Resources
How A Customer Communications Management Strategy Can Improve Consistency And Reliability In Your Small Business
How Customer Communications Can Improve Your Business
The importance of communicating with customers cannot be overstated and can homogenise your communications. Learn how to do this on our blog.
When it comes to business, there is no shortage of components that need constant consideration and reworking. There’s marketing, compliance, accounts, and all the essential front and back-end things that can easily, yet fatally, become overlooked. However, one of the most important and fateful components of your business is your customers.
When it comes to your consumers, having a customer communications management (CCM) strategy is more important than you may think. In fact, it is thought that 80% of a company’s future revenue will come from 20% of its current customer base. These kinds of statistics are nothing to turn your nose up at. (1)
Read on for reasons and methods that a customer communications management strategy can improve consistency and reliability in your business.
Upward communication
Whether your business is in excavating, lawnmowing, or catering, customers are inevitably going to have thoughts and opinions to share with you. Sometimes they will be positive, but more likely, they will be negative, but that’s okay. Nobody is perfect, and feedback is how we improve.
One of the most infuriating things for customers is when their voices are not heard. They try and communicate, but there is no space for their voices to travel upwards to the people they’re intended for. Without upward communication, problems are often left unaddressed, and there is a stall in innovation. (2)
Innovative upward communication initiatives can be woven into business processes in the form of feedback forms, surveys and reports. New technology makes this easy to achieve, especially for field-based businesses where apps such as Jobber’s HVAC service software is highly effective at managing these communication initiatives for you.
This way, your business can keep on top of the tone of your customer experiences and keeps them contained. This keeps these, occasionally unflattering, appraisals from being proliferated online or via word of mouth, arenas we hold less control over.
Downward communication
Of course, there is no good without evil, light without darkness, so on and so forth. The chain of communication needs to be multi-laned and two-way in order to make sure subordinate employees, who are often placed in customer-facing roles, are attuned to the moods and wishes of superiors.
One reason why downward communication is important is that senior employees hold esteemed positions within the company because of their experience and skills. These professional merits are largely what separate seniors and subordinate employees in the company.
This means that superiors are more likely to see things in the business that warrant action. Expecting subordinate employees to be mindful and improve without communication is naïve and unfair.
Setting up this formal chain of communication will ultimately trickle down and make improvements in a couple of areas: one is that, by being communicated to more often, these staff will learn about adapting to change. Another is that, as they are customer-facing, this will lift standards and improve outcomes.
Internal lateral communication
A successful business depends on everything, with everyone having their right places. These larger wheels lock the smaller cogs and screws into place, packing them in tightly, so everything works in tandem with each other as a single unit.
Your machine needs to work in this way, and there needs to be a limited access bridge that extends from your shell to the outside for the facilitation of customers. The flow of information within the structure similarly needs to move, although in a spontaneous manner (not fixed like the large mechanical parts that manoeuvre up, down, and around).
This dynamic system consists of emails, messaging platforms, and production overview programs. With this in place, there is a shared sense of understanding amongst the employees as communication is instant and big announcements are received by all users within the platform. It enables customer communication to enter the system and move through it with the same freedom as internal communication.
Tech and system-based solutions
Nowadays, there are various CCM strategies that are afforded to your business via technological advancements. Some of those include:
- Route optimisation software : This bridges the distance between customers and a company’s workflow. It allows them to assign the incoming jobs to the closest team member on the provided digital map. This can save time when moving information.
- Field service task automation: This relates to identifying redundant operational tasks that are crucial to your workflow and automating them to remove the figurative on and off switch, which is both resource-intensive and no longer necessary.
- Job quoting software: Creating, sending, and tracking quotes that are easy to view and easy to approve for customers.
By following the ideas above, can streamline and homogenise your CCM strategy. By doing this, there will be benefits across many sectors of your business.
References
- “Why Customer Retention Is King: The Evolution Of Retention Marketing”, Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jerryjao/2014/11/19/why-customer-retention-is-king-the-evolution-of-retention-marketing-part-1/?sh=4cee3b95186b
- “Why Don’t People Communicate Up in an Organization?”, Source: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-dont-people-communica_b_9521808
-
News8 months ago
How to Recover Deleted WhatsApp Messages without Backup (iOS/Android)
-
News8 months ago
How to Unlock iPhone if Forgot Passcode without Restore
-
Resources8 months ago
TOP 154 Niche Sites to Submit a Guest Post for Free in 2024
-
News10 months ago
How to Restore Deleted Data from Android Phones without Backup
Rupinder
09/14/2021 at 8:37 AM
Thanks for sharing this great Knowledge.