This article was included in the May 17th, 2016 issue of the LACRM Newsletter.
Building strong relationships is the keystone to every successful small business. Customers come to you because they love what you offer, but they stay because of their relationship with you. By genuinely caring for the satisfaction of your customers (and potential customers!) you are telling them not only do you value their business, but you also value their happiness. In this age of technical transactions and automated interactions, it’s refreshing to work with real people and build lasting relationships from there -- something a small business can more easily accomplish than a corporate giant. Sarah Bergman, a travel agent at Magical Miles Travel, works hard to ensure that she has a good relationship with all her clients, even if they are hard to work with, because she has seen the incredible result this can have:
“In this business, it really, truly is about building relationships, because it pays you back to take care of your customers. Once, I worked with a lady on a really small trip with an incredibly low commission, but I did my best to make her happy and answered every single one of her billion questions. She was very high maintenance, but I wanted to make sure she had a fantastic trip.
About two months or so after the booking, I got an email from a friend of hers who said that she was recommended to us by this lady. This trip that her friend came in with ended up being a huge booking that needed hardly any work at all!”
-Sarah Bergman, Travel Agent at Magical Miles Travel/Foerster Travel Inc.
How can a CRM help?
CRMs let you keep track of every interaction you have with a contact, be it a phone call, a meeting or an email. Being able to pull up the content of all the conversations you’ve had with a potential customer allows you to anticipate their needs, add a personal touch to every call, and nurture this relationship into one that is more than just a transaction. After all, as Sarah saw, going the extra mile to take care of your customers ends up taking care of you too!
Tip to try: Referrals are the simplest way to market your business, so keep track of your referrals in the CRM by making use of the relationship feature. This way, you can see every referral made by a single person at a glance, and if you notice that someone has referred a number of customers, why not send them a small gift or a thank you note? Click here to read a tutorial on how you can use the relationship feature to track referrals and other relationships.
We hope this helps give you some ideas on how you can use the CRM to strengthen your customer relationships, and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us!
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