7 best practices for monitoring your customers

Customer care is essential to the successful development of your business. Take inspiration from tried and tested customer relationship management practices to put in place high-quality support and an optimal customer file.

Customer satisfaction is vital: a 5% increase in the loyalty rate can boost profits by 25-95% (source: Marketing Management).

OK, but how can you spare your sales staff time-consuming and complicated sales management? Take a look at our 7 tips for looking after and managing your customer relations in this article. And as a bonus, we've shared some examples of the software that's best suited to each tip!

See all software Customer relationship management

Customer follow-up: definition and challenges

Customer care, or sales care, refers to the relationship established with your customers. It involves being :

• listening to their expectations
• attentive to their reactions
• responsive to their requests.

Your customers send out a number of signals:

• buying behaviour
• choice of products
• habits,
• preferences, etc.

These are all sources of information that need to be deciphered, cross-referenced in tables and analysed.

Knowing your customers better will enable you to satisfy them more effectively. The aim is to win their loyalty so that they use your services again, think of you for a new purchase or recommend you to their friends and family.

This requires a high degree of personalisation.

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7 tips for successful customer follow-up

1 - Collect customer data scrupulously

A complete customer file, as well as the history of all interactions, all requests, invoices and quotations, are all elements for monitoring the customer lifecycle.

What purchases were made, when, was there a need for after-sales service, were there any complaints?

🔎 E xamples of customer tracking software:

• Kizeo Forms allows all parties involved in customer follow-up, particularly teams in the field, but also sedentary teams, to record all this data thanks to a mobile application, linked to a back office to configure and standardise reports.
  
  
• Maintaining contact with potential customers means remembering previous interactions. Here again, the software is a memory aid. With EFFICY CRM, for example, the history is kept and associated with each contact record.
  
  
• Why not go even further by adopting a complete view of commercial interactions? That's what Olyn Soft, a CRM made in France, offers. Centralise customer data from all your tools via an API and use it in a single interface for optimum customer follow-up.

2 - Optimise your customer knowledge

To get to know your new customers, start by trying to understand them. To do this, you need to set the context.

To this end, the discovery plan enables you to list all the relevant information about a prospect or customer and answer the following questions:

• What is their need?
• What are their expectations?
• What motivates them?
• What are their issues?
• Their current situation?

🔎 E xamples of customer tracking software:

• Monday CRM seamlessly integrates your email inbox into the tool. Result: you no longer waste time looking for information about your customers in the messages you receive. And you won't lose any crucial data either.
  
  
• Nelis, for its part, promises to centralise and automatically segment your contact database using intelligent filters and personalised criteria (opportunities, emailing history, prospecting actions, etc.). Improve your customer knowledge by simply accessing all their information, so you can develop more effective targeted campaigns.
  
  
• As for Teamleader, it uses the lead scoring technique to establish a qualified follow-up of customers and prospects. The CRM tool triggers a watch on the basis of business signals defined by yourself, and alerts you to any changes: a simple and effective way of keeping abreast of what's going on with your customers.

3 - Personalise your approach

The art of sales management is getting it right: making the right offer to the right person in the right place at the right time. It's a tough job... It's all about studying the customer journey to increase customer knowledge and optimise the customer experience.

Satisfaction surveys, loyalty programmes and personalised offers are all customer monitoring techniques that need to be taken into account.

🔎 E xamples of customer tracking software:

• Zendesk allows you to personalise your customer relations, thanks in particular to the automatic routing of each ticket to the member of staff most competent to resolve it and the tailored display of the workspace according to the type of ticket, with the tools most useful for resolving it highlighted.
  
  
• To personalise your customer relations, start by customising your CRM tool so that it looks just like you. EasyFact offers you a tool that allows you to monitor the behaviour and profiles of your customers so that you can get to know them better, while at the same time modulating it so that it matches your image and your usage requirements.

4 - Look after your customer relations

Listening to your customers also means giving them ways of communicating with you. If they need to, how can they contact your sales force? If they have a problem, how can they find a solution?

This availability, however strategic it may be, can take the form of a support service of various kinds:

• a tickets interface
• a web portal
• a hotline
• an after-sales service number, preferably free of charge
• or even a chatbot.

In addition, customers must also be able to access their documents easily.

🔎 E xample of customer tracking software:

With Axonaut, they have a dedicated space to view their invoices and quotes, receive notifications. The company can then track interesting stats, such as document opening and response rates, to adapt scoring and decision-making.

And if accessibility counts, so does responsiveness. How quickly will your customers get a response? If the response time depends solely on your technical support, it is likely to vary according to the volume of telephone enquiries.

