As in the name, business operations software helps businesses to better carry out their operations by providing them with the necessary tools, resources, and automation for increased productivity. In short, business operations software is a form of operational software that’s here to help make your business better.
For businesses in ecommerce, it’s valuable to consider how improving your business’s operations with software can help you to better serve your customers. According to the Harvard Business Review, it’s 5 to 25 times more expensive to acquire new customers than to keep existing ones. In this way, maintaining customer satisfaction is critical to building brand loyalty, keeping your customers coming back for more, and boosting your revenue.
If you are considering adopting business operations software, or if you’re simply looking for ways to reap all of its benefits, here are 5 tips for how you can use that software to improve customer satisfaction.
1. Keep better track of your communication with your customers.
A significant source of frustration for customers is the inability to get a hold of anyone at the company that they have purchased a product or service from. Without the appropriate tools and processes in place, it can be easy for employees to forget to return a phone call or for another customer’s email to slip through the cracks.
Unfortunately, instances of poor communication can lead to lost customers and, thereby, loss in revenue. According to an American Express survey, 33% of American consumers claim they will switch companies after just one instance of poor customer service.
Instead, build customer loyalty by providing a better customer experience via a robust customer relationship management (CRM) application. Not only will your customers be happy that they heard back from your sales representatives in a timely manner, but Nucleas Research notes that CRMs pay companies back an average of $8.71 for every dollar spent.
2. Provide automated customer support to answer FAQs.
When a customer reaches out, it’s often because they have a question. More often than not, the majority of those customers are also asking those frequently asked questions you often receive. However, if you have a small staff or receive a high volume of messages, you could easily miss one of these questions.
Rather than hiring another employee, you may want to take advantage of business process automation software that can automate some of these customer interactions. In many instances, these automation tools can be integrated into your CRM, so you can still manage these communications in one place.
For example, you can integrate Facebook’s Messenger Bot with your CRM. That way, you can set up the messenger bot to autoreply to certain questions. As an added bonus, you can retarget customers with personalized messages that have a 60 to 100% open rate, according to AdLeaks.
3. Use management tools to offer on-time product delivery.
Even if a customer is entirely satisfied with the product or service they receive, receiving the wrong product by accident first or receiving it late may negatively impact their perception of your organization.
In fact, 2 out of 3 consumers choose their retailer based on the delivery options available, notes Accenture. This implies that failed delivery expectations could negatively impact a customer’s impression of your organization. However, this issue can be easily resolved with the help of software.
If your organization is in retail and ships customers products, you can improve your delivery time with an inventory management system. In contrast, if your organization offers services, you can improve your employees’ effectiveness and project completion time with the help of project or workflow management software.
In the end, your customer will be happy to receive what they ordered in a timely manner.
4. Make providing refunds a fast and easy process.
Oftentimes, when a customer is unhappy with the product or service you provided them, there’s no going back. However, maintaining a positive customer experience even during the return process is valuable, as an unhappy customer often leaves a greater impact than a happy one.
Think about it: People like to complain, and they complain to their friends, family, coworkers, and more. In line with this, the aforementioned American Express also found that American consumers tell an average of 15 people about a bad service experience, while they only tell 11 about a positive one.
Rather than receiving a bad review from an unhappy customer, consider streamlining your refund process with the help of software. For instance, you can use your CRM to manage requests for a refund, pair that with an inventory management system that tracks all purchases, and you can quickly and easily provide the refund your customer requested.
5. Offer an improved customer experience via better analysis.
Another instance where customers can become frustrated, particularly in retail ecommerce, is when the products they order run out of stock. Conversely, many businesses don’t want to order a surplus of a particular item unless they feel relatively confident the item will sell.
One potential way to address this issue is by developing the appropriate reports and sales forecasts, which allow you to predict what items will sell during a given season, how many you’ll need in your inventory, and more. That being said, the data you produce is often only as accurate as the employees or software generating them.
Generally speaking, the average human error rate is around 25%, making it the leading cause of business data loss, according to Steadfast. Instead, integrate software into your existing CRM, for example, that automates the development of these reports. That way, you can tell fewer customers that you ran out of their favorite product, resulting in higher customer satisfaction.
Looking to Go Custom?
Many businesses can benefit from using off-the-shelf software, but there are also many that could use something more: custom business operations software.
And that’s where we can help. If you would like to supplement your existing software with custom software or build entirely custom software altogether, ClikFocus can build it.
