Businesses need to build and expand on healthy relationships for success. Whether it be relations with a client, supplier, or its own workforce, a firm positions itself for economic well-being with solid interpersonal engagements. While crafting such relationships, we can leverage information to further help guide how to manage them. What follows is a discussion on useful data to capture and incorporate in customer relationship management.
Historical relationship data represents important information to store for later use in the future management of those relationships. With details and occurrences of past relationships appropriately logged in a CRM, managers can reference past situations encountered with the customer in order to guide strategy or execution in the present. This information further enables relationship details and their outcomes to be projected onto engagements with new clients through a comparative analysis. Leveraging this data allows companies to inform their decisions with an understanding of how they previously engaged with certain clients, with the goal of recreating past successes as well as venturing into new territory with some information backing them up. It also serves as great training material for new relationship managers.
Within the bucket of historical relationship data, firms may capture several types of information. Correspondence data, consisting of the timings of and mediums through which they engaged with clients and potential clients, may be of use. With this information captured and displayed in handy format in CRM software, different members and teams can stay on the same page regarding contact with external parties. This is especially helpful in large organizations. Knowing the scheduling of engagements, members of sales teams will be able to seamlessly coordinate strategic timing of when to contact certain companies or individuals. Seeing when and with whom sales engaged, also provides account management a backdrop from which to base their actions once they take over. Keeping track of the timing and method of communication also helps bring new team members up to speed on the relationship with the client.
More nuanced depictions of correspondence prove useful for firms as well. Logging call agendas, as well as the discourse of the conversations, provides valuable information. This data allows account managers to easily express their interactions with a client in order to cross-functionally coordinate with sister teams that may need to stay in the loop for deliverables. These teams might be in the process of conducting research, producing decks, or developing a product for the client on behalf of the account manager. These stakeholders benefit from details logged from client interactions relating to the needs, expectations, desires, and timings of deliverables. Even if these teams sit in on calls, referenceable records and the actionable nuance they provide, may come into use.
Furthermore, logging call agendas and their actual discourse in tandem can create data on items that may still need addressing in the relationship. Discrepancies between agendas and discourse keep a record of items that were not addressed for any number of reasons. There are only so many things that can be fit into given correspondence, and the items that fall by the wayside could still be important. Logging these items as well as the greater discourse occurring on calls or through other communications, enables members of teams to not only see what was addressed and what wasn’t, but also how they were brought up and any resulting discussion. The software housing this data may also provide a chance to comment and inquire on certain aspects of customer engagements, in order to bring up considerations regarding the customers thoughts, mindset, concerns, or desires, and how to best service them.
With call agendas, call discourse, and other correspondence specifics organized in a CRM, a firm gains the ability to reference and analyze past engagements with clients. This data helps to visualize relationship timelines as well as how they may have progressed and evolved. It is valuable for relationship managers to see when and how others may have brought up considerations to clients in strategizing how to navigate their own relationship. Cutting this data into client or relationship-level features can further help stakeholders filter it to the specifics of their current engagements.
When recorded and structured in software systems, specific information pertaining to the relationship and customer can then be annotated and discussed in dedicated manners. Discourse and planning may occur in a natural yet organized fashion over time, via interfaces strategically designed for the task. living breathing documents that have considerations flowing through their collaborative canvas as teams engineer actions and develop processes.
Lastly, intelligently tagging instances of conditions in correspondence with customers provides a business the chance to find possible statistical associations between prior events in the relationship. This process involves tagging certain features, like when risks were taken or when the firm pushed against the client (and how), into categorical labels that create variables. With scenarios and periodic customer outcomes structured into data variables, firms can search, further classify, visualize, and analyze features of relationships. Past cases can be referenced and their variation used to conduct hypothesis testing or statistical modeling. With such techniques, it is possible to quantify estimated connections between actions and features of relationships that may help to inform future decisions regarding similar situations and strategy sets.
By capturing the types of data mentioned herein, and then organizing and structuring it in business systems, you can leverage it to continue to build and augment strong relationships.
Brian Thomas, Enlightened Digital