Customer relations are always an integral part of any business regardless of its size and scope. You must nurture your customer with all the effort and service quality for a continuous sale.
The magic formula that successful businesses have discovered is to treat customers like guests and employees like people.
Tom Peters, Speaker and Author
That’s why most businesses focusing on virtual customer relationship management today. Online platforms are easier to provide support and service than other platforms nontheless. However, any type of business do you have, you must take care of your customer both physically or virtually.
In today’s blog, we’re going to show you what is real-life and virtual customer relationship management, and what are the differences between them.
Lastly, we’ll share when you should think of a CRM solution. And also some of the best virtual customer relationship management best practices. Surely they will help you 100% to uplift your business growth.
Well, let’s dive into the main discussion.
How Businesses Manage Customers In Real Life?
Well, we all deeply feel that customers are the most vital asset of a company. No matter what your business is, you have to make sure you’re dealing with them appropriately.
If you’re not making relationships with them, they’re not going to return or recommend you
Otherwise, it will be tough to stay in the competition. For instance, you should attract new customers with unique services, products, give away programs and discounts, etc.
Thus it helps to maintain proper customer management procedures, and surely your business will rock even in any unwanted situations.
Anyways, for your convenience, we’ll share some ideas that were followed by the businesses in real life. Take a look at them one by one.
Defines The Target
Yes, to accomplish any business goal, you must target something that you have to reach through your business. So in the real-life business world, it is quite important to set a target.
For example, if the company is new or small, then they must look in to create a strong network, understanding the market, communication process with customers, etc. So one day these little parts will play a strong role in your business process.
And these tricks exactly maintained by Facebook back in 2004. They started their journey inside Harvard University, did lots of experiments with their customer’s attributes, and then they began to rock in the market.
Market Research for Virtual Customer Relationship Management
Like all other business platforms, market research is always a crucial fact. But when it’s about in the real-life business, then it must be applied correctly. Without researching the market is like you’re doing business blindly.
Anyways, let’s try to find the answers to these questions while doing business in real-life.
- Where is the industry going?
- What’s the competitive landmark?
- What are customers liking or disliking today?
- Which market niche is performing today?
Finding these answers isn’t that hard stuff. You need to be focused and consistent while researching. That’s all.
Business Communication
Well, on an online platform, it’s easy to communicate with customers. But when it’s in real-life business, sometimes it seems a tough job to keep communication with customers on a regular base.
Business communication is the procedure of sharing information between people inside and outside of a company
Real-life business communication follows these examples below:
- Displaying options/new business plans
- Making ideas and offers
- Accomplishing conclusions
- Entering settlements
- Sending and meeting orders
So whatever your business is, you must maintain a well-triggered business communication strategy at the right time. Thus exactly executed in the real-life business fields.
Offers or Facilities
After passing the above stage, it’s time to grab those customers with the top-notch service. Yes, in the real-life business, it’s an imperative part. Because clients visit the company most and make deals.
Since customer loyalty and revenue are both qualities that affect a company’s revenue.
Forbes
If you get a customer you must keep your promise to give something more. In such cases, giving away offers or any discounts are highly beneficial to maintain a stable customer relationship throughout the entire journey. Especially if you’re doing offline or real-life business.
Customer Support
In the virtual customer management process, it seems quite easy to support the customers. For example, using any digital platforms or software. And these platforms make online customer management easy and simple.
On the other hand, it looks difficult to handle customers in real life somehow. Yes, in real-life business, customers are being supervised directly or manually. As a result, they solve their issues immediately. This is how customers get their support via real-life business.
How Businesses Are Managing Customer Relationship Virtually?
In the previous section, you have known how real-life businesses manage their clients. So this section will give you an idea and also help you to make a comparison between real-life vs virtual life customer management.
That’s why its time to know how online or virtual platforms are managing their customers in these digital days. Or the strategies they are following to maintain customers.
Be Aware of Your Customers Need
Using virtual CRM Softwares or solution, managing customers has become an easy task for the company owners. Yes, virtual platforms always provide unlimited support collaboratively. This customer management becomes a delightful one.
To ensure better engagement with your business, consider knowing your customers with no stone unturned
Like other facilities, knowing the customer’s attributes is also one of them. For instance, various social platforms or integration can help to know customer’s insights accurately.
Time To Time Customer Response
According to the research, more than 74% of users believe that virtual CRM software or solution enlarged their way to customer data. We can assume that a large portion of internet users are utilizing virtual CRM. And this is how they’re giving time to time response to their customers accordingly.
The thing that grows customer trust most is when we receive and acknowledge to customers’ feedback and requests
Yes, the above statement is absolutely true. When you’re gathering your customer feedback or improvement ideas, surely they will fall in love to do business with you. Thus exactly you’ll see the perfect virtual CRM integration.
Give Information To Customers
We all know the common proverb ‘Content is King‘. But did you notice that content is nothing without the customers? Yes, in that case, we can say ‘Content‘ & ‘Customers‘ are related to each other.
