Customer Management System - Small Business - Building a Positive Customer Management Program, a Recession Essential

Small Business - Building a Positive Customer Management Program, a Recession Essential

By Leon Noone 

The Key Elements
Your customer management program has three key elements

• corporate policy and systems
• on job support systems
• reward systems for successful customer support and service staff.

Corporate Policy and Systems
Your policies and systems must be designed to show that positive customer management is an unequivocal priority. Your policies need to clearly encourage

• prospects to become clients
• clients to continue and increase their involvement with you.

This means clear systems and performance standards for targets, guarantees, service provision and market position. Without proper policy and systems you cannot expect your sales, support and service staff to support customer management.

On Job Support Systems
These systems should include training, job aids, customer information, product or service delivery, after sales service, problem resolution and customer contact techniques including phone, letter, email and face to face.

In particular, you must eliminate systems that are an impediment to or discourage good customer management. Review both the design and the necessity of your forms. Get rid of administrative impediments that conflict with customer management policy and systems.

Reward Systems
It's important that you reward staff adequately for successfully implementing your customer service policy. But you must be clear about one thing.

Reward systems should reward successful goal achievement: not effort, application or good intentions. You may choose some form of acknowledgement or recognition of old fashioned "application". But the major tangible rewards must go to those who satisfy or exceed your performance standards.

You should ensure too that support and service staff are equally eligible for tangible rewards as are contact staff.

Conclusion
If you're to survive and prevail through the recession, professional customer management is crucial. A successful system contains all three elements I've mentioned. Many sound systems fail because they don't pay sufficient attention to one or more.

Leon Noone invites you to contact him on http://www.leonnoone.com where you can collect your FREE copy of his 42 page Special Report: "5 Proven Methods For Improving Employee Performance On The Job". Leon specialises in using effective systems to improve on job performance of employees in small-medium business. This includes customer management and marketing systems. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Leon_Noone Very timely article for those of you out there who has Customer Management Systems for you small businesses.