customer behavior

The retail landscape is undergoing a seismic shift, and the driving force behind this transformation is e-commerce. With the proliferation of online shopping platforms and the changing preferences of consumers, the retail industry is experiencing a digital revolution like never before. 

In this article, we’ll delve into how e-commerce is disrupting the traditional retail sector, altering customer shopping habits, and ushering in a new era of retail. We’ll also explore how Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems play a pivotal role in enhancing the e-commerce experience, from leveraging CRM data to optimizing operations with specific CRM features.

E-commerce’s Impact on Retail

Here are a few points of impact e-commerce has on retail:

1. Changing Customer Shopping Habits

E-commerce has fundamentally altered the way customers shop. The convenience of browsing and purchasing products from the comfort of their homes has led to a significant shift in shopping habits.

According to a report by Statista, global e-commerce sales are projected to reach $5.4 trillion by 2022, a testament to the growing dominance of online shopping.

Today, consumers expect a seamless online shopping experience. They value convenience, product variety, and personalized recommendations. Retailers that fail to adapt risk losing their customer base to e-commerce giants.

This shift in consumer behavior has led traditional retailers to reevaluate their strategies, focusing on providing an omnichannel experience that combines online and in-store shopping.

How CRM helps track changing customer shopping habits

CRM systems are invaluable for retailers looking to understand and cater to their customers’ preferences. Retailers can gain deep insights into their audience by collecting and analyzing customer data, such as purchase history, browsing behavior, and demographics. This information is crucial for creating personalized shopping experiences.

Customer Segmentation

One key CRM feature that empowers retailers in this regard is Customer Segmentation. CRM systems offer advanced customer segmentation capabilities, allowing retailers to segment their customer base based on purchase history, demographics, browsing behavior, and location.

This enables retailers to send highly targeted marketing messages. For example, a retailer can create segments for customers who prefer specific product categories and tailor marketing campaigns to their interests. 

Personalized Product Recommendations

Another valuable CRM feature is Personalized Product Recommendations. CRM systems often integrate with recommendation engines. These engines use data analysis and algorithms to suggest products to individual customers based on their past purchases and browsing history.

By implementing personalized product recommendations on their e-commerce websites, retailers can significantly increase cross-selling and upselling opportunities, driving higher revenue per customer.

2. Rise of Online Marketplaces

Online marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, and Alibaba have become retail powerhouses. These platforms connect sellers with a vast global customer base, enabling retailers to reach audiences beyond their physical store locations.

Amazon, for example, reported over 200 million Prime members worldwide in 2021.

Retailers increasingly turn to online marketplaces to expand their reach and tap into the growing e-commerce market. However, they also face challenges in standing out among the competition and maintaining control over their brand image. This is where CRM systems come into play.

How CRM helps businesses adapt to online markets

Inventory and Order Management

Inventory and Order Management is a crucial CRM feature that can significantly benefit retailers operating on online marketplaces. Many CRM systems offer inventory and order management features that help retailers keep track of their stock levels and streamline order processing.

This is especially valuable when selling on multiple online marketplaces. Retailers can centralize their inventory data and ensure product availability is accurately reflected across all platforms, reducing the risk of overselling or stockouts.

Integration with E-commerce Platforms

Additionally, CRM systems often include integration with E-commerce Platforms. This integration lets retailers synchronize customer data, orders, and product information between their CRM system and online store.

It ensures a unified view of customer interactions and allows for more effective customer engagement and support.

3. Understanding Customer Behavior, Unique Needs and Preferences

CRM systems are invaluable for retailers looking to understand and cater to their customers’ preferences. Retailers can gain deep insights into their audience by collecting and analyzing customer data, such as purchase history, browsing behavior, and demographics.

This information is crucial for creating personalized shopping experiences.

Retailers can use CRM data to segment their customer base and deliver targeted marketing campaigns. For example, if a customer frequently purchases sports equipment, a retailer can send them promotions related to sports gear.

This level of personalization increases the chances of a sale and enhances customer loyalty.

4. Improving Customer Support, Customer Engagement through Email

In the digital realm, providing excellent customer support is essential. CRM systems help retailers manage customer inquiries and issues efficiently. They enable customer service teams to access a customer’s purchase history and preferences, allowing for more personalized and practical support.

Email marketing automation is one specific CRM feature that can significantly benefit retailers in the e-commerce space. Email automation allows retailers to send customers personalized, timely, and relevant emails.

For instance, if a customer abandons their shopping cart, an automated email can be sent with a reminder and an incentive to complete the purchase. According to SaleCycle, abandoned cart emails have an average open rate of over 40%, making them a powerful tool for recovering potential sales.

CRM systems with email marketing automation allow retailers to create highly segmented email campaigns.

Retailers can target specific customer segments with tailored messages, whether it’s promoting new products to frequent shoppers, offering discounts to dormant customers, or sending personalized recommendations based on purchase history.

Conclusion

E-commerce is reshaping the retail industry, prompting traditional retailers to adapt or risk obsolescence. As consumer shopping habits evolve, retailers must meet the demand for convenience and personalization.

CRM systems empower retailers to harness customer data for personalized marketing, efficient customer support, and streamlined operations.

In the era of e-commerce dominance, retailers can thrive by embracing CRM solutions and their features, such as email marketing automation, to stay competitive and meet the ever-growing expectations of online shoppers.

