Are competitors stealing your customers? 3 tech trends to retain customer loyalty

How long do you keep customers waiting on the phone? Do support queries build up? Do your sales team take days to follow up on web enquiries? How many customers have you lost in the past year or two?

UK companies are losing a staggering £11 billion a year due to poor customer experience. This includes feeling unappreciated, unhelpful staff, being passed around to multiple people and being fed up of queuing. To make matters worse, dissatisfied consumers are more likely to complain and leave bad online reviews or tweets, which can further damage your brand. Bad news travels fast – can you afford to get it wrong?

Applying technology to boost customer loyalty

There’s no magic dust which you can sprinkle on your customers to make it all better, therefore many successful businesses are turning to technology to retain customer loyalty, improve experiences and increase competitive advantage…

Data: the key to customer loyalty

“Go with your gut,” is a cliché piece of advice that shouldn’t be one of the decision making tools. Unfortunately, 42% of SME decision makers still make gut-based decisions – is it rational to rely on intuition when your business grows?

Power BI for example, gives you a simple, fun, visual and creative way to view your data insights, enabling you to monitor performance, identify trends and opportunities as well as anticipate needs. Use it to review service delivery performance and identify areas for improvement. Dive deep and analyse product performance and customer history to find upsell or cross-sell opportunities.

More from our blog: Power BI For CRM: Reporting Nirvana Or Just The Media Noise? Read here >

Proactive customer service is the new black

The truth is, you can’t afford to neglect your customers, even after the purchase is complete. According to research, a small business will lose 10% of its influence for each month that customer doesn’t hear from the business.

With solutions like Dynamics 365 for Sales, you can schedule reminder activities that prompt you to proactively follow up with customers. You can also make sure clients aren’t neglected by applying an automated process to alert you if no recent activity is detected on an account.

Top Tip: Integrated marketing capabilities will allow you to keep customers informed via newsletters and product updates, with full visibility in both your CRM and email marketing platform!

More from our blog: 4 Reasons TO Love Dynamics 365 for Sales. Read here >

First-call resolution for greater customer satisfaction

Do you get frustrated when a customer service advisor takes an age to find your records? What about when they haven’t got any prior information and you have to repeat yourself? The more you can ease the amount of time and effort customers have to exert to get a problem solved, the more satisfied they’ll be.

Microsoft customer service tools will enable you to optimise staffing levels and allocate resources based on trending issues and use case data including how the case originated, priority, and hints with potential knowledge base articles to solve the problem effectively, aiming towards improving first call resolution rates.

More from our blog: The Path to Customer Retention. Read here >