managing customer

Want to know how you can segment your audience for your email marketing campaigns? Learn how to do it in seven easy steps.

Sending an email blast to a list of customers without understanding their needs and priorities is not only wasteful of time, energy, and resources, but it also risks customers having a bad impression of your brand.

To make sure you’re only sending relevant information, it’s important to segment customers based on commonalities.

Some of the common factors that bind customers together are their interests, age, gender, and company industry. When you segment customers together based on these commonalities, it helps you understand customers’ challenges better.

You’re also 130% more likely to know their intentions, according to research, which helps you launch a more responsive sales and marketing strategy.

How Does Email Segmentation Work

Email segmentation works by dividing your email lists into smaller “segments” based on certain criteria such as age, sex, interests, buying intention, etc.

No two customers are the same. That’s why it’s important to understand why a customer subscribed to your email list and what type of information they want to get in the future.

One of your subscribers may find promotional offers and discounts helpful, while others may only want guides or expert advice coming from you.

By separating these two apart, you ensure that you only send information that is relevant to a target segment— promotional offers to the audience that actively looks for promos, and expert advice to the audience that only wants to get advice from you.

What is the Best Way to Segment Customers

Here’s how you can start segmenting your audience:

1. Gather as much information about your customers as possible

The first step to segmenting customers is to identify first who they are. Gathering as much information about them as possible. More data can help you in your analysis. 

Through surveys, you can gather details like location, interests, buying habits, and your customers’ demographics. The information you get from your customers will help you learn how to improve your products and services, and how best to provide value to the market. 

Tools like digital ecosystems and customer relationship management (CRM) systems can help you massively when doing this. 

2. Divide your audience based on commonalities

After gathering important data about your customers, the next step is to divide your audience into segments, based on commonalities. Find the common features among your audience. And be sure to keep each segment distinct from the others.

3. Create customer personas

Customer personas are more accurate representations of your customers based on data and information you’ve gathered from them and the market. It helps you design content that is responsive and relevant to them and their values.

When creating personas, try to identify the friction points between your business and your target customers. Address the objections that they may have to your product or service and prepare to address future concerns. Match your brand’s voice to your customer personas’ preferred communication styles.

4. Explore customer needs

After crafting your customer personas, the next step is to understand your customers’ needs at a deeper level. This includes digging deeper into your audience’s desires, value systems, and even needs that your customers do not know themselves.

This can be done through surveys at stages through progressive profiling. You can also include a customer feedback loop to know more about your customers’ thoughts and experiences with your brand. You can also delve deeper into what your customers think about your competitors’ products and services.

Another thing to note about customer needs is that you can identify them by determining research keywords, search terms, and frequently asked questions (FAQs) related to your product. This helps you know more about your customers’ needs without asking them directly about these needs.

5. Link your product and service value to customer needs

The next step is to connect the needs of your consumers with your brand’s product or service. 

This is where sales and marketing step in. Try to highlight how your products and services address the pain points of your customers. And how it can deliver value over time.

6. Prioritize high-value segments 

Some segments offer higher value than others— meaning, that in terms of sales, they generate higher value than other segments. Channel your focus on these segments. And prioritize these groups when you have to invest in sales and marketing efforts.

7. Evaluate your strategies

All strategies have to be evaluated at the end to ensure they work. Strategies cost companies resources to run, so make sure they’re delivering results. 

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Conducting customer surveys are important in determining customer sentiments, but they can be a hassle to perform. Find out how you can do them effortlessly.

Companies often use customer surveys to understand their audience’s needs and preferences and to gain a better understanding of their customers’ experiences interacting with the brand and by using their products or services.

But conducting customer surveys can be painstaking and time-consuming. What are the ways for you to conduct customer surveys effortlessly? Check out our tips below:

1. Use tools that let your collect and organize customer data

Using digital ecosystems that let you collect and organize data is one of the easiest ways for you to conduct customer surveys.

It’s important to note, however, that these digital ecosystems must have all the tools and features you need to gain insight from the data you’ve collected.

Some tools automatically display data through visual representations such charts and graphs. These can help you make meaningful and strategic business decisions to help your brand grow.

2. Automate your tasks

Digital ecosystems can also automate your tasks for you. For example, when a customer visits a sales and marketing channel (like your website or a landing page), the tool can automatically prompt them to answer a survey.

This reduces the need for you to call them to answer a survey or to wait for them to answer a survey you’ve sent through mail or email.

Some digital ecosystems also allow you to automate the creation of reports, which eliminates the need to manually write one, based on the answers you’ve received from your customers.

3. Keep the surveys short

To make it easy for you and your customers, surveys must be short and simple. They should be aligned with the business goals and objectives— what do you want to know from them and why? 

This is important because, according to research, only 7% of customers actually respond to surveys they receive. And that means that long surveys are highly likely to be ignored or rejected.