The future of retail is undoubtedly digital, and those who leverage CRM systems effectively will lead the way in this transformative journey.

Want to improve your retail business through technology? Talk to our experts. Book a FREE demo below.

Are you tired of seeing your valued customers slip through your fingers? It’s time to address the elephant in the room: customer churn. Read on to find out more about how to prevent losing customers.

Customer churn, also known as customer attrition or turnover, is a thorny issue for businesses across industries. The painful end of a relationship, where customers decide to walk away, often leaves businesses questioning what went wrong.

That’s why in this article, we will delve into the causes and dynamics of customer turnout, providing insights to help you understand this phenomenon. We will also uncover the secrets of preventing customer turnout and winning the battle for customer loyalty. Let’s get started.

Dynamics of Customer Churnout

Customer churn is not a static process. It involves various stages and dynamics. Understanding these dynamics helps businesses identify potential warning signs and proactively mitigate customer churn. Here are some key dynamics to consider:

1. The Customer Journey: Customer churnout often occurs during specific customer journey stages.
   
   It can happen during the onboarding phase, where customers decide whether to continue their relationship with a brand, or during the retention phase, where ongoing interactions and experiences influence their decision to stay or leave.
   
2. Competitive Landscape: In a highly competitive market, customers have numerous options. A company’s ability to differentiate itself from competitors, provide unique value propositions, and deliver exceptional experiences becomes crucial in mitigating churn.
   
3. Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty: Customer satisfaction and loyalty are vital indicators of potential churn. Monitoring customer satisfaction levels, gathering feedback, and addressing issues promptly can help prevent customers from seeking alternatives.
   
4. Switching Costs: Customers often consider the effort and costs of switching to a different provider. Businesses can reduce churn by providing seamless onboarding experiences, loyalty rewards, or exclusive benefits that make switching less enticing.

Understanding customer churn is the first step in preventing it from wreaking havoc on your bottom line. You can proactively address the underlying issues and retain your valuable customers by recognizing the signs, identifying the root causes, and studying customer behavior.

Tips and Strategies to Prevent Customer Churnout

Preventing customer churn requires a proactive approach and comprehensive strategies to win over your customers’ hearts.

In this part, we will share ten powerful strategies successful companies employ to prevent customer churn. Get ready to discover actionable tactics to help you build enduring relationships and keep your customers loyal to your brand:

1. Offer Exceptional Customer Service: Create a customer-centric culture, empower your frontline staff, and go above and beyond to exceed customer expectations.
   
2. Build Strong Relationships: Foster connections through personalized interactions, timely follow-ups, and genuine care for your customers’ needs.
   
3. Enhance Product or Service Quality: Continuously improve your offerings based on customer feedback, ensuring they meet and exceed expectations.
   
4. Implement a Customer Loyalty Program: Reward loyal customers with exclusive perks, discounts, or special access, incentivizing them to stay.
   
5. Regularly Seek Customer Feedback: Conduct surveys, interviews, or feedback sessions to gain insights into customer satisfaction and identify areas for improvement.
   
6. Actively Listen and Respond to Customer Concerns: Address customer issues promptly, show empathy, and take corrective actions to resolve their concerns.
   
7. Provide Proactive Support: Anticipate customer needs, reach out with helpful resources or recommendations, and provide guidance before problems arise.
   
8. Deliver Personalized Experiences: Leverage customer data to tailor interactions, offers, and recommendations, making customers feel valued and understood.
   
9. Stay Relevant and Innovative: Keep pace with industry trends, adapt to changing customer preferences, and continuously evolve your products or services.
   
10. Build a Community: Foster a sense of belonging by creating online forums, social media groups, or events where customers can connect and engage with your brand and each other
    
11. Nurture Relationships Beyond Transactions: Engage with customers on social media, send personalized emails, or provide exclusive content that adds value to their lives.
    
12. Anticipate and Address Common Pain Points: Identify customers’ recurring challenges and proactively offer solutions to mitigate their frustrations.
    
13. Provide Seamless and Convenient Experiences: Simplify processes, eliminate friction points, and make it easy for customers to interact with your brand across various channels.
    
14. Offer Competitive Pricing: Regularly review and adjust your pricing strategy to ensure it remains competitive and provides value to customers.
    
15. Build Trust and Transparency: Communicate openly, be honest about your products or services, and demonstrate integrity in all your interactions.
    
16. Educate and Empower Customers: Share industry insights, provide educational resources, and empower customers to make informed decisions.
    
17. Stay Top-of-Mind with Regular Communication: Send newsletters, updates, or relevant content to maintain a presence in your customers’ lives and remind them of your value.
    
18. Reward Referrals: Encourage satisfied customers to refer friends and family by offering incentives or referral rewards, expanding your customer base through trusted recommendations.
    
19. Continuously Innovate: Embrace emerging technologies, seek new ways to delight customers, and stay ahead of the curve in your industry.
    
20. Monitor and Analyze Customer Data: Leverage CRM systems and analytics to track customer behavior, identify early signs of dissatisfaction and take proactive measures to retain their loyalty.

Conclusion

With these tips and strategies in your arsenal, you can prevent customer churn and foster long-term loyalty. Remember, every interaction with your customers counts, and by consistently delivering exceptional experiences, you can create a customer base that stands strong and loyal.

