CRM is Free Market Research Tool

In business, if you regularly don’t ask yourself or find out where you and your products and services positioned in the marketing, your customers are soon going to shop with your competitors.  Now you can chose to hire a market research expert or send out questionnaires to a bunch of people, but I do have a suggestion that is much easier and if you are using a CRM Software that makes more less time consuming too:  Just look at responses why your customers are calling your service department.

Evaluate why your customers are worried

Generally people don’t call service department, at least till absolutely everything is working fine. Even if they call for an explanation on bill, that means the bill need to be more elaborated when presented to customer. It is something up-to their understanding is missing, that is why a customer has to call your service department to get the same understanding on his Invoice. So, with this example we see that even if there is a very small thing missing, but it impact on customer physic that he has to call your service department to understand his own invoice.

If as a provider you would be able to keep track of all these inquiries and that each enquiry is registered in a database, and classified by what caused a customer to contact the provider. Then the provider would be able to report on this and measure how many inquiries they are getting every month from people with questions related to their invoices, and see how this number has developed over the time. If the number of customer inquires related to invoice questions are too high, then the provider should try to improve the information printed on the customer invoices and measure if this helps on the number of inquiries.

Other type of inquiries the provider might be interested in could be measuring how many customers contacted them about the quality of the product they sell and quality of the service of installation of the product. These are very crucial areas of business. As a customer invested in product and installation of the product enable the customer to actually use the same.

Here, if a lot of customer are complaining about product delivery timing then provider should evaluate, what kind of product is actually getting delay in delivery. What is the specific reason and how it could be overcome.  After customer makes payment he expects timely delivery.

You need some System in Place     

A well configured customer service system should quickly let you track the inquiry, classify on what caused the customers’ problem, when it happened, which one of your products or services it was related to, how large the impact was, and how much time you spent fixing the problem and responding to the customer.

No matter what your business is, I think you probably have some kind of customer service department. Your customers will contact this department and tell you what is wrong. This information, if you listen to it, will make you a better provider. This is free market research. The information is already there, all you need to do is harvest it.

If you’re interested in more ideas on how to improve your business’ customer service levels, visit .  “How your customer service should be?”.