Today, businesses are realizing that building strong relationships with their customers is no longer optional – it has become absolutely essential.
In fact, businesses that value customer satisfaction are more likely to see more customer success stories. Similarly, 73 percent of consumers who receive multiple bad experiences from a company will switch to a competitor.
All this solidifies the importance of building strong customer relationships, and a powerful way to achieve this is through customer relationship mapping.
At present, customer relationship mapping has become a term often thrown around by big corporations, but it’s not as easy as it may sound. You must be able to map such relationships the right way, and here’s how you can do just that.
Understanding Customer Relationship Mapping
As Prolifiq puts it, customer relationship mapping is an approach for figuring out who’s who within your target account. Through the map, you’ll get to visually represent the connections, touchpoints, and interactions that a customer has with your business.
Now, this is not just about identifying who your customers are. It’s more about understanding the journey they take from their initial contact with your business to post-purchase support.
At its core, a customer relationship map gives you a bird’s eye view of all the stakeholders involved in your customer relationships.
The Need for Proper Account Planning Tools
Customer relationship mapping can be a complex process, especially when dealing with multiple stakeholders and touchpoints. This is where account planning software comes in.
A dedicated Salesforce account planning tool can help streamline and organize your efforts, ensuring that your customer relationship maps are accurate and actionable.
Salesforce account planning tools allow you to create detailed profiles for each customer. This, in turn, helps map out relationships, track interactions, and identify opportunities for growth.
The account planning process can be time-consuming if done manually. However, with the right account planning tools, you can automate much of the process.
Getting Started and Gathering the Right Data
Before you can create a meaningful map, you need to gather detailed information about your customers, their roles, and their interactions with your company.
First, you have got to find the key contacts in your customer relationships. These are basically people who make decisions or influence others’ decisions. You can even refer to them as those who are directly impacted by your product or service.
Now comes the part where you look at the touchpoints: basically the contact points through which your key contacts interact with your business. Marketing emails, sales calls, customer support inquiries, or even social media engagement, all these can be your touchpoints.
Your mission here is to understand how and when your customers engage with your brand.
Once all that is done, you finally need to understand the customer journey – the path that a customer takes from awareness to purchase. Mapping out this journey helps you identify where relationships are strong and where they might be faltering.
Building the Map Through Visualization
With the data in your hand, it’s time to get working on the relationship map itself. For that, you need to work out the visuals associated with the customer relationship. Once you have the final map, it will give you the chance to see patterns, identify gaps, and prioritize your efforts.
You first start by creating a simple chart where you get to see the various customer roles and their connections. For the sake of simplicity, here, you can use flowcharts, diagrams, or even specialized software tools designed for mapping relationships.
Now, you must remember that not all relationships are created equal. Hence, you’ll always find that there are some contacts that are somewhat more influential than others. Then you’ll also see that some interactions are far more critical to the success of the relationship than others around it.
You need to color code or use other visual cues to highlight such key relationships and better understand which ones need more attention.
Of course, your customer relationship map won’t just be about the wows. It also needs to show you where you’re lacking. These gaps represent opportunities to strengthen your customer relationships.
The Long-Term Benefits of Customer Relationship Mapping
All throughout this article, we’ve had a decent discussion on customer relationship mapping. Now, what you need to know is that this kind of relationship mapping is never a one-time project. After all, relationships change, even with your most loyal customers, so your relationship maps will change too.
Hence, it’s an ongoing effort that can transform depending on the way you do business and manage customer relationships. By understanding your customers on a deeper level, you can create more personalized experiences, build stronger relationships, and ultimately drive growth.
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