Today more than ever, the king in the business world is the customer, the buyer. Companies live for them. It is they who have the ability to buy what we offer… that is why we live in a state of "customer dictatorship": their power is absolute.
The client wants us to meet and listen to him. That we offer you products / services that fully satisfy your needs. Look for a positive and personalized experience every time you interact with us (by phone, through email, by letter, on the web…)… in a word: they want everything at the best price. They have the power and they know it.
We must listen to them, get to know them and design products and / or services appropriate to their needs, since this way we will be able to differentiate ourselves from our competition and win in the battle for competitiveness.
How can we get it?
To achieve this, the company needs to evolve its philosophy and the tools to achieve it.
The company, and therefore all the people that make it up, must live obsessed with adding value to the customer at all times. Although in most cases it is a change that will not always be easy to achieve, it is totally justified by the important benefits it brings.
As for tools, the most powerful is technology. The information systems and the Internet have a lot to say in this sense since they allow us to approach and interact with the client to detect their needs and offer satisfactions.
At this point it is interesting to comment and pay attention to customer relationship management systems (CRM- Customer Relationship Management) that are specially designed for this purpose in both physical and electronic media.
How does technology help us?
As we have already mentioned, technology offers us many opportunities in this area:
1. Communicate with our clients at very low cost. The communication possibilities that we have with the website and email allow us to approach our clients at a much lower cost than with physical means.
Through the website, we have a "vendor" that serves 200, 500 or 5,000 people a day for free. How much can that cost with a physical vendor?
And if we compare the cost of an email delivery against its letter counterpart, the costs are unmatched. Email is much cheaper, although some of its limitations must also be taken into account.
2. Know more about our clients and their needs. The possibilities of having databases of our clients and obtaining information from them is key.
We can collect information from both physical means (telephone contacts, sales force,…) and electronic means: through the web and email both actively (questionnaires) and passively (traces of users who use the website).
Thus, through the web, we can know which products are the most consulted, what is the time spent on each of the pages (which indicates their interest), which pages they use to leave our website (which indicates your little interest in its content), etc.
3. Interaction 365 days a year and 24 hours a day through our website and email.
4. Improved communication to customers and the information they have about products or services: Communication facilities and their low cost, together with more information about our customers, allow us to further personalize our message. Thus, they will have more information about our products / services, which will lead to increased sales.
The possibilities of the Internet and New Technologies in the area of customer relations are endless. Obviously, if we do all this well we will achieve one of the main purposes: SELL MORE AND BETTER.
