Your relationship with your customers is one of the most important aspects of your business. How you interact and connect with them will directly impact your customer satisfaction, loyalty and, in turn, the overall success of your business.
For these reasons, you should consider investing in relationship intelligence software for your business, which are programs that provide insight about your customer relationships and how you might improve them. This software can help you understand more about your clients and customers and analyze their given data, making you spend less time on menial upkeep and more time focused on growing your business.
[Read: Retooling Your Business]
Relationship intelligence software defined
Relationship intelligence technology collects and generates insights based on your interactions and relationships with clients and colleagues. This data can be from your email communications, phone calls, meetings and sales pitches. The output of this data gives a company or individual insight into understanding their clients’ behaviors and actions and be used for problem solving and improving communications.
Almost all your interactions with customers and clients can be turned into data contributed by relationship intelligence software. However, you may need specific data tools to help interpret and convert it into meaningful information that is most useful to you and your company.
[Read: How to Use Facebook to Connect with Your Customers in Times of Crisis]
Why your business should use relationship intelligence software
A recent study found that only 15% of businesses fully understand their customers and address their needs. This means you are likely among the majority of businesses that do not entirely understand their clients. Relationship intelligence software and technology can help strengthen your relationship with your clients by understanding them deeply, which will help you conduct your business more effectively.
Benefits to using relationship intelligence software
Here are five specific ways that relationship intelligence software can improve your business:
Analyze and interpret useful information on customer relationships
Has your business ever experienced a situation in which your sales have declined and you couldn’t pinpoint the reason? Instead of putting all the energy and effort into identifying a reason yourself, you can use relationship intelligence software to analyze your customer’s behavior and their relationship with your business. The technology can analyze data such as the last time you contacted a customer or if a certain product or service isn’t getting as much engagement. From there, you can use that data to make adjustments to improve your customer’s experience.
By analyzing your customer's behaviors, you can improve their experience while increasing sales.
Accelerate sales and business cycles
If you have up-coming sales goals or want to push a certain product, relationship intelligence software can assist with those goals. The software can analyze your customer’s data and track their patterns to help you develop a sales plan that targets loyal customers with a specified sales pitch personalized to them. When you incorporate relationship intelligence software with your sales goals, you won’t have to worry about unclear outcomes because you have analytics to back up your decisions.
Alleviate customer data management
As a business, you probably spend a large amount of time managing and organizing data surpluses about your clients and their behaviors. And often you find yourself reaching out to potential clients who turn out to be dead ends. Relationship intelligence software saves you time by collecting all your customer’s data and presenting it in a neat and organized fashion.
Using relationship intelligence software also allows you to focus on the right details. The technology will prioritize likely clients who have been fully engaged in your buying process as opposed to ones who are the biggest or who have interacted with your business most recently. It’s not about engaging with the most number of customers, it’s about engaging with the right ones.
Identify existing relationships for business growth opportunities
One of the best ways to scale your business quickly is to expand an existing contract with a satisfied client or customer. Nurturing a relationship with an existing client is five times more cost effective than attracting a new customer. However, it can be difficult to look at your network and know where to pursue further business opportunities. Your relationship intelligence software can assess your current customers, vendors and partners, and help you identify existing partnerships that will result in more growth opportunities.
Enable sales representatives to focus on the right leads
If your sales team has 50 leads to follow up on but only has the bandwidth to focus on 20 of them, which leads should they prioritize? You may prioritize older requests over newer ones or potentially bigger deals over smaller ones, but these may not be the best way to pursue prospects. Instead, relationship intelligence software can help your sales team prioritize leads based on who is more likely to close a deal.
Bottom line
Investing in relationship intelligence software can save you and your business time and energy that you can use to invest in other aspects of scaling your business. By analyzing your customer’s behaviors and how they interact with you, your business can improve their experience while increasing your sales.
[Read: Ready to Grow Your Business? It's Time for CRM Software]
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