4. Think about the timing

When it comes to conducting surveys, timing is key.

Surveys must be given at a time when customer availability is high to get a higher sample size— so you won’t have to do it again and again just to make the survey statistically significant (which takes a lot of time and effort). 

Timing is also necessary if you want to gain a sincere and genuine response. For example, if you send a survey to determine customer satisfaction while the customer has not yet made a purchase, then the survey becomes meaningless. 

Try to identify at which stage of the customer journey the survey is best conducted.

5. Offer incentives

Speaking of genuine responses, offering incentives encourages customers to participate and give honest feedback. Integrate narratives that let customers know how participating in the survey is going to help them in the process.

Words like “help us help you” or “let us know how we can do better” send a message that their inputs are going to affect them along the way— and will eventually redound to their benefit. 

Conduct surveys effortlessly

Want to know how you can effortlessly conduct customer surveys or gain their honest feedback? 

Gain access to a complete set of tools with Saphyte’s digital ecosystem. Learn more about its features from our experts and how they can impact your business. Book a FREE demo here.

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.

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”

-Warren Buffet

Managing customer experience has become a priority in the digital age. With the emergence of new and innovative digital technologies, customer behavior has been continuously reshaped, making it harder for companies to predict and proactively respond to customer needs and demands. 

When the customer expectations are unmet, customers begin to question the credibility of the business they regularly interact with and turn to competitors for better service. 

To avoid this, businesses must understand the important factors that comprise customer experiences and manage them. They can do this by mapping the customer journey, identifying gaps across the different stages of the customer journey, and optimizing the journey to enhance the customer experience.

From complete strangers, customers can become your brand representatives who will actively advocate for the use of your products and services.

Why Managing Customer Experience is Crucial

Managing customer experience is crucial and relevant in the digital age. Among the reasons are the following:

1. Because customers are different now than they used to be

Earlier businesses operated purely on a brick-and-mortar model that engage with their customers and earned sales and profits. 

But this model has been disrupted by digital innovators that contributed to the birth of the digital age. Nowadays, businesses are offering and delivering online services. 

This has shaped and reshaped consumer behavior. With fast internet connectivity and availability, customers now want complete product information at their fingertips as they go about their daily lives. 

They’re also caring less about which channel they use to communicate— they can browse business websites through their PCs, make purchases on mobile devices, or even check your products in-store and make purchases online.

Because of new consumer behavior and emerging technologies, customer expectations are changing. They now hold businesses at higher standards when it comes to their online and offline shopping experiences. 

Moreover, the wide availability of information and quick access to competitors’ channels have also made them now more demanding in terms of quality service. They can make quick comparisons, provide public feedback, and influence other consumers’ purchase decisions which empowers them to make demands from businesses.

This is why consumer experience is crucial in the digital age. A bad experience can leave a bad taste in the mouth of customers and negatively affect your business reputation.

2. Because businesses can easily lose leads along the way

The availability of multiple channels also makes it difficult for businesses to track where their leads are coming from and what types of customers they have. 

This lack of customer information makes it easy for businesses to lose them along the way. To sustain customers’ interests, businesses need to send relevant and useful information to each customer. But this seem impossible without knowing the customer first.

3. Because future customers may avoid your business upon hearing about bad reviews

As mentioned above, the wide access of information and connectivity between users makes it easy for consumers to influence each others’ purchase decisions.

When a customer leaves a bad review due to a bad experience with your business, it may deter others from purchasing too.

4. Because customers’ entire purchase decision may rest on customer experience

This is a business nightmare. All the stages in the pipeline may go smoothly— from the acquisition of the lead and to the first contact with the sales team— but a little inconvenience or, for example, a lack of integration of payment solutions on your website can make a customer decide not to push through with the purchase.

A customer’s entire purchase decision may rest on the entire experience, which is why it’s crucial in the digital age.

5. Because customers may become brand advocates due to quality experience

But when a customer’s experience is smooth, it may be the first thing that comes into their mind when hearing about your brand.

It may lead to loyalty. And loyalty can make customers become brand advocates— recommending your brand to others whenever a need arises.

How CRM Helps Improve Customer Experience

A CRM can let companies track millions of consumers and address gaps in service instantaneously. They also make the communication process between the customer and the business smoother and more efficient.

With a CRM, busineses can provide customer feedback loops, quickly interact with customers at each stage of the pipeline and discover bottlenecks and key issues along the customer journey. 

Along the way, they can discover the customer’s state of mind at each touch point, develop a better understanding of each customer’s needs and expectations, and drive improvements to deliver the best customer experience.

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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.

Having good and proper customer service does not end after closing sales. You need to consider a lot of things beyond that point to enhance your customer experience. One of which is After Sales Service. After-sales service refers to the things that your team does to make sure the customers are satisfied with the products or services they received after they bought it.

