November 22, 2008

Joint Venture Marketing: An Overlooked Option to Improved Customer Service

It is widely known that the central tenant to any successful business is great customer service, and running an online business is no different from running a traditional business in this sense. Although you do not have face-to-face contact with your customers as you do in the setting of a traditional store, it is essential to still foster close relationships with your customers and provide them with exceptional customer service.

Turning the Online Disadvantage into a Strength

Because there is so much competition in the world of online businesses, it is almost even more important to deliver superior customer service when running an online business. Collaborating with other businesses to form a joint venture marketing venture is one way to increase your customer service capabilities. Joint venture marketing can psychologically prompt your customer to perceive that you care about their entire wellbeing or convenience. 

When you have personal contact with customers, it is much easier to make an impression and create a bond that will potentially lead to a strong business relationship. While this is more difficult with an online business, you can still make that great connection, especially with joint venture marketing. With an online business, you have fewer options and opportunities for giving that feeling of a personal touch, and it is vital that you capitalize on the resources for creating strong customer relationships that you do have.

Joint Venture Marketing: Joint Customer Service!

Forming a joint venture marketing partnership is a way to expand your resources for creating strong client relationships and providing customer service. In a joint venture marketing partnership, you agree, formally or informally, to partner with one or more other companies to share the responsibilities and reap the rewards of greater customer exposure. Once you have increased your client base through joint venture marketing, it creates a larger base of customers to provide good service to, but it also provides you with greater resources to do so.

If for instance, you run a pet accessories business, and you partner with a company that sells pet food products, the goal is that you will each gain some customers from one another based on their mutual interests in their pets. A person who likes to buy toys and accessories for their pet from you is likely to buy pet food products from your partner once they see your endorsement for the pet food products. You have created a link with this customer that you share with your joint venture marketing partner.

This new customer will now receive customer service independently from each of your companies, and since you put this customer in touch with your partner in the pet food products business, this customer now trusts you, and is likely to immediately trust your partner. But along with the independent customer service you and your joint venture partner will each provide, there is a piggyback effect - a connection in the customer’s mind and in practice. The added customer service outcome from a joint venture marketing partnership is also that you and your partner will keep an eye on the customers that you do have in common, which will enable you to provide more targeted personal service to your shared customers.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing & Consulting firm empowering business owners to discover and implement Integration, Alliance, and Joint Venture marketing tactics to solve specific business challenges and increase profits. To read more articles related to Joint Venture Marketing, please go to his Joint Venture Blog Site. He can be reached at christian@synertegic.com

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Increase Your Business Productivity with Predictive Dialers

Your help when it comes to increasing your business productivity has come; look at Predictive Dialer software.

Predictive Dialers increase call center agents talk time and contact rates. Predictive Dialers are used to save 70% of phone operators time that would otherwise be devoted to dialling manually. That's why Predictive Dialers is also used by market survey companies and debt collection services who need to contact and personally speak to a lot of people by telephone. More commonly, Predictive Dialers are now being used as a quick and easy way to automate all sorts of calls which would otherwise be made manually by a call center agent. Such as welcome calls for new customers, customer service call backs, appointment confirmations and reminders, or even for the automation of large numbers of ad hoc calls that might need to take place (such as by a taxi company, or parcel delivery service, etc).

Predictive Dialers are not only easy to install but also simple to learn. Moreover, predictive dialers have the ability to integrate call recording devices, too! Predictive Dialer users identified cost issues related to keeping records over longer time periods.

Predictive dialer software accomplishes this by forecasting how many telephone calls need to be placed. If the Predictive Dialer software does not place enough calls, the agents will sit idle waiting for a call. Predictive Dialers can cut an agents time that would otherwise be spent on dialling contact numbers alone. It also allows your business to remain consistent as the feature allows everyone to work at the same rate and experience similar levels of success. Predictive Dialers have demonstrated talk times in the 45 - 50 minute range, giving you an increase in productivity of nearly 100%! That translates into direct savings either by allowing your call center to handle more calls per day with the same number of agents, or by allowing you to reduce your staff significantly while handling the same call volume.

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November 21, 2008

Work as Customer Service Agent at Home

New York Times specifies that customer service work at home job opportunities have increasing in United States. Customer service jobs also called call center jobs require employing agents in work at home customer service jobs. This type of work is that it offers income to stay at home parents and physically challenged people. 

