24 Nov 2021
Managing customer expectations is the solid foundation of business success. In fact, a company may not be the best on the market but they can still attract and maintain a great number of customers for the long term by providing stunning customer services. Of course, it is not as easy as it sounds. So, companies can consider these proven principles for effective customer service management to increase the chance of success.
Follow Standard Expectations
Every industry has some standard expectations that all companies should adhere to. These baseline expectations are often decided by industry-standard, laws, or regulations. For instance, e-commerce businesses must ensure payment security for clients and have a minimum stable speed for their e-commerce websites. According to research by Think with Google, if the page load time takes 3 more seconds, the probability of bounce will increase by 74%.
Define Objectives
Identifying common objectives with clients before the project begins is also a useful principle to manage customer expectations. Setting defined goals means that your business already has a consistent vision and target for your client segments. This allows your team to understand clearly what missions they will take on and get more productive. During the goal-setting process, you can consider S.M.A.R.T guidelines. It helps you ensure that your goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely.
Besides, it is important to discuss with potential clients before setting objectives. This allows clients to see eye to eye with companies, comprehend and respect each other’s objectives. Especially, it makes clear sense that both parties need to avoid violation and maintain a healthy contract life during cooperation.
Invest In Communication
Communication strategy also plays a key role in managing customer expectations. For effective communication, the trick is that you must know how and when to interact with your customers.
Your company can identify your targeted client profile by consolidating all specific characteristics of your ideal clients, such as geographics, demographics, preferences, etc. Accordingly, you can gain a better understanding of its main concerns and aspirations. This allows for a more personalized and effective encounter.
Make sure that your clients will be informed about not only what is going on but also any concerns or problems before they become more serious. Obviously, you always want to know if your clients are happy or not with how things are going as soon as possible. This enables your team to manage their expectations and solve the problem.
Set a time to speak with your client. Communicating with clients on a regular basis helps companies build trust with them. Moreover, you can also detect issues as soon as it emerges and resolve them immediately.
Provide Customer Support Consistently
There must be a consistency of service, no matter what product/service you provide. To retain customers, you can’t give the best service to the initial few consumers and then ignore them after they become regular customers. In fact, maintaining current customer relationships can be more important than attracting new ones. Therefore, regardless of how frequently or infrequently a consumer visits your website or purchases from you, you must continually engage, follow-up, assist, and contact them.
Moreover, for various reasons, different clients prefer to use different channels such as email, chatbox, social media messages, etc. Make sure that no matter how they communicate, you still have all relevant information from previous conversations at your fingertips.
The Customer Relationship Management module in Synergix ERP system enables to centralise all customer data in one place, and all employees in charge have the right to access it. It makes sure that you can keep up to date with the latest information in case there is any change.
Be Transparent And Honest
Transparency is more than just a bedrock of effective communication. Ensure that you can keep your clients up to date with the status of the project. You should always inform them about what has already been accomplished and also the next steps. Instead of waiting for your customers to be disappointed when plans change, let them know right away. This can be an effective way to manage client expectations without taking too much effort.
Moreover, be honest with clients when you interact with them. It is important to make it clear from the beginning what your products/services can help. Do not build up expectations that you can not meet as no matter what it is, it can break trust.
Rely On Real-Time Data
It is obvious that counting on data is an excellent way to streamline the entire project. Always keep track and analyze all the data you have as it reflects the productivity of your strategies. Moreover, official reports can be generated from all real-time data and be utilized to keep customers up to date with important information. Therefore, clients can have a bird’s eye view of the situation of their project.
Analyzing data and creating reports can be a complicated and time-consuming process. However, advanced technologies can help. Being one of the main modules of the ERP system, Business Analytics can help analyze your projects to gain better insight into their performance. It also provides tools to create accurate reports easily at any time of the month.
Summary
In conclusion, 6 techniques mentioned above are suggested to assist companies in managing customer expectations. This is a long journey, so there’s no harm in not being able to provide these consistent services right once. Moreover, in this technical era, you can opt for advanced technologies, such as ERP software, to simplify your customer expectations management process. Being one of the leading ERP vendors in Singapore, our fully-integrated and customisable ERP software will be a useful assistant for your company.
Grants
To accompany Singapore companies in their digitalisation journey, the Government has released Productivity Solution Grant (PSG) and Enterprise Development Grant (EDG). These grants offer the maximum funding of up to 80% of the qualifying costs for eligible companies. This maximum support is going to expire in March 2022, so this is the best time to adopt an ERP system for your company.
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