Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

By Stephanie Snyder

Improving customer relations should be your company’s top priority in 2021. You should start by devising new strategies that address your customers’ needs. Automating your customer relations is one way to build good relationships with your clients. By automating routine functions, your employees can get enough time to offer support and connect with clients. Therefore, automating customer relations enhances productivity and consumer satisfaction by creating time for your staff to identify problems and devise solutions.

Poor customer relations can lead to dissatisfaction and eventually prompt your existing customers to relocate to another company. Studies have shown that over 65% of customers perceive excellent customer relations as the most important way a company can appreciate them. As a result, you should invest in the automation of your customer relations to meet clients’ needs.

Here are four ways to automate your customer relations in 2021.

– Use automated online chats

Approximately 75% of customers consider a short response time as the most crucial aspect of assessing your company’s customer relations. Modern clients prefer getting quick answers to their concerns, and as such, most of them choose automated online chatbots. The technological advancements in machine learning and AI have led to a rise in chatbot usage to enhance customer relations.

According to a report by Invesp, 85% of consumer relations in 2020 were through automated online chats. The report further revealed that this automation helped businesses save up to 30% in customer relations costs. However, you shouldn’t entirely depend on automated chatbots to facilitate customer relations. Chatbots have a limited capacity and can’t resolve complex issues raised by your customers. Therefore, you should have a human customer relations agent to address complicated problems.

– Use automated Email marketing

Email marketing services help in building customer relations through promotional campaigns. Studies indicate that approximately 60% of customers admit having been influenced to buy through email marketing campaigns. Further