Customer service work at jobs ranges from call handling to technical support. If you want to such a job, you would need some basic essentials like a modern computer with internet connection, basic computer knowledge, latest operating system, a phone connection, excellent communication skill to handle varied customers and of course some educational qualification.

How to get a customer service work, home job?

If you want to get a legitimate customer service work at home job that would provide you smart income, then try to follow the under mentioned tips:

1. The first step in betting a work at home customer service job is to understand the type of employment. It is not that hard. The concept is that the company hiring your service routes their incoming customer service calls to your home phone.

2. Then understand the type of duties require to be performed. Most of the customer service jobs include taking and logging orders, processing transactions, providing assistance to customers as per their requirements etc. 

3. Discover the benefits of work at home. In fact work at home customer service jobs are boon to stay-at-home mothers, disabled people, retired seniors and college students. If you are not able to step out of home but need to earn some income, then you can select any of the customer service jobs according to your ability. Since agent hiring, training and scheduling jobs are being conducted online, you need not even get out of your home to get a job.

4. Once you decided to work at home, then do lot of homework to select a legitimate home based customer service jobs. You need to browse through the list of companies and websites regarding this.

5. Then submit your application and resume to the company you wish to. Always take care to prepare the application properly just like you may do in case of other jobs.

There are numerous benefits of doing customer service jobs at home. That’s why one quarter of customer service agents in North America start work at home. The convenience and independence are the two main advantages of customer service work at home jobs. 

Every business requires creating customers and it is very important to retain an empathetic and trusting relationship to ensure customer commitment. Faithful customers surely add to long term success of any business and so their requirements should be fulfilled as soon as possible.

Hence the overwhelming need for customer service jobs arises. This situation provides more job opportunities for you. If you have the ability to do services regarding this, then you can earn some smart income at your convenient timings.

It is estimated that work at home customer service agents are earning more than the representatives working in traditional call centers. By employing work at home agents, the companies also reduce erosion in customer service jobs.

They can also save money on office rent, utilities and equipment. Therefore customer service work jobs benefits both the companies and the work at home agents.

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CRM : is it Worth it for a Small Business?

As a small business, you may be bombarded with a torrent of market noise regarding the latest and greatest in customer relationship management (CRM) software. You will hear each vendor boasting about infinite features and benefits that differentiate themselves from one another. This makes it increasingly difficult to decide which CRM one is best for your business. Until now, your business might have been comfortable using a combination of Outlook and Excel to fulfill most of the basic CRM needs, and in all honestly, that would have been more than sufficient to start with. You also may be thinking of recruiting a distributed sales force to grow your saturated customer base, or even introducing new product line to augment your current offering. In the midst of looking into a crystal ball for your future, you may be apprehensive that the current systems in place will not able to cope with the influx of new customers when extrapolating growth trajectory. Like a ship entering into uncharted waters to reach a destination, you want to make sure that you have the right crew, procedures, and equipment in place to navigate the unknown of the open ocean. This article attempts to address certain questions. Do I need a CRM? What do I look for? Is it worth it for a small business?

The term CRM was originally coined from the high-end enterprise market. However, the benefits of a CRM system are palpable in industries of all sizes. The concept is simple and is defined in all marketing books. Technology tools may be new, but the underpinning idea of a CRM application has remained throughout the ages. An entrepreneur explained it to me the other day describing his business model, "Customers will buy from you through experience you provide them, make the experience as pleasurable as possible and they will keep coming back". Managing this customer experience at all touch points is the core function of a CRM system.

The fundamentals in adopting a CRM system are irrespective of company size. Before selecting any CRM vendor or even deciding if a CRM if even right for your business, have a deep look inside the company and its overall business strategy. Take an inside-out approach, do a reality check of where your business is, where you want to take it, and how you want to get there. During this analysis take into account your industry, competitors, customer segments, and economic environment when formulating a strategy. What you might discover is that your self-image is very different from how your potential customers perceive you. A thorough understanding of your corporate strategy will then dictate your marketing strategy moving forward. Here you decide on what are your marketing objectives: is it to enter new segments? Is it to change your position on the customer perceptual map? Or is it to increase repeat business? Once you have carefully considered all your strategic alternatives and decided which one to adopt, flesh out individual tactical steps, milestones, and measures on how to achieve the overall goal. The features you will require out of a CRM system will naturally fall out of this rigorous process and bubble to the surface. These are the functional features which form the basis of the selection criteria when short listing which CRM vendor to choose.