Preventing client churn is the ultimate game-changer in the fast-paced commercial world. You may create unbreakable relationships with your clients and maintain their obsession with your business by putting these 10 techniques and these ten ideas into practice.

Want to learn more about using customer data to prevent customer churn? Book a FREE demo below with our experts.

Learn how you can effortlessly create buyer personas for your business with the help of your customers.

A customer persona is a detailed description of your target customer. It is a product of deep research about your existing or target customer and represents a summary of their needs, preferences, and behavior.

Customer personas help you channel your focus into qualified prospects, manage your product and services to suit the needs of target customers, and ensure that all workflows (from marketing to sales) are designed to match the customer personas. 

Doing these help you attract leads and customers that provide high value to your business over time.

How to Create a Customer Persona

So how can you create a customer persona for your business? Check our tips below.

1. Get your customers to participate in your research

Your customers are the most important element of your research. The entire strategy revolves around them and so it’s crucial that you’ll get input from them.

Anyone— from the leads that visit your website to your repeat customers— can participate in this research.

You can also automate this process by configuring your website or landing pages to prompt visitors to fill out a form. You can also send emails to subscribers that let them participate in surveys or even interviews.

2. Collect as much information as possible

Gather as much important and relevant information as needed for your research. You can start with demographic details such as their: Name, Email, Gender, Age, Company Position, and Company Name. Then you can move into more personal information such as their needs, buying habits, preferences, and online behavior, among others.

3. Dig deeper

Sometimes you need to dig deeper into your customers’ profiles by asking more specific questions. Here, your sales and marketing teams must work together to identify the type of questions you need to ask to get the desired response from your target customers.

For example, identifying whether a product or service may suit a customer may require you to ask more than the standard “Would you like to try this product?” question. 

It may be necessary to ask what the customer does on a daily basis, what they like or dislike, or what they prioritize right now to establish the necessary conclusions.

Further assessments and evaluations may be needed to validate the conclusion you’ve arrived at after conducting your research.

4. Identify the appropriate messaging strategy for the personas created

Once you’ve created your personas, create a messaging strategy that suits these personas’ needs and preferences. 

Everyone in your company must be able to speak the language that your personas are speaking, especially when they’re having direct conversations with them. This ensures that your messaging resonates well with your target audience.

Automate Your Data Collection

Effortlessly collect information about your leads and customers with their participation. Automate your workflows and have your sales and marketing teams access a rich database of customer information.

Help them establish a solid customer persona which allows them to tailor the sales and marketing experience accordingly.

Need to know more about automating customer data collection? Talk to our experts at Saphyte and book a demo for FREE.

Customer feedback is very helpful to businesses. It lets businesses learn about the strengths and weaknesses of their brand and work on improving the customer experience. The problem is, sometimes, it can be challenging to gather customer feedback.

With a feedback loop, it becomes easier to understand what your customers are going through when using your product or service. But what is a customer feedback loop and how can you have one? Read on to find out.

What is a customer feedback loop and how can it help your business?

A customer feedback loop is a strategy designed to improve your product based on user reviews and feedback, using active interaction between the business and the customers.

To make it easier to gain constant access to customer feedback, tools like CRMs allow businesses to let their customers access a system where they can input their feedback anytime. The CRM then organizes all customer inputs in a meaningful way that makes it easier for brands to gain insights from the customers’ feedback.

This allows them to develop strategies to continuously improve customer experience, making it easier to establish brand loyalty in the end.

Tips to get started with a customer feedback loop

Here are a few tips to consider when implementing a customer feedback loop mechanism:

1. Use tools that make it easier for you to implement the feedback mechanism

Manually collecting feedback from customers can be done but the quality and quantity of feedback you’ll be getting will more likely be low. More than that, manually collecting feedback can be stressful for your teams.

To make it easier for you to collect feedback from all your sales channels, you can automate the collection process using CRMs like Saphyte that allow customers to provide feedback through forms (surveys), live chat, or a ticketing system.

2. Encourage customers to provide feedback

It’s also important to encourage customers to give sincere feedback. Otherwise, it’ll be difficult for you to determine their true experience when using your product or service.

Prompt customers to provide feedback only at critical stages like when they’ve made a purchase, or when they’ve made a rating on your website. You can also reward customers after they’ve provided feedback.

3. Analyze the feedback

Now that you have gathered customer feedback from all your sales and marketing channels, it’s time to organize them and identify trends and patterns in customer behavior and preferences.

You can create charts to gain meaningful insights from customer feedback. You can also organize them according to the departments involved (sales, marketing, technical, or support), or based on the type of review (positive or negative).

4. Start implementing changes

One of the most important steps when implementing a customer feedback loop mechanism is to actually start making changes based on customer feedback.

Customers provide feedback for a reason— they want to improve their experience the next time they encounter or engage with your brand. If the negative experience continues, it’s likely that they will churn and stop doing business with you.

The goal of the strategy is to improve brand loyalty, which helps you gain advocates for your brand who will refer it to their friends and families. Brand loyalty also helps you drive sales as there will be repeat purchases coming from the same loyal customers.

5. Close the loop

After customers leave feedback for your team, you should close the loop by following up with them directly. Timing is everything. And with tools like a CRM, you can provide a prompt response using automation.

