Managing Relationships

When you have had a great experience with a business or a brand, how many people do you rush out and share it with? When you have had a negative experience, how many people do you share it with then?

Exactly.

As a rule of thumb, happy customers refer their friends and sometimes leave reviews when they remember. Unhappy customers tell the whole world – online, in person, in the queue at checkout – anyone and everyone.

Without them We are Nothing

No matter whether you run your business from your kitchen table, home office or flash high rise building – we all need the same thing to continue to run business, customers.

And while businesses seem to spend heaps of money on sales and marketing to acquire customers, suddenly when they have got them, the effort ends.

Think about the businesses, brands, restaurants and stores you frequent and ask yourself why you use them and why you go back.

9 times out of 10 if you ask people why they support the businesses they do, they tell you about the people that work there and how they make customers feel. It often isn’t about things that we think it would be such as price, convenience and location, it is almost always about service.

Keeping the Customers you Have

When you start out with just a handful of customers, it is easy to remember their names, preferences and what colour shirt they wore the last time they visited your store. But despite your very best intentions, when your business grows and your customer numbers start having double digits it can quickly become impossible to remember the details and follow up on everything.

If you are still managing this manually, it may be time to have a look at a CRM or Customer Relationship Manager software. There are a number of programs that can automate some of those time-consuming tasks you currently do yourself while managing regular communication with your customers.

CRMS We Love

Sometimes it is just about automating some of those personal customer service touchpoints keeps your customer feeling like they are still number 1. Here are some of the programs our team uses and loves.

ClickUp

Track your time, schedule tasks, sync with calendars, integrate with your favourite programs like Google, Zoom, Slack, Outlook and more. Never forget to follow up with a client or to check on a status update, to collect a product from a supplier. Automate processes, emails and communications with your customers and use ClickUp as part of your customer service solution for your business. As a bonus, they offer a forever free plan as well as a paid on.

MailChimp

Once upon a time, MailChimp was just a jolly little ecard service that quickly grew into a small business support powerhouse that does just about everything your business needs except froth your coffee. They sync with most of the major eCommerce platforms and help store owners deliver that personal touch with their automation solutions. So you never have to worry about forgetting to follow up, remind customers about purchases or appointments and you can even send them a sweet snail-mail postcard to their door.

Salesforce

Salesforce is a powerhouse CRM and now boasts an entire portfolio of SaaS (Software-as-a-service) products to boot. If we didn’t know better we would think it could also make the coffee and froth it too! Expensive to use, complicated to get your head around but word on the street is there if you are looking for an intuitive enterprise solution for customer management in your business, then SalesForce is the Mothership you need to board.
They offer a 30-day free trial before you need to commit to the paid version.

Zoho

Free for up to 3 users, Zoho has a well-earned reputation for being super versatile with heaps of functionality value. Syncing with your everyday favourites like Office, 365, G-Suite, MailChimp, Evernote, QuickBooks and more. It can handle everything from mails to accounting, customer service support, webinars, social media and all kinds of cool sales and marketing bells and whistles you could possibly think of. It has a 30-day free trial and comes highly recommended for small to medium businesses.

Starting Small

Whether you have 50 or 5000 customers you need a way to manage your interactions with them. Sometimes starting small with a nurture sequence or a few nifty automations can be the best way to start.

Chat to us about a content solution for your business – send a message to our team here.