It aims to ensure that their expectations were met. Doing this potentially increases your customer loyalty because according to a recent study, 69% of consumers shop more with businesses that offer consistent customer service. This means that consistent customer follow-ups are crucial in your day to day processes.

And to help you be more engaged with your customers, CRM systems were made. This modern business solution is made for the sole purpose of helping you be connected to your customers. So, to better understand its importance in your after-sales service execution, here are the reasons why you need an after-sales CRM.

Helps build client relationships

Increases customer loyalty

Enables third-party integration

Helps Build Client Relationships

From the name itself, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software helps you build customer relationships. It does that by recording all the client’s contact information – including queries, phone calls, and feedback – through customer interactions and stores them in its own centralized platform. The recorded data can then be accessed anytime and anywhere in real-time.

This means that CRM solutions provide you the means to create better contact management that can help increase customer satisfaction. And with the increase in customer satisfaction, you will then improve your customer relationships.

The best thing about this feature is that it can be applied to both existing and potential customers. This is highly beneficial especially for small businesses that have a limited number of employees and resources to implement proper customer service and after-sales services.

This will help lower the cost of hiring more employees and at the same time, it will enable your team to focus more on your customers while letting the system handle all the other tasks.

Increases Customer Loyalty

We know that customer loyalty is difficult to increase without the help of any modern tools. But now that your business has the capabilities to build a long-lasting client relationship with the help of CRM tools, increasing customer loyalty will be a piece of cake.

CRM does a wonderful job of handling both your sales process and marketing campaigns. Meaning, it automates your sales and marketing so that your marketing and sales team can focus more on your customers. It empowers your team and enables them to execute genuine service towards your customers while letting the system do all the other tasks. This way, customers will feel that they are being valued as much as you value sales.

With this, CRM provides ways to enable your customers to go back to your business. It encourages them to become loyal to you because of your capability to immediately respond and care for your customers. This way, your customers will be satisfied with your service and thus your customer loyalty rate will increase.

A recent statistic states that there are 47% of CRM users believed that the system made a significant impact in increasing customer satisfaction. And a separate study states that CRM improves customer retention rate by 27%.

With these facts and evidence, applying CRM in your business will allow you to develop important customer relationships and increases your customer loyalty and retention rate.

Enables Third-Party Integration

We have been telling you over and over again that a CRM system can easily connect your business to the world. And to address the question as to how can a single system do that, well CRM does that by integrating multiple and different platforms in its own system. This integration feature of a CRM enables connectivity between your system and third-party applications.

Although CRM systems are already powerful on their own, this integration results in automated actions that further expands the functionality of your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. This gives you and your team the benefit of eliminating the need to go back and forth between different software.

Systems like Saphyte allows you to integrate a lot of different and necessary 3^rd party platforms for your business. With Saphyte, you can integrate your social media platforms so that you can easily connect to your social media customers. Aside from that, this integration also allows you to seamlessly execute and monitor your social media campaigns directly from your CRM.

It also allows you to integrate your different email accounts for easier access and management by only using your CRM mailbox. By integrating your email accounts into the system, you can easily log all of your emails, send a single email to thousands of recipients, have the access to high-quality email templates, and many more.

With this, CRMs like Saphyte gives you the capacity to reach your customers no matter what platform they are in. It also enables you to have the ability to execute better contact management throughout all of your platforms. So, whether it is from your social media channels, own website, email accounts, handling your customers will become easier with the help of CRM.

Why Saphyte is the Best Fit for Your After-Sales CRM Needs

Yes, there may be a lot of other CRM providers that offer features and functionalities that may resolve your after-sales needs. But compared to them, what makes Saphyte the better choice?

First and foremost, Saphyte has everything that you need to manage – not just your after-sales needs – but all of your different business processes. It is a compact and all-rounder CRM equipped with powerful tools that can easily bring your business to a whole new level. And mind you, these tools can be yours at an impressively affordable price.

It empowers your teams to do their tasks with the highest effectiveness and allows them to become productive no matter where they are. The system also does an impressive job of providing you the tools to further expand your reach.

So, whether you have a growing business, small-scale, or an established one that needs a reliable business solution, Saphyte is the best fit for all of your needs. It can do all the things that we have discussed earlier. It also has all the right tools that enable your business to become competitive in the market.

With Saphyte, the essence of implementing proper after-sales services, genuine customer service execution, and as well as managing your business is easily fulfilled. And you don’t need to worry because, throughout the years, Saphyte has built a reputation for helping businesses from different sectors achieve growth and success.

So, to address all of your after-sales needs, make Saphyte your official CRM partner today. Our team is always available to help you achieve success. Contact us now and have the most powerful and affordable CRM in the market in your hands.