For example, if a customer suggests you improve your product options, you can send them a quick, personalized email using the CRM to let them know the impact of their feedback on your team. This makes the customer feel heard and valued.

Start a customer feedback loop mechanism

Gather feedback from your customers now and make implementing the strategy easier by using tools like Saphyte.

With Saphyte, the manual process of collecting feedback from customers becomes automated using the system. You can also provide prompt responses, like thanking customers for their feedback, without manual effort.

Want to learn more about this feature? Book a FREE demo now and see how Saphyte can impact your organization.

We’ve gone past making your business’ identities, and now is the season for building your brand’s success through customer experience analytics. These days analytics is integral to refining your customer experience and overall customer journey. 

For some time now, brands have focused on internal business functions like product design, supply chain, and customer service to drive new and better customer experiences. Some organizations focus more on their product and use customer feedback to generate value or develop loyalty products for better customer retention. We can all agree that these strategies are all good but can also be unsustainable in the long run. 

Analytics Bringing more than just Data on the Table

Customer experience isn’t just about function and form. Guessing what your customers want can be counter-productive and, at the same time, annoying. Businesses fail to understand that the root of customer experience understands how your customer can relate to your entire brand. To gain and leverage such insight, organizations must learn how to harness the power of customer data and analytics.

Customer experience analytics is discovering, collecting, analyzing essential customer data. This process produces actionable insights to derive better decisions and solutions to benefit your customers and business. These decisions, in turn, allow your business to run for a more tailored or hyper-personalized experience for the individual customer.

Analytics will always be an integral part of refining the customer experience moving forward. Research shows that 90% of business managers believe analytics can improve their sales performance. Another study shows that 62% of businesses believe that analytics can increase their sales by 20%. 

Competing in Data-Driven Economy – Not as simple as ABC

Organizations must acknowledge or eliminate guesswork to compete and win in a data-driven economy. Data is more than just mere numbers. With this current economic setup and competitive environment, businesses must have access. They must have the ability to act on customer data with speed, agility, intelligence, and accuracy. 

How Data and Analytics Helps Improve Customer Experience

You’ve heard of the phrase, “customers are the lifeblood of your business” a million times over, and you’re getting sick of hearing it. But, if you’re planning to leverage data and analytics, knowing your customers and keeping them engaged is the best thing you can do for your business. 

Yes, it’s exciting to find new technologies and strategies and harness them for your business’s advantage. However, forgetting the main objective of your business is to create relationships that add value to your company and bottom line. An intelligent customer experience (CX) and your customer lifetime value (CLV) strategies are the best way to go. So how can analytics create an impact on customer experience? 

Understand Customer Sentiments and Level with Customer Emotions

Emotions play an essential role in building relationships with customers and vis-a-vis. Marketers over the globe clearly understand the impact of emotions and feelings in the decision-making process. As mentioned in the previous lines of this article, competing in data driven-economy is not easy. Consumers face many marketing materials, from emails to social media platforms. Unsurprisingly, only a tiny amount of that gets through.                                                                                                                      

Learning how to act on collected and processed data is an essential skill that businesses should pick up. Despite the harsh competition, you’ll be at the most disadvantage without data analytics. Nowadays, using and processing big data to understand the customer better and insight into how they feel is critical to connecting with them emotionally and winning their loyalty. 

Businesses may source data from different methods or mediums. These methods may include formal surveys, call transcripts, social media comments, reviews, and any other form of exchange between a brand and a customer. In return, the collected and processed data allows businesses to analyze quantitative and qualitative feedback to improve customer services, whether by changing or using softer language, more emotionally established marketing campaigns, or a more hyper-personalized service.

Streamline Service and Save Time

Having long sales funnels is no fun for your employees and your customers. Organizations should do their best to streamline processes and save time whenever possible. 

Customers hate it when their calls are redirected frequently and still can’t seem to find a solution. In these cases, when your data is processed and analyzed, you can easily match sales reps to more appropriate roles or improve the efficiency of your entire team. Ensure that all customer information is in a single platform, like CRM software solutions, streamlining your business process and saving time is within reach. 

Analytics Help Improve Communications

Communication is not about the words you say but how you say them. Not communicating well with your customer is like playing minesweeper. That is why it is essential to gather much customer feedback and reviews as possible. 

In this case, you can use customer feedback and satisfaction scores to improve communications among employees and customers. Feedback and reviews allow your team to redirect their efforts and even tap on opportunities that have never been. Or even in situations where agents are not performing well because they spend too much time looking for peer support. 

Your team can avoid confusion and re-routing communications with the help of accurate and valuable data. When data analytics are put in place, your team knows where they stand with the customer. They can use better communication strategies to make service interactions more efficient when they have this knowledge.

Enhance targeted marketing practices

Big data is also paramount for implementing effective and targeted marketing strategies. Organizations need to pay attention to click-through rates of links communicated via marketing emails, text messages, and other channels. For example, it can reveal whether a marketing strategy results in actual sales. Furthermore, geolocation data may allow brands to better target customers near brick-and-mortar stores or during the in-store shopping experience.

Brands may use the information collected to share sales events and other news on discounts applied in-store. As brands collect various types of data on their customers, taking a thoughtful and customer-centric approach to interpreting data can result in better service practices and more substantial customer experiences.

