Five ways an SME can build customer loyalty through effective communication

Is customer relationship management (CRM) a fad or real deal? Is there such a thing as a relationship with a customer or it is just a fling between a salesperson and a customer?

More intriguing is the transient relationship a customer has with a company, based on cost savings or convenience. Is it all about opportunism–opportunistic on the enterprise side to increase business and profits and opportunistic on the customer side to make the most of a promo or knocked down prices?

We all know the importance of retaining customers over acquiring a new one, whether it is cost, effort, or time issue. Management gurus have written best-selling books on this topic. Tech companies are pushing out whitepapers and demos to proclaim that by buying their CRM software you will have your relationship issues sorted.

One of the key elements of a company's success is never losing sight of the customer, which means having a customer-satisfaction agenda in place.

In this rapidly changing and highly competitive economy, customer-centric companies interact with customers constantly to keep up with customer requirements and marketplace changes. A company that lacks real-time or effective communication on customer satisfaction can lose insights and customer loyalty.

While communicating customer satisfaction information within the organisation, it is important to understand the needs of employees and the corporate culture.

Here are five ways to effectively disseminate customer satisfaction data within the organisation. Their success relies heavily on how they have implemented and the level of employee participation.

For real-time communication on customer satisfaction information and feedback, some companies have developed in-house apps that link all the customer touch points.

When a customer provides feedback or answers a customer satisfaction survey via e-mail, phone or live chat, the data is documented or tabulated and automatically routed to the people concerned. Many companies leverage CRM technologies to get the same results.

The feedback improves a company's ability to monitor the satisfaction level of each customer, take immediate corrective action, help retain customers, develop long-term relationships, and increase competitive advantage.

Some customer-centric companies that lack rich IT resources have built a customer satisfaction website –Customer Satisfaction Dashboard or something similar–on the intranet and linked it to one of their highly trafficked internal pages.

The page displays the latest customer satisfaction information in a concise format for easy reference. It also has information on customers' top issues, the source of their greatest dissatisfaction, their opinion of competitors' products and services, the trends in customer satisfaction, industry customer satisfaction benchmark data, customer loyalty index and other data.

It allows information to be accessed by all departments and employees in remote locations and also paints a complete picture of customers' wants and needs.

Some customer-centric companies have created e-mail aliases such as "customer satisfaction," "customer listening" or something similar for employees. Others have built online message boards that focus on resolving customer issues and ways to improve customer satisfaction.

These steps improve information-sharing across organisation, maximise leverage for solving tough customer satisfaction issues, saves data collection costs and increase focus on customers.

Another effective way to disseminate customer satisfaction information is to stage roadshow presentations for each department or business unit. The benefits are the ability to provide customised information for each business unit, increased opportunities for face-to-face dialogues and reinforcing the customer-focus message.

To increase the visibility of the customer satisfaction data, some firms use all-employee meetings to discuss critical customer satisfaction data with the entire organisation.

The benefits are the ability to relay key customer satisfaction information to a large number of employees at once, to help ensure everyone is working toward the same goal and an opportunity to clear the confusion.

By using a mix of media—telephone, email, video, town halls, etc—effective communication can be easily achieved. The advice is simple: communicate, communicate, communicate.