The relevance of doing this analysis is to make the CRM selection and adoption process as seamless as possible. Think of it as similar to building a house. The more precise description you provide to the architect on what you would like your house to look like, the better the end product will ultimately be. Although may not know every descriptive feature beforehand, and the fixtures could change during the process, the foundations remain the same. The quality of your input you can provide upfront will affect the end product you will receive at the end. This is the same process in adopting software. When you engage in a software vendor, you will disclose to the vendor what you know and require, and then an experienced vendor will probe through a structured discovery process for as much information below the surface. This is in the best interest of both parties to do this information gathering exercise before a solution is agreed upon.

Keep in mind that no software will ever be the single sliver bullet. There is no CRM that will make your sales reps sell more if they are the wrong people, nothing will make your support reps more proactive if there are no incentives in place to drive them, and it is impossible to eliminate customer churn if your product or processes are fundamentally flawed in the first place. All this change has to come from within and stem from your overall strategic objective. It is important to note that from experience, most CRM or software failures has little to do with the technology itself, but more the human problems. Enabling the key stakeholders and end-users to participate is the planning and selection process will help avoid this perilous fate. The more involvement the stakeholders play in defining and refining the requirements, the more efficient the selection process will be, and the more ownership your people will ultimately take of the solution. It is key to remember that a CRM, if selected for the right reasons, will provide support fabric and help facilitate the tactics to reach your overall strategic objectives.

Software should not be your only decision when choosing a vendor. Software is a commitment; you need to make sure that you find a vendor that will not only provide you the software, but one that will partner with you through your company life-cycle. Businesses are like organisms, they evolve over time. Market conditions change, industries change, and competitors come and go. For this reason you need to make sure that your software and vendor have the agility to change your processes incrementally as they evolve. If not, you will be constrained to with archaic processes that will dilute what you bring to the market.

Investing in a CRM application is a major decision for a small business. When selecting a CRM application, choose carefully as the costs to switch of the wrong decision can have serious consequences. Once you have performed a deep strategic analysis to derive your company direction, ensure you find a vendor that not only ticks all the functional boxes, but a vendor you can trust, one that goes out of their way to understand your business, and one you believe can be a long-term strategic partner. Relating it back to the ship analogy, when navigating uncharted waters, make sure you have the right crew on deck, collectively decide where you want to go, have the right procedures in place, and then identify the right equipment for your journey. The CRM should take part in the latter part of this process. Rushing this process will see your investment turn to dust, while thoughtful planning and analysis will help ensure that aligning the right CRM system to your overall strategy will be worthwhile for years to come.



Thanks to Hugh McInnes for contributing this article to our CRM blog:

Hugh McInnes is a Business Solutions Manager working for NetReturn, the sole distributor of the NetSuite CRM software range of business solutions in Australia and New Zealand.



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November 20, 2008

The Business Benefits of Customer Relationship Management CRM

Not only can customer relationship management (CRM) save your business a very considerable amount of both time and money, there are also many other benefits. One of the most important and useful benefits will be the development of better relations with all of your existing customers, which leads to increased sales.

This is possible by being able to better anticipate the specific needs of your customers, based on historic trends. Being able to effectively understand target customer requirements and the cross selling of other products by highlighting and suggestively selling alternatives or enhancements is also another major benefit you will learn with CRM.

With CRM your business will have the ability to go after their specific target market with their communications focusing on their customers’ needs, giving your company a more personal approach. Your company will also have to focus on the development of current products and services so that you will be able to get more customers in the future.

In order to keep your business at the top of its game you need customers satisfaction and retention which will help insure that your company’s great reputation in the market place will continue to be high and also grow with time. Your company will get an increased value from their existing customers while also reducing the cost that is usually needed for supporting and servicing them. This in other words will increase your efficiency while reducing the total cost of sales.

CRM allows your business to take care of its existing customers more effectively while also concentrating your efforts on finding new customers to expand your market. It is best to learn as much as you can about your specific target market so that you can better identify new prospects and increase your total customer base. No matter how successful your business is there is always going to be room for improvement and growth. Your customers’ needs will change over time so you must be on top of the trends.



Thanks to alexhamsten for contributing this article to our CRM blog:

Written by Alex Hamsten. Find the latest information on CRM Benefits.



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