Hence the importance of FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) and forums. The community of users then becomes a strength. And an answer given once to one person can be used by all those encountering the same problem later on.

5 - Build on omnichannel customer relations

These days, customers come into contact with you via a multitude of communication channels, and vice versa:

• telephone
• social networks
• email
• mobile application,
• chatbot.

It is therefore essential to centralise and contextualise omnichannel exchanges so that your staff have access to all customer data and can respond to them quickly, easily and in a personalised way.

🔎E xample of customer tracking software :

• easiware is an all-in-one omnichannel platform that centralises contact channels and efficiently handles incoming requests from a single interface, without leaving the tool. It focuses on personalising customer relations thanks to a 360° customer file that includes all data, from history to loyalty programmes.
  

6 - Set up follow-up actions

For good customer follow-up, stamina is essential. It's not a question of dealing with them "once and for all". The challenge is to keep coming back to them so as to maintain timely and lasting contact and maximise customer loyalty.

Given the size of your database, this is a difficult task. Unless you use management software to keep on top of everything.

What's more, to relieve your sales team of the burden of prospecting, a CRM with notification management and automatic report settings is invaluable.

🔎 E xamples of customer tracking software:

• Salesforce Sales Cloud benefits from a very broad application ecosystem, including marketing automation features, to automate marketing actions, such as sending welcome and follow-up emails, without losing sight of the complexity of customers.
  
  
• noCRM.io (formerly You Dont' Need A CRM) is a tool that synchronises with salespeople's diaries, and the pipeline view lets you manage opportunities and access their history.
  
  
• With Initiative CRM, for example, you can visualise your sales activity using dashboards, graphs and dynamic cross-referenced reports. You can track your favourite key performance indicators, such as best sales, new customer rate, sales growth, etc.

7 - Invest in customer tracking software

As you will have gathered from all our examples, software dedicated to customer relations allows you to :

• collect and store all the commercial information about the customer and the company's business ;
• facilitate internal communication and collaboration thanks to the centralisation of customer data, for all departments directly or indirectly involved:
  • sales
  • marketing
  • communication,
  • billing,
  • support,
  • quality ;
• Smoother sales processes through access to standardised, accessible documentation;
• dashboards with a global view of activity, for improved sales reporting;
• automation of repetitive tasks (reminders) and key notifications (anniversaries, purchases, sponsorships).

The additional advantages of software in SaaS mode, like all those presented in this article, are :

• constant updating of functionalities, in line with standards such as RGPD,
• interoperability with other software, such as marketing or accounting software, enabling multi-channel monitoring, so you never lose any important information about the customer journey,
• mobile working,
• real-time synchronisation.

Example of a customer tracking table

Is your customer care really effective? Measure it!

To measure the effectiveness of your customer care, select the right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Here are the most relevant:

• Customer satisfaction rate (CSAT): Via satisfaction surveys or independent review sites, this measures the proportion of customers satisfied with your services and products. A good CSAT is above 70%. An excellent CSAT is above 80%.

• Time to first response (TFR): This measures the average time between a customer's direct request and the response from the helpdesk. It applies to all channels (forms, social networks, etc). The response time varies from sector to sector, but is generally less than 1 hour.

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): Using a scale of -100 to +100, this assesses the likelihood of a customer recommending your product or service. This indicator is obtained by subtracting the percentage of dissatisfied customers from the percentage of satisfied customers. An NPS above 50 is considered excellent.

Other relevant KPIs:

• First Interaction Resolution Rate (FIRR): This shows the proportion of problems resolved during a first interaction.

• Retention rate (loyalty): The percentage of customers who remain loyal to your services over the long term.

• Turnover per customer: The revenue generated by each customer over a given period (generally one year).

Can artificial intelligence help your team to follow up customers?

Artificial intelligence is making inroads at every level of the business, and customer service is no exception. More and more support software incorporates AI assistants to answer users' most frequently asked questions.

These chatbots are available 24 hours a day, increasing customer satisfaction. If necessary, they forward the request to a human expert.

But the benefits of AI don't stop there. This technology also makes it possible to :

• Predict behaviour by analysing customer history.

• Personalise the user experience and offers in real time.

• Assist decision-making by prioritising the actions to be taken.

See all software Customer relationship management

Customer relationship monitoring: it's up to you!

🔎 Customer follow-up is essential if you are to create prosperous, lasting customer relationships, and this starts as early as the sales prospecting stage. You need to give yourself the resources, both material and operational, to deploy a system that is both qualified and reliable. Are you with us?