Let’s say you are working in a busy café with lots of regular customers. While they may remember you, you probably don’t always recognise them among the flurry of morning commuters.
You don’t remember the lady that requests soy milk in her coffee. When that man asks for ‘the usual’, you have no clue what he’s talking about.
It’s a fact we can all identify with; storing customer information can be challenging.
Thankfully, today’s digital tools make knowing your customers easy — particularly for ecommerce businesses.
Here, we explain the benefits of customer relationship management (CRM) systems and how they can be integrated beneficially with live chat.
Painting a picture
Coupling customer relationship management systems with live chat software has obvious advantages. Knowing your customers allows you to tailor the experience to each customer.
That is, the better the picture you have of each customer, the better service you can provide.
Syncing transcripts of live chat conversations within a user’s CRM profile, for example, gives sales representatives a more thorough understanding of the customer and their relationship with the company. In turn, they can tailor their interactions to improve sales results.
If an existing customer has responded positively to upselling via live chat in the past, they could be an ideal candidate for other sales or marketing tactics. (Such as offers through email marketing or SMS blasts.)
On the other hand, if the customer has had a negative experience with live chat — or has been unresponsive to customer service representatives — it would be better to exclude them from hard-sell marketing techniques and take a softer approach.
Analysing sentiment
This may seem like a lot of data to collect and archive about each customer, but most intelligent live chat platforms can store this information without much thought at all.
WhosOn, for example, can add live chat transcripts and call-back requests directly to a CRM system, as well as analysing chats for positive or negative sentiment.
In fact, sentiment analysis is a key game-changer in the customer relations space. With chat software that calculates the sentiment scores of conversations and streams them directly into your CRM, businesses can glean real-time insights on customer satisfaction.
Similarly, archiving historical live chat conversations can be incredibly useful. This is true both for follow up marketing and general administration.
For example, if a customer claims that they had a discount granted by another customer service agent, an archived record of evidence makes it easy for another member of the team to verify the discount.
Collaboration goes both ways
When it comes to knowing your customers, true collaboration is a two-way street.
The WhosOn CRM integration, for example, means that live chat operators can be supplied with detailed information about a client they are talking to from the CRM system without delay.
Meanwhile, whenever a live chat message is received from a customer, WhosOn cross-references the CRM. It locates all the existing user details that the live chat agent may need to have an informed conversation.
In turn, this enhances the customer experience and builds strong brand relationships.
Driving sales
However, live chat is not just about customer service — it can also be used to drive sales. Using the information extracted from live chat sessions and website activity, sales representatives can fill their sales pipeline with data-rich prospects that have already shown an interest.
WhosOn has advanced prospect detection features. As part of this, it uses reverse IP lookup to narrow down the identity of anonymous website visitors. You’ll be knowing your customers before they’re even customers.
This technology, combined with live web analytics from WhosOn, can supply sales representatives with detailed user data — meaning that leads are never allowed to go cold.
Data-driven success
We’ve heard a lot about big data in recent years. The collection of customer data and live chat insight is a primary example of how data can usefully change business operations.
To some extent, the true value of big data could be compared to that of crude oil. While it may be hugely valuable, it is useless when unrefined. Similarly, if your customer data is left to gather dust, it isn’t going to benefit the business.
There is no denying that the collection and intelligent use of this data is the key to knowing your customers better.
Knowing your customers
When you are running all or part of your business online, getting to know your customers is imperative. Thankfully, today’s integrated technology makes this easy.
Although, if you’re working the coffee shop morning rush, you might just have to fess up and admit to that customer that you can’t remember what his regular is.
(At least until we figure out how to integrate a CRM system with the human brain.)