If you are pushing on the buzzer button saying, hard sell (or buy, buy, buy) method then you are on the wrong track
Suppose you have a blog site. And every month ten thousand visitors come to your website. Surely, they find something special and informative in your website’s content. That’s why they’are bookmarking your website for further approach.
So customers love to get useful content. Hence, they want to make the decision only by their inclination. This is how a virtual platform manages customers providing powerful content management.
Rewards and Giveaways for Virtual Customer Relationship Management
Giving away programs bring lots of good signs. For example, customer retention, increase growth, and enhance brand reputation. Recently Happy Addons, provide its customers with a giveaway program.
In that program, customers participated and won prizes. As a result, the number of active installations becomes higher after the end of the program.
Giving Away or loyalty program provides people cool essence they really admire, amaze, and feel special in different ways
So unlike real-life businesses, virtual CRM allows business owners to do uninterrupted things for their customers.
Stay Active in Social Platforms
Another way to manage customers is to stay active on social channels. Yes, ‘a relationship is nothing but communication’ this term is undoubtedly true. And it’s a part and parcel of virtual customer management.
Communicating via messages, emails, newsletters are an undeniable part of virtual CRM. Therefore, interaction with customers, makes them happy and special. So this is how perfectly customer management executed.
Renders Valuable Recommendations
Before using any online service or product, everyone likes to research and study for that particular thing. Suppose, you’re looking to start an online course. But you don’t have any idea where to start or whom to ask.
In that case, either you’ll ask anybody or watch reviews from other trusted sites. Right?. After getting the right direction from the website, surely you’ll recommend others to follow it.
So it’s simple to understand. Users like recommendations, reviews, and case studies. And this builds a secure relationship with the customers. For instance, virtual customer management helps users to do that effectively.
Merits & Demerits of Virtual and Real-Life Customer Management
This section is a summary of the previous two parts. We hope that you’ll get an overview and also it will let you decide which one you should choose for your business growth.
Merits & Demerits of Real-life & Virtual Customer Relationship Management
| No | Real-Life Customer Management | Virtual Customer Relationship Management |
| 01. | Helps to connect with customers directly | Customers could be found through virtually |
| 02. | Able to fix customers issues physically (Meeting, call or conference) | Through the video calls, conference or live chat, customers can be handled |
| 03. | Real-life customers mean local customers | Virtual customers mean global customers |
| 04. | Real-life CRM enlists, customers information, transaction history, and product information | Along with the three facts, virtual CRM includes, click stream, content information |
| 05. | Reports are being generated with files or hand notes | Google sheets, forms, and survey forms are highly used |
| 06. | Customer service is static and it has time & space limit | Customer service in virtual CRM in real-time and it has no limit. Also, it can be performed at any time. |
| 07. | Customer profiles and their last transaction helps to analyze. | Integration with different modules helps to determine customer analysis. |
| 08. | Contact management seems it be difficult at some points | Contact management with virtual CRM is super easy, fast and accurate |
| 09. | Projects & customers can not be managed at the same time | Easy to handle both the projects & customers combinedly |
So representing a bottom line in real-life CRM vs virtual CRM discussion, we can consider these following outcomes-
Virtual CRM prolongs the limits of digital marketing with the different transaction while real-life CRM concentrates on the promotion of its product or service.
In contrast to real-life CRM, virtual CRM wins customer curiosities instead of insisting on them to a part of a company’s strategy.
Virtual Customer Relationship Management Best Practices
Sustaining proper customer relations is an autocratic part of any business growth. When you are intending to extend your business you will need to follow particular strategies or practices to accomplish the things you want for your business. That’s why you need to practice those CRM formulas to get a better result in the end.
So let’s find out what are they:
- Provide outstanding customer support
- Try to adjust the billing cycle
- Target customers carefully
- Keep a record of your customer’s interest
- Sync everything to CRM
- Always keep interacting with Co-Workers
- Plan bundled products for customers
- Advise corresponding products to customers
- Provide time-limited offers or deals occasionally
- Surprise your customers
- Reward Loyal customers
Capitalize on these things so that you can furnish your CRM system. Try to keep judging the lackings in your CRM system to check the range of development. Surely, this strategy will unquestionably get you some certain results in the long run.
Related article: Changing Nature of customer relationships and proven strategies
When To Opt For a Virtual Customer Management Solution?
High-class customer service is an essential part of every business development. And the reason is customers are king. Therefore, it must be executed at the right time to build a long-lasting business.
However, if your business still not getting a virtual customer relationship management system, now is the time to utilize it to uplift your process.
The CRM industry has an enormous expansion in recent years. Most companies from WordPress territory are adopting the CRM system.
However, if you’re looking for a complete ERP package for your business to control the Human resource, accounting, and project management department, then surely WP ERP can be the one that you are looking for. So why are you waiting
