Know Your Customer in a Web-Sphere 2.0 World

“Know Your Customer.” It's a time-honored axiom of business that you should get to know your customer. Like any other relationship between equals, the business-customer relationship depends on a healthy flow of information back and forth. Communication has to be constantly worked at, with good sense and good humor. If you benefit from the relationship, it's your responsibility to keep the lines of communication open.

The customer may communicate, or they may not. As a customer, how many times have you simply walked away from a bad meal, a bungled service interaction, or a bored and indifferent cashier because you thought nobody would really listen anyway? If you have, then you've been on the other side of the equation.

Provide every means you can to encourage and allow valuable feedback from your customers. They know more about some aspects of your business than you do. The key to all of this is getting, maintaining, and using personal information about your clients.

One high-end international hotel chain, a regular winner of prestigious service quality awards, trains each of their employees to gather and document information about each one of their guests. If they ask for a certain brand of coffee, that's noted. If an employee notices the make and model of their personal car, that's noted. And those guest dossiers are shared with every property, nation-wide. Put this all together, and two things emerge. One is establishing empathy and true connection with the customer, and making that conversation feel like a real relationship.

It's powerful to know that your customer is calling from Austin, Texas, for instance. That fact subtly shapes your understanding of the caller's likely values, urban surroundings, vocal pace, and communication style. The other thing -- in an increasingly automated, bell-curved, over-calculated and outsourced business environment, false assumptions have been made and real contact has, in many cases, been lost. Good customers recognize and appreciate good personalized service. Reaching these customers provides a real, measurable business advantage.

But how can you keep track of all this information? You can't just go around jotting down notes about your clients in stickies, and paper files probably won't work either as only one staff member at a time would have access to these important customer records. This is where modern technology can go a long way to make the job easier. Storing your client's personal information along with their contact information and other client records makes a lot of sense. Organizing the information that might appear in a client dossier into a simple summary that your staff can use familiarize themselves with a client quickly and easily also makes a lot of sense.

One commercial solution that provides these features is www.opscotch.com, which is a web based client information and issue-tracking system that is inexpensive (about eight dollars a month), secure and hosted on the Internet making client information available to as many locations as you might need it from.

Discover the benefits of getting to know your customers, grab a free trial of opscotch and use it to store your customer information, long before the trial runs out you will begin to see an emerging trend of improved customer satisfaction and improved employee moral. Sign up right now for opscotch's FREE 30 day trial to get started improving your customer relations today – Go here: http://www.opscotch.com