Keeping your Customers Happy has Turned Social

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a key component to any successful business.  Without this key relationship building experience, your online business is doomed for failure.  There are many companies out there that still don’t understand that customers have a bigger and larger voice than they ever have.  The internet has allowed anyone with an experience to voice their opinion.  Any company that does not take care of their customers will soon find out about it online and through social networks.  The key to customer relationship management is to understand that most consumers will usually not voice a good opinion about a company unless asked to do so.  We as customers expect to receive good or great service every place we go.  Only when the service is bad do customers tend to voice their opinions online.  This is where CRM can help your company fight the bad reviews and hopefully kick start the good reviews.

There are many CRM platforms out there to assist any size company with their online customer management.  One that I particularly enjoy is Get Satisfaction.  It is a Social CRM platform that is used by some of the largest companies in the world along with some of the most service centered companies.  Get Satisfaction is used by companies such as Tide, Zappos, Visa, Nike, Microsoft, and much more.  The reason why it is very popular is due to the fact that is reduces the cost of customer support as it connects to the customer in a social networking type of environment.  You can sign up your company for a free community where your customers will be able to voice their opinions or concerns.  With the free community, you cannot moderate the comments, but you can have an employee respond back to them.  This is a great way to get engaged with your customers for the first time and assist them with any problems that they may have.  I will advise that although the free community from Get Satisfaction may be tempting, it will not really give you the power to manipulate how your customers feel about you.  Get Satisfaction has other plans for that.  Below is a sample of Zappos.com’s Get Satisfaction Community.

Starting out at $19 per month, any business can create a community and have a moderator.  You will be able to have a social community just for your business and allow an employee or manager handle the interactions with customers.  For that amount of money, your company can really take charge of how your customers feel about you and your brand.  If you are able to save one customer or persuade a dissatisfied customer to give you another try, then you have paid for your month.  If you have a larger business, then they provide better plans that provide deeper interactions and the ability to have a top notch social CRM platform at the fraction of many other CRM platforms.  Here are the features of each of the plans for you to compare.

As you can see from the plans and features, Get Satisfaction provides a company of any size to manage the relationship with the customer without sacrificing cost.  If your company has never thought about CRM or even social CRM, then you need to check out Get Satisfaction and see what their service can do for you.  All of the paid plans have a Free 15 Day Trial.  You can be setup in the matter of hours and then start redirecting your customers to your community.  You will see in no time how useful this platform is and how much happier your customers will be.  Alway remember that your customers are your business and if they are not happy, then your business will suffer.  Customer Relationship Management will always be a key success factor, so don’t ever believe that just because you are online, CRM does not matter.  Your dream world will soon come crashing down!

Related Posts:

• CRM – Main Principles and Functionality