7 best practices for customer care

Customer care is essential to the development of your business. Take inspiration from proven customer relationship management practices to put in place quality support and an optimal customer file.

Customer satisfaction is paramount: a 5% increase in customer loyalty can boost profits by 25-95% (source: Marketing Management).

OK, but how can you save your sales force from time-consuming and complicated sales management? Take a look at our 7 tips for nurturing and managing your customer relationships in this article. And as a bonus, we'll share with you examples of software adapted to each tip!

See all software Customer relationship management

Customer follow-up: definition and challenges

Customer follow-up, or commercial follow-up, refers to the relationship established with your customers. It involves :

• listening to their expectations,
• attentive to their reactions,
• responsive to their requests.

Your customers send out a number of signals:

• buying behavior,
• product choices,
• habits,
• preferences...

So many sources of information to decipher, cross-referencing them in tables to derive an analysis.

Knowing your customers better will enable you to satisfy them more effectively. The aim is to win their loyalty, so that they use your services again, think of you for a new purchase, or recommend you to their friends and family.

This requires a high degree of personalization.

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7 tips for successful customer care

1 - Scrupulously collect customer data

A complete customer file, as well as the history of all interactions, requests, invoices and quotations, are all elements for tracking the customer lifecycle.

What purchases were made, when, was there a need for after-sales service, were there any complaints whatsoever?

🔎 E xamples of customer tracking software :

• Kizeo Forms enables all parties involved in customer follow-up, particularly teams in the field, but also sedentary teams, to record all this data thanks to a mobile application, linked to a back-office for configuring and standardizing reports.
  
  
• Maintaining contact with potential customers means remembering previous interactions. Here again, the software is a memory aid. With EFFICY CRM, for example, the history is stored and associated with each contact record.
  
  
• Why not go one step further and adopt a complete view of commercial interactions? That's what Olyn Soft, a CRM made in France, offers. Centralize customer data from all your tools thanks to an API, and use them in a single interface for optimal customer follow-up.

2 - Optimize your customer knowledge

To get to know your new customers, start by understanding them. To do this, you need to set the context.

To this end, the discovery plan enables you to identify all relevant information about a prospect or customer, and answer the following questions:

• What is their need?
• What are their expectations?
• What motivates them?
• What are their issues?
• Their current situation?

🔎 E xamples of customer follow-up software:

• Monday CRM seamlessly integrates your email inbox into the tool. As a result, you no longer waste time searching for customer information in incoming messages. And you won't lose any crucial data either.
  
  
• Nelis, on the other hand, promises to centralize and automatically segment your contact database using intelligent filters and personalized criteria (opportunities, emailing history, prospecting actions, etc.). Enhance your customer knowledge with simple access to all their information, and develop more effective, targeted campaigns.
  
  
• As for Teamleader, it uses lead scoring to establish a qualified follow-up of customers and prospects. The CRM tool triggers a watch based on business signals defined by you, and alerts you in the event of any change: a simple and effective way to keep abreast of what's going on with your customers.

3 - Personalize your approach

The art of sales management is getting it right: making the right offer, to the right person, in the right place, at the right time. It's all about studying the customer journey to increase customer knowledge and optimize the customer experience.

Satisfaction surveys, loyalty programs and personalized offers are all customer follow-up techniques to be taken into account.

🔎 E xamples of customer tracking software:

• Zendesk allows you to personalize your customer relations, thanks in particular to the automatic routing of each ticket to the employee most competent to resolve it, and the adapted display of the workspace according to the type of ticket, with the highlighting of the tools most useful for its resolution.
  
  
• To personalize your customer relations, start by customizing your CRM tool to suit your needs. EasyFact offers you a tool that enables you to track your customers' behaviors and profiles to get to know them better, while at the same time modulating it to fit your image and usage needs.

4 - Pay close attention to customer relations

Listening to your customers also means providing them with the means to communicate with you. If they need to, how can they contact your sales force? If they encounter a problem, to what extent can they find a solution?

This availability, however strategic it may be, can take the form of a support service of various kinds:

• a tickets interface,
• a web portal,
• a hotline,
• an after-sales service number, preferably toll-free,
• or even a chatbot.

In addition, customers must also be able to access their documents easily.

🔎 E xample of customer follow-up software:

With Axonaut, he has a dedicated space to consult his invoices and estimates, receives notifications. The company can then track interesting stats, such as document opening and response rates, to adapt scoring and decision-making.

And if accessibility counts, so does responsiveness. How quickly will your customers receive a response? If the response time depends solely on your technical support, it may vary according to the number of telephone inquiries.