Key Takeaway

Analytics is more than just a piece of processed numbers. Analytics has become their lifeline to stay competitive in a data-driven economy to some businesses. Trusting in guesswork no longer works in this present day and age. Companies need accurate data, precise analytics, and responsible actions to stay relevant and even gain an advantage in the market. 

In a customer-centric world, upping your customer data and analytics game is the best way to get ahead.

To centralize or not to centralize – a hard call made harder with power struggles. The timeless tug-of-war between centralizing and not centralizing remains a dilemma for most companies. Business leaders believe that poorly judged centralization can stifle initiative, compel the business’s ability to tailor products and services locally, and burden business departments with high costs and poor service. [1]

However, as the world courses through in rapid motion, every business is now compelled to have a management system to help them streamline their daily processes and procedures. Systems that allow companies to establish management protocols and facilitate clear communication between departments. A business’s communication structure can influence discovery and the potential of its staff members, which in turn causes the company to innovate and implement its ideas. 

Why Choose to Centralize your Business System?

A centralized business system means keeping most of your inventory in one or a few platforms instead of having individual storage systems to maintain your account. Doing so can benefit your business’s overall design, including more efficient data control and quicker responses to prospects and customers. These are just some of the few benefits you can gain with a centralized business system. 

Curious to know more about the power of a centralized business system? Here are more of its benefits that you may enjoy. 

Effective Decisions

At the local level, decentralized business systems allow businesses to respond swiftly to unpredictable market conditions. However, in most cases, centralization provides firms with the most efficient decision-making and communication throughout the company. Some decisions, such as responding to unfavorable news events, are best made by executives, especially when it comes to timely decisions and when responses are essential to execution. 

Accountability 

Centralization also highlights decision-makers, making it easier for individual team members to be accountable for their decisions and actions. When the right choices are consistently made and implemented, recognition goes to the right people. Accountability compels corporate decision-makers to invest the right amount of time, effort, and energy to examine decisions and their impact on all stakeholders. 

Consistency 

Consistency is another necessary strength of business centralization. When the same person or group of executives make decisions on behalf of the company, those decisions are consistent and predictable. That way, it helps managers and employees know what to expect and prevents some frustration resulting from constant changes in decision patterns. In addition, decisions that affect customer relationships can improve brand consistency if made by the same executive. 

Reduced costs

A centralized system adheres to standard procedures and practices that guide and reduce office and administration costs. With the right business system, businesses can now reduce spending on storage, augmenting staffing, and even location. 

Improved quality of work

Standardized procedures and better supervision in a centralized business system improve work quality. With the help of systems and apps, businesses can now reduce the potential waste of manual labor and ensure quality and accurate work. Systems like CRM software can help minimize task duplication and increase labor costs. 

Streamlined Information Flow 

Most industries that rely on a constantly changing and inconsistent market have the advantage of being free to update. With a centralized source of information, it’ll be easier for managers and employees to implement strategies and easier to track individual performance. When data is readily accessible, communication is streamlined, thus adding more value to your bottom line. 

Definitive Chain of Command

A definitive chain of command paired with a centralized business system is also beneficial for staff seeking more supporting guidance regarding their responsibilities and expectations. A centralized system works reasonably well to provide people with clear directions. 

The vague nature of a decentralized system may confuse common workflows, but increased autonomy is desirable to employees who prefer working on a flexible schedule. Companies that handle a lot of employees with a work-from-home set-up can significantly benefit when they have centralized business systems that combine reduced oversight and self-reporting tools to streamline admin and managerial responsibilities. 

Creating Standard Internal Metrics 

It is easier to create a standardized format in the central system when developing internal performance metrics. A top-down management structure allows managers and executives to integrate communication and reporting standards with minimal deviation. If the indicators of success are relatively simple, it may be beneficial to centralize the whole structure of the organization. A well-distributed system allows individual departments or teams to decide how to report and avoid confusion about performance results. Active communication between managers and executives helps answer any questions in the report. 

Relationship with customers

Building a direct customer relationship is easier to use in a decentralized organization because there aren’t many communication and reach restrictions. Optimizing social media channels is a prominent decentralization feature that allows businesses to interact with multiple geographic markets with lesser difficulty. Online customer service via numerous communication lines is easy to do with flexible behavioral guidelines. 

However, the power of centralized business systems often has specific guidelines for how they should conduct themselves with the general public, giving businesses more control over their brand image. Companies in industries such as children’s media and baby products typically communicate with the general public through a strong public relations team. In contrast to automated online systems, an in-house customer service team with in-depth knowledge and experience may also respond to complaints.

Key Takeaway

Decentralization may offer plenty of untapped business potential, and it may give plenty of autonomy on an individual level. However, amidst a decentralized environment, businesses need a bit of control of how things are run inside our business to control efficiency and effectiveness. This is the true power of a centralized business system. 

Are you taking measures to centralize your business flow? If not, Saphyte will be more than happy to take you in on a little open secret. Call us today, and let’s get your business centralized today!

The word “customer-centric” is thrown around in a lot of boardrooms. But what does it mean to be customer-centric? And will it pay off?

What Is Customer-Centric?

Customer-centric is a strategy that involves creating the best experience for the customer for a meaningful, long-term business relationship. In this strategy, the customer is at the core of the business’s decisions and operations.

Providing a positive customer experience helps the business achieve customer satisfaction. Once the customer is satisfied, the chance for a repeat purchase is high. This behavior, when repeated, builds customer loyalty and drives sales results.

