Customer Relationship Management, Considerations for Your New Customer

By Pat Campbell

Each business owner brings to the table their own style and experience in managing their business and customer relationships. This discussion is solely for a springboard of thought for those who are brand new to managing their Home Based Business and are looking for some guidelines.

Action Steps for Customer Relationship Management

The following are a sample of action steps as simply a guideline for managing your relationships with your customers once they have joined your team.

1. Customer Relationships with Regular Communication

Regular communication is the first priority in building your customer relationship management action plan. Remember how you provided value and stayed connected with this individual over time until they made a decision? You had appropriate regular communication with them.  Relationship marketing brought your customer to you and relationship building keeps them in your business.

Communication does not end with the sale or partnership. This is the time to establish a stronger rapport. This is the time to nurture customer loyalty and provide business training for the new partner. You are the person these people turn to for guidance in using the product well and/or growing their business.

Make a commitment to yourself that each of your new team members will know that you have an open line of communication with them. Be sure to make it clear how they can reach you and when.

2. Managing Customer Relationship with Scheduled Communication

Scheduling your communication in your daily action steps will in time make this part of your business run smoothly, you will have fun with it while keeping yourself “in front” of your customer or business partner. Certainly, you are not talking with every team member every day, but on a regularly scheduled basis.

In some way, on no less than a monthly basis, your customer will appreciate hearing from you. Your phone call will especially be helpful to ensure their product needs are met. At the end of the month, ask yourself, " Did I go the extra mile to keep my customers happy and loyal?" If not, think about how to change that for the next month.  Your business partners will require closer contact for purposes of training.

In Romancing the Sale, Barbara Silva has a suggested schedule of communication for one of her businesses.

(a) Each new customer receives an immediate welcome/thank you letter from the autoresponder service you use. Include your contact information for their convenience.

(b)Within the first week of your new team member being on board, Email a value based newsletter teaching your customer about product use, your company, inside information on services they have access to.

(c)Be sure that in the first month your customers are reminded that they may contact you for any question. Appointments for conversation can be nicely managed with free Genbook software.

You can invite you customers/business partners to join you on your social networking site. This enables them to view current updates on your status. They can contact you directly and you can make them aware quickly of events they can attend with you.

(d)Plan to call your customer base on a regular basis. The purpose of the call is simply a reconnect for updates on customer satisfaction; customer service needs that change that you can address.

3. Training Your Leaders in Customer Relationship Management

As your team numbers grow beyond personal telephone contact, have a plan to train your business partners to assist with this kind of customer relationship management. Your daily action steps model for your business partners how you conduct business. Early in your working relationship with partners, delegate some of the team contact support tasks to them. Mentoring in this systematic way will ensure that your customer base will continually receive personal contact and support no matter how large your business grows.

There are many variations to how this can be done to fit your business, your personality. Have fun with the process and network with others on what works and does not work for you.

If this is all new for you, have a look at Renegade University. This is a free internet training site with click by click, 24/7 to learn at your own pace.

Pat Campbell is a Renegade Professional and Super Guide. She has learned Attraction Marketing with Mike Klingler since 2002. Online Attraction Marketing has been a breath of fresh air after years of cold calling, return calling with poor results. Pat is an RN and knows the effort it takes to juggle your passion around fulltime day job commitments and life. It is exhilarating to develop strength and skill set within you that is brand new with Attraction Marketing.