Why Your Customers Want You to Have a Strategy

When it comes to your customers, “strategy” can sometimes be misconstrued as a negative or deceptive approach, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Having a strategy in place isn’t about convincing customers they need something they don’t; it’s about equipping your organization to meet customer’s real needs with the right service at the right time.

Research has shown that companies who skillfully manage and execute customer experience strategies reap enormous rewards. They achieve higher customer satisfaction, reduced churn, increased revenue, and more.

Maximizing revenue and creating a loyal customer base revolves around strong customer engagement. But you can’t just expect customer satisfaction; you have to proactively plan for it. You need a game plan in place for helping serve customers better — and they would agree.

Here’s why.

1. A Strategy Allows You to Understand Them Better

Your customers want to feel known. For community banks and credit unions, that’s often one of the major reasons they chose to open an account with you (as opposed to a larger bank) in the first place. A customer experience strategy helps you understand your customers better by unifying information across disjointed systems and containing all the most information customer data in a single place. This at-a-glance customer profile lets you get a full view of the customer’s relationship with the bank and begin to determine the next best step.

In 360 View’s CRM tool, a robust customer profile holds everything you would need to know about them. You can see a complete view of your customer that include accounts, relationships, deposits, loans, cross-sell opportunities, and more. You can also use profiles to manage financial statements, annual surveys, or any additional demographic information to enhance your knowledge base. By better understanding and documenting crucial customer information, you are able to deliver the personalized service than customers want and expect.

 

2. A Strategy Allows You To Serve Them Better

Excellent customer service doesn’t happen by accident. Having a strategy in place means that every person on your team is equipped to enhance customer experience while increasing profitability. The responsibility of frontline staff, for instance, is not just to process transactions, but to leverage the “moment of opportunity” within a customer engagement to expand the relationship through cross-selling opportunities.

With automated messages delivered through a CRM, your staff can prompt employees with customer-specific sales and service messages during any customer interaction. You can also record important customer and prospect interactions so your team can be more helpful, informed and responsive in every encounter. In doing so, you demonstrate your commitment to serving your customers, increasing their satisfaction while generating more revenue.

 

3. A Strategy Allows You To Better Anticipate and Meet Their Needs

Recent research studies show that more than 50 percent of engaged customers get mistargeted communication. This includes communication about a product or service the customer already has, or has already expressed that they have no need for. Don’t make that same misstep. Service and selling is exponentially easier when your product or service fulfills a real need for the customer in some way. 

It’s your job to gather the information that tells you what a particular customer is looking for, what benefit it will provide them, when they will need it, and then offer it to them in that moment. With a CRM-powered customer experience strategy, you are able to anticipate customers’ needs before they do through activity logs, pipeline tracking, and workflow management. By establishing a consistent process, you don’t just save time and improve efficiencies; you also ensure that customers’ real needs are being tracked, monitored, and met consistently over time.

People appreciate being surprised and delighted by above-and-beyond customer experience. That appreciation will register in the form of sustainable growth, higher referral rates, reduced customer churn, and a distinct competitive advantage.

Ultimately, having a strategy in place means that your customers don’t need to worry about what step comes next — you’re always anticipating their needs and doing the legwork for them. The less work they have to do, the more you become a trusted advisor and valuable resource for them long-term.

Need help optimizing your customer experience strategy? We can help. At 360 View, we have one mission: to provide the best customer relationship management platform for banks and credit unions in the business. Discover what sets us apart.

 

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