Overall, being customer-centric is necessary for companies especially when the business environment is competitive. It helps them distinguish themselves from the other brands. It also ensures long-term business success.

What you should know:

Customer-centric is a strategy focused on enhancing customer experience.

It helps businesses set themselves apart from the competition, drive down business costs, build customer loyalty, reduce customer churn, and improve overall sales.

Using technology is necessary to implement a customer-centric approach. It helps businesses run smoother workflows. It facilitates faster information exchange.  And it helps businesses generate insights faster.

Benefits Of Being Customer-Centric

Being customer-centric has multiple benefits to businesses. Here are a few:

Lower business costs

For businesses to drive sales, they must acquire new customers through lead generation tactics. But these tend to be costly. Spending on ads to gain a wider audience reach, giving discounts, or other promotional activities, to name a few examples, are expensive to run. 

Compared to having existing customers make repeat purchases to gain sales, lead acquisition tends to drive costs higher. This need to acquire new leads is eliminated when the business successfully runs on customers making repeat purchases.

Reduces customer churn

When customers are dissatisfied with a business, they tend to leave the business and choose the competition. This is wasted sales potential and is often measured by the rate of customer churn. Reducing customer churn improves sales performance, which, in effect, improves profitability.

When a business focuses on the customer experience, it ensures that the customer is satisfied with the service from the start of their journey towards the end of the sales process. This reduces the chances of customers churning. 

Builds customer loyalty

Aside from reducing customer churn, being customer-centric ensures that customers get to stay, make future purchases, and recommend your products and services to others.

Customer loyalty helps the business gain a wider reach through recommendations and referrals. For example, when a customer is satisfied with your product or service, they tend to introduce your brand to others on occasions when a need arises.

How to Be Customer-Centric

One of the popular ways to be customer-centric is to use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. The software is designed to help businesses get to know their customers more, gain data and information, and craft a workflow that enhances their services.

CRMs are known to help businesses gather information about their potential and existing customers. They do this by using landing pages, for example, to prompt website visitors to fill out a form and get their contact information.

Or by providing feedback loop mechanisms that help customers smoothly provide feedback at strategic points of the sales process (e.g. when closing a deal or after the customer makes a purchase).

They can also help businesses tailor their content and send content via email automatically, based on a schedule. This is important especially when the business runs a drip email marketing strategy.

Learn more about drip email marketing here:

Customer-centric Through Tech

Learn more about using tech to implement a customer-centric strategy. Get started here.

A successful online business does not settle with closing a sale. It goes beyond—  it makes customers fall in love with the business.

Customer experience (CX) is the top priority for many business professionals. The reason is simple: a good customer experience can help reduce churn and increase sales revenues. According to a report, 81% of companies that provide better customer experience were found to perform better than their competitors. 

More than that, customers are also willing to pay higher prices for better service. In fact, research noted that 86% of customers indicate their willingness to pay more in exchange for better experiences.

So let’s cut to the chase. How can companies deliver an experience that customers would enjoy? Here are 6 ways for you to take note of.

Six Ways To Provide Better Customer Experience

Let’s take a look at strategies that help create a great customer experience strategy. These are found to help improve customer satisfaction, reduce customer churn, and increase profits.

1. Create a goal

The first step that you should take in providing a better customer experience is to have a goal centered on, well, the customer experience. 

Have a vision and provide a set of statements that allow you to materialize that vision. These will be your guiding principles that will help shape your acts and decisions that would ultimately result in providing a better customer experience.

2. Understand your customers better

It’s hard to provide a better customer experience without understanding your customers first. To do this, gather data from them that reflects their needs, interests, and preferences.

And it’s not just enough to collect feedback. Make sure that their feedback is authentic. And you can do this by strategically placing a feedback loop mechanism at certain points of the buying process.

For example, allowing customers to provide feedback at the end of the purchase allows you to gauge their satisfaction with their purchase. You can also reward this behavior by providing incentives after every feedback given. 

You can also understand your customers— even from the start— by allowing them to fill out forms in exchange for lead magnets.

Learn more about customer profiling here:

3. Do it from the start

As mentioned above, gathering data can be done all throughout the buying process. And it includes the start of the buying process— when customers are still considered as leads.

Map the customer journey and experience— what do leads feel at the starting point of your engagement? What pushes them to take the next step? What generates and sustains interest? And what makes them stay as loyal customers?

Answering these questions through the lens of the customer (or the lead) allows you to correct certain workflows that do not provide an impact during the journey. It should also be highlighted that certain interactions need to be quick before customers lose interest.

Learn more about implementing quick, automated workflows here:

4. Empathize

They say that the best customer experiences are achieved when businesses create an emotional connection with customers. Emotions shape the attitudes that drive decisions— that’s why in mapping customer journeys, what customers feel should be taken into account.

When customers are engaged emotionally, they’re found to be more likely to recommend your business to others, repurchase, and even be less price-sensitive than those that weren’t emotionally engaged.

5. Manage customer expectations

To reduce customer churn, managing customer expectations should be done all throughout the customer journey. Many negative experiences are a result of unmet expectations, so managing expectations help shape the desired customer experience.

Right from that start, it’s suggested to determine what the customer expects from the company. Ask open-ended questions and check what the customer perceives from your business.