Hence the importance of FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) and forums. The community of users becomes a strength. And an answer given once to one person can be used by all those encountering the same difficulty later on.

5 - Focus on omnichannel customer relations

These days, customers contact you via a multitude of communication channels, and vice versa:

• telephone,
• social networks,
• email,
• mobile application,
• chatbot.

It's therefore vital to centralize and contextualize omnichannel exchanges so that your employees have access to all customer data and can respond quickly, easily and in a personalized way.

🔎E xample of customer tracking software :

• easiware is an all-in-one omnichannel platform that centralizes contact channels and efficiently handles incoming requests from a single interface, without leaving the tool. It focuses on the personalization of customer relations, thanks to a 360° customer file that includes all data, from history to loyalty programs.
  

6 - Set follow-up actions

For good customer follow-up, endurance is essential. It's not about taking care of the customer "once and for all". The challenge is to come back to them in a way that maintains timely and lasting contact, and maximizes customer loyalty.

Given the size of your database, this is a difficult task. Unless you have management software that allows you to keep on top of everything.

What's more, to relieve your sales team of the burden of prospecting, a CRM with notification management and automatic report settings is invaluable.

🔎 E xamples of customer follow-up software :

• Salesforce Sales Cloud benefits from a very broad application ecosystem, including marketing automation functionalities, to automate marketing actions, such as sending welcome emails, reminders, without losing sight of customer complexity.
  
  
• noCRM.io (formerly You Dont' Need A CRM). is a tool that synchronizes with salespeople's agendas, and the pipeline view lets you manage opportunities and access history.
  
  
• With Initiative CRM, for example, you can visualize your sales activity using dashboards, graphs and dynamic cross-referenced reports. You can track your favorite key performance indicators such as best sales, new customer rate, sales evolution, etc.

7 - Invest in customer follow-up software

As you'll have gathered from our examples, a software package dedicated to customer relations enables you to :

• collect and store all commercial information concerning the customer and the company's activity;
• facilitate internal communication and collaboration thanks to the centralization of customer data, for all departments directly or indirectly concerned:
  • sales,
  • marketing,
  • communication,
  • billing,
  • support,
  • quality ;
• streamlined sales processes through access to standardized, accessible documentation;
• dashboards with a global view of activity, for improved sales reporting;
• automation of repetitive tasks (reminders) and key notifications (anniversary, purchase, sponsorship).

The additional advantages of SaaS software, like all those presented in this article, are :

• constant updating of functionalities, in line with standards such as RGPD,
• interoperability with other software - marketing or accounting, for example - enabling multi-channel tracking, so that no important information is lost in the customer journey,
• mobile working,
• real-time synchronization.

Example of a customer tracking table

How effective is your customer care? Measure it!

To measure the effectiveness of your customer care, select the right KPIs. Here are the most relevant:

• Customer Satisfaction Rate (CSAT): Via satisfaction surveys or independent review sites, this measures the proportion of customers satisfied with your services and products. A good CSAT is above 70%. An excellent CSAT is above 80%.

• Time to first response (TFR): This measures the average time between a customer's direct request and a response from the support department. It applies to all channels (forms, social networks, etc.). It varies from sector to sector, but is generally under 1 hour.

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): Using a scale from -100 to +100, this evaluates the likelihood of a customer recommending your product or service. This indicator is obtained by subtracting the percentage of dissatisfied customers from the percentage of satisfied customers. An NPS above 50 is considered excellent.

Other relevant KPIs:

• First Interaction Resolution Rate (FIRR): This shows the proportion of problems resolved during a first interaction.

• Retention rate (loyalty): The percentage of customers who remain loyal to your services over the long term.

• Sales per customer: The revenue generated by each customer over a given period (usually a year).

Can artificial intelligence assist your team in customer follow-up?

Artificial intelligence is invading all levels of business, and customer service is no exception. More and more support software is integrating AI assistants to answer users' most common questions.

These chatbots are available around the clock, increasing customer satisfaction. If necessary, they forward the request to a human expert.

But the benefits of AI don't stop there. This technology also makes it possible to:

• Predict behavior by analyzing customer history.

• Personalize user paths and offers in real time.

• Assist decision-making by prioritizing actions.

See all software Customer relationship management

Customer relationship monitoring: it's up to you!

🔎 Customer follow-up is essential to building prosperous, lasting customer relationships, and it starts right at the sales prospecting stage. You need to give yourself the resources, both material and operational, to deploy a system that is both qualified and reliable. Are you with us?