Customer Management in your Online Shop

Goal-oriented customer management is the foundation of your success. All measures defined in customer management are aimed at improving customer orientation, thus increasing customer satisfaction, strengthening customer loyalty and ultimately increasing customer value.

In the process, all four major “C’s” of customer management mesh like cogwheels. Customer management thus encompasses all entrepreneurial efforts to ensure that you convert prospects and new customers into happy and satisfied regular customers. The following article explains why customer management is so important, what the 4C model is all about, and what options you have when it comes to customer management.

Why do customer management?

Your customers are the key success factor in your business. Without customers, you would not be able to sell your products or services. This would simply mean you would have no sales and consequently no successful business. Without a doubt, winning new customers is an important part of any marketing strategy. On the other hand, it is important to keep your existing customers as long as possible with a well thought-out customer management, so that the customer value increases. Always keep in mind that your existing customers are by no means to be taken for granted and that you should actively manage every customer relationship.

Proactive customer management helps you to do this and focus your company’s activities on the needs of your customers and manifest them in customer-oriented thinking, followed by appropriate measures. This is based on in-depth analyses of your target group so that you know what your customers want from you. With a fundamentally high service mentality, you manage your customers in a targeted and continuously optimized way with the help of strategic customer management.

This has several advantages at once, because regular customers are significantly more favorable, more profitable, buy more often and more, are less price-sensitive, are happy to recommend you to others, and generate the largest share of sales.

You can pursue different goals with customer management:

– Increase customer loyalty
– Maintaining customer relationships
– Optimizing service quality
– Holistic customer orientation
– Creation of higher customer value

4C model of customer management

The so-called 4C model of customer management shows the four most important points to consider. The model illustrates how the individual qualities of efficient customer management build on each other:

With a high customer orientation, you increase customer satisfaction. With a high level of customer satisfaction, you extend and strengthen customer loyalty. If your customers feel comfortable with you, customer value increases, which ultimately leads to increased sales.

Let’s take a closer look at the individual points of the theory of customer management.

1. Customer orientation

Customer orientation in customer management means the orientation of your activities regarding the wishes, demands and requirements on your customers. Central questions here are:

• What does the customer want?
• What solutions is the customer looking for?
• How can we offer him this solution?

Through analyses and the recording of customer wishes and expectations of your target group, you can derive appropriate measures in customer management in order to offer products, services and services tailored to your customers. Your entire company is geared to your customers.

2. Customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction in customer management means the intersection between the expectation a customer has of a product or service and the fulfillment of this with the application of the product or the service provision. The better the expectation is met, the higher the customer satisfaction.

The systematic recording of customer satisfaction (for example, via surveys, evaluations or complaints) serves continuous quality management and, in customer management, is the basis for optimizing the corresponding measures, services, benefits and products.

3. Customer loyalty

Customer loyalty is one of the most important goals in customer management. The longer a customer remains loyal to you, the more often he or she will make purchases from you, leading to significantly less effort in your customer service, generating more sales per shopping cart and recommending you to others. When it comes to customer management, the key is to turn new customers into regular customers and to proactively retain these regular customers. This is the only way to prevent your customers from moving to your competitors and to strengthen your market position in the long term.

But how do you build a strong customer relationship with smart customer management?

Many small positive steps lead to success. Pay attention to your customers right from the start. Let them know that you care about them. Use smart tools like the exit intent popups from uptain. These popups are controlled by the uptain® ALGORITHM and address your customers at the best moment with the right incentives. Voucher popups support a sales decision and can increase the shopping cart value, while service popups help the customer to overcome barriers. With the right message at the right moment, you increase customer satisfaction. Without any extra effort and completely automated.

4. Customer value

Customer value in customer management defines the value of a customer for the company based on measurable key figures. This makes customer value in customer management a central variable that you can control. The determination of a customer’s value can be regularly measured and analyzed using Customer Lifetime Value, ABC Customer Analysis or Customer Contribution Margin Analysis, among others.

Learn how to use, measure, and increase customer lifetime value.

Customer management success factors for companies

There are different approaches to customer management that you can use to improve your customer orientation and increase customer loyalty. Customer relationship management (CRM) and customer experience management (CEM) are the primary tools that support you in customer management.

These tools are used to collect and manage relevant customer data, help you communicate, and optimize marketing for customer management. But technological innovations such as chat boots are also becoming increasingly important.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Customer Relationship Management, or CRM for short, is the most widely used technology that makes a significant contribution to customer relations and organization, both of new and existing customers.

With a CRM system, you manage all customer contacts, use them to build and strengthen relationships, and can more easily engage in active customer relationship management. The important thing is to find a CRM tool that fits into your company structure.

Customer Experience Management (CEM)

While CRM in customer management deals with organizing and managing customer interactions, customer experience management (CEM) is about using relevant data to derive targeted measures that increase customer satisfaction and ensure strong customer loyalty.

To do this, CEM software collects important data from customers about their satisfaction during the customer journey and analyzes it so that you can implement CEM measures. These include newsletters or personalized offers. CRM in customer management thus ensures that a customer has many positive experiences along the visit to your online shop that meet their needs.

In this context, use the free newsletter popups from uptain. They appear at exactly the right moment with an incentive tailored to the customer.

Complaint Management

In addition to CRM and CEM, another important component of customer management is complaint management. This refers to the systematic handling of complaints from your customers. If customers are dissatisfied with your products or services and complain, your complaints management strategy ensures that they are handled professionally, examined and responded to in a customer-oriented way.

Afterwards, you initiate appropriate measures and thus have the opportunity to optimize similar problems and thus avoid them in the future. Important for customer service are standardized and methodical procedures that respond to customers and satisfy them in a targeted way analogous to their needs.

Innovative technologies

New technologies are becoming increasingly important in customer management and are visibly gaining in relevance. Two examples that we would like to present to you are chatbots and live chats.

Chatbots are already being used on numerous websites to support customer management. They replace face-to-face communication with employees when it comes to standard questions and simple concerns, such as frequently asked questions directed to customer service. Not only does this provide significant relief – customers receive much faster responses, 24/7, which increases customer satisfaction. And when in doubt, the service employee will still help within business hours.

However, the trend is increasingly moving away from already familiar chatbots to voicebots in customer management. Instead of text-based technology, interaction with customers takes place via voice control. It becomes possible for the bot to proceed much more intuitively and even understand emotions. Such service experiences increase customer satisfaction many times over.

Another option in customer management is live chat. Here, customers and service employees communicate in real time, which leads to a particularly high quality of service. Even complex questions can be answered quickly. The biggest advantage is that one service employee can deal with several inquiries at once.

Use customer management and grow sustainably

If you operate an active and continuous customer management today, you not only ensure sustainable sales, but also create huge growth potential for yourself. Satisfied customers who feel seen by you and that their needs are satisfied become regular customers who represent your foundation for success. If this foundation is stable, it will also be much easier for you to generate new customers at the same time.