Questions like “what kind of results do you expect to achieve at the end of the day?” or “what’s your timeframe?” help businesses address expectations right from the start.

6. Assess and evaluate

At the end of the day, it’s all about data. Did your customer experience strategy produce results that you expect? Were they unsatisfactory? And to answer these questions, you’ll need to have data about your performances.

Using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software that generates data and insights in real-time helps you gain a better understanding of the customer experience. It also helps you make data-driven decisions so that, at the end of the day, you won’t be second-guessing what to do next to improve your customer experience strategy.

Improve Customer Experience Through Tech

Learn more about how a system can help you gather data and generate insights in real-time. Get started here.

The famous magazine, Entrepreneur Asia Pacific, tagged 2021 as the year of the customer. Over the past year, marketers and leading sales leaders learned a lot, whether they liked it or not. After a tough year, it’s time for businesses to go back to basics and focus on what matters – the customers. 

The consumer landscape experienced a sudden tectonic shift as businesses and consumers moved into a fully digitized realm of sales and marketing over the past year and several months. Therefore, strategies and approaches also changed. The focus became less about traditional marketing and sales methods and is now leaning more toward rethinking the whole digital customer journey and, most importantly, the customer experience.

Why should Businesses be Paying Attention to the Customer? 

Emotions, whether you deny them or not, creates an impact. It’s like a ripple. Customers who feel ignored by businesses feel rejection, and rejection can lead to many downward spirals. Meanwhile, when customers feel that they’re heard and valued by the business, it can positively impact your business. 

Businesses must listen to their customers, as customers directly impact your revenue. To actively be involved in your customer’s overall journey – this is where you must apply customer service and customer experience. 

Delivering excellent customer service and experiences is a practical approach in reducing the expense of operations and investing in improving their customer’s experience, and moving the needle on revenue. To do so, you must know what’s on top of your customer’s minds or the things that matter to them. 

What Matters Most to Your Customers 

Knowing what matters to customers and how they might interact with your brand is essential to your business’s success. So what are the things that matter to customers? Saphyte has listed ten things that matter to customers in 2021. 

Omnichannel Communication

With the fast-paced environment, customers will always want to reach out to you at any time. A study has shown that customers no longer desire to communicate with companies when and where it’s most convenient for them — they expect and demand it from your business. 

Unlike before, this new approach to conversational commerce is much bigger than your ordinary live chat. Though live chat is a part of the whole approach, it’s no longer the focus. Consumers expect and demand the ease of connectivity with your brand on their preferred communication platform.

But what is an omnichannel communication approach? An omnichannel communication approach allows businesses to deliver a seamless and constant experience across various communication channels (email, social media chat, website chatbots, etc.) while factoring in consumers’ different devices, behaviors, and choices.

Personalization taking Center Stage

On top of ease of communication, customers expect and demand personalization, and businesses notice this trend. And in 2021, hyper-personalization will take its place center stage. Data shows that customers value a friendly, efficient, and profound personalized customer service experience.

Never underestimate the influence of friendly, personalized interactions. One study shows that most customer buying decisions no longer rely on things like price or convenience. Instead, 70% of buying experiences depend on how a customer feels a company is treating them.

Communicate the Purchasing Process

Customers hate it when sellers dance around talking points like availability, price, discounts, total cost, add-on options, and so forth. Customers expect you to tell them, in plain and simple language, what items are included in their purchase and how the purchase will take place. No surprises and, most significantly, no last-minute upsells.

Showing Customers you Know Them

Customers no longer want to be a part of your sales number. They expect and demand them to feel seen, appreciated, and understood by the businesses they deal with every time. Of course, this is a natural human response, but it does create a massive impact on your revenue. 

The minor details can make a significant difference for your customers. You could start with tailored recommendations, greeting them on their birthdays, and addressing them by name when they’re talking to you. 

Agent Experience on Greater Focus

Agent Experience (AX) is the holistic outlook of how empowered, efficient, and influential a company’s customer service agents are. As is the case with almost any department in a business, prioritizing your team and staying in touch with your employee morale is the only authentic way to ensure positive customer reactions. 

You can do this by adequately equipping your agents with the right tools, enhanced training, make customer data more accessible, give specific and relevant feedback, and clear process documentation and flexible guidelines that allow agents to prioritize customer outcomes over their KPIs. 

Positive online engagement  

Brands are so obsessed with acquisition, clicks, and conversions that it can be easy for them to neglect the importance of the moments in between. Engaging customers between and beyond purchases will strengthen their emotional connection with your brand. Stronger ties between your customer and your brand will help you retain your hard-won customers.  

By positively communicating with your current customers online will make it much more likely for them to go out of their way to help boost your business socially.

Ability to trust your brand  

Trust is an issue with customers. While it is easy to set up your web page and social pages, it does not guarantee to build and maintaining trust. Customer trust is necessary for an environment where customer expectations increase daily and competition is intense. Customer trust is a brand differentiator that could make or break a business. 

Safety, convenience, and flexibility 

Safety, convenience, and flexibility are known as the new trifecta customer experience. After the pandemic, customers will prioritize their convenience, ease of transaction, and flexibility in options. No matter how great this need can be, the bottom line is that consumers demand it, and if your business isn’t convenient enough for them, they will look for one that is — presumably your competitors.

Understand ALL the Their (customer) Needs

Today, it’s no longer enough to “connect the stars” between your customer needs and your brand’s offering. By knowing and understanding what your customer needs is at the very core of every successful business, whether you’re directly selling to individuals or other companies. Once you have this knowledge, you can persuade potential and existing customers that purchasing from you is in their best interests.

Understanding your customers is the key to giving your customers good service, which further results in stronger customer relations and new sales through positive word-of-mouth recommendations.

Craft Compelling Solutions

Solution selling will be a great selling point for businesses this 2021. Customers demand and expect your business to have the essential selling skill of defining and proposing a valuable and practical solution. 

Always remember, your customer’s problem is always more important than your solution, and giving a solution to their problem should be your greatest priority.

Key Takeaway

Your customers are the bread and butter of your business. Knowing the things that matter most to them can set your business apart from your competitors. 

However, the key takeaway is catching up to these needs. To catch up to your customers’ needs, you need tools to gather, keep, and access data, keep business processes simple and make work easier for your employees. Saphyte can help you build these things. 

Saphyte is a UAE homegrown business operating out of Dubai. It is currently helping hundreds of companies drive digital transformation through local support, zero implementation fees, competitive subscription models, and an advanced CRM ecosystem technology.

Feel like talking about this opportunity more? Book a demo with us today, and our digital ecosystem experts will be right there with you.

So it’s another Monday in the office, you just sat down in your office chair, setting your steaming cup of coffee on the table, powered up your PC, and decided to check on your prospects. As you try to scour through names, emails, and numbers, you begin to realize that you don’t have a clue as to who your customers are or how to approach them.

Playing the assumption game is dangerous when you’re trying to sell to your customers. At the same time, assuming that all of your leads and prospects need and want your product is like expecting to see rain in the middle of a drought.

For your business to properly market, sell, and offer support to your customers, you need to understand the people that you’re selling to and really get to know them. You can do this successfully by building out customer profiles and developing an internal process for creating and auditing said profiles.

Well, what are Customer Profiles anyway?

A customer profile is a detailed description of your target audience. They differ from a buyer persona because customer profiles are not a fictional representation of your customers. These profiles consist of factual and actual information about your prospect’s demographics, their purchasing behaviors, preferences, customer service interactions, and more.

Everything you need to know about a group of customers is captured within this one description.

Customer profiling, on the other hand, is the process of identifying the characteristics of people who are most likely to avail or purchase your product or service and derive a lot of value from it. Along this process, you gather data that includes demographic, geographic, and psychographic characteristics, as well as buying patterns, creditworthiness, and purchase history.

How to create an effective customer profile?

The more refined your customer profile is, the more it can help your company find and attract more people that are likely to purchase your product, build more impressive features, develop stronger relationships with your customers, and put you on a better course for market dominance.

So, what are the steps involved in creating an effective customer profile? Here are 5 necessary steps you need to take in order to create an effective customer profile.

Focus on the business problem that you are trying to resolve.

Review your customer journey map again.

Understand your industry.

Build, analyze and iterate your customer personas.

Partner with software that understands your customer profiling needs right off the bat.

There are different ways to go about building your customer profile database. However, there is one way that might work for you and your business.

Introducing Saphyte Forms , your partner in building a reliable and accurate customer profile database.

What are Saphyte Forms?

Your customer interaction doesn’t start with the actual conversation itself. Customer interactions are more like the prep work before the actual act of cooking takes place.

In your business’ setting, before you do the actual talking, you need to get your customer profiles in shape. This is where Saphyte Forms come into the picture.

Forms is Saphyte’s newest addition to its ecosystem to make business and sales more streamlined and effective. Saphyte Forms allow its users to acquire, organize, update, and track customer information without having to switch from one platform to another.

This feature also allows you to automate some of your manual tasks and capture data that truly matters to your business and your sales team. Allowing you to stay on the pulse, gain real-time customer insights and build more customer relations opportunities for your business.

What are the benefits that Forms can bring to your business?

Accuracy is key for your sales team to perform better, and they can’t perform well if you give them subpar customer data. With this feature, you can build better, clearer, and more accurate data for your sales and marketing team to use.

There are plenty of benefits and added value businesses gain with Saphyte’s newest feature. Here are some of them.

Provides real-time updates of your audience needs, interests and objectives.

Data submitted integrates easily into workflow processes.

Saves effort and mitigates errors in capturing information.

Improves quality of submitted applications.

Minimal administrative overheads.

Improves customer experience.

How to use Saphyte Forms?

Using Saphyte Forms is a breeze and definitely sweat-free. You can tailor your forms according to the objective of your campaign. Some forms simply need a couple of data fields whilst others are more complex and incredibly useful for refining your customer profiles. Follow these steps and you’ll get there easily.

Open your Saphyte Ecosystem and drag and drop your form of choice.

Set up your relevant data fields. (Customize as you need)

Assign the form to your campaign.

Connect your form to a workflow.

And start capturing real-time data that matters to you, directly into the CRM ecosystem.

If you don’t have access to our ecosystem yet, you can sign-up for one today. Want us to take you on a tour of our ecosystem? Book a demo with us today.  

Wrap Up

Building your customer profiles shouldn’t be so tedious. With Saphyte Forms you can capture data that matters to you, build out your profiles and provide value where it really matters for your business.

Saphyte, bringing endless possibilities for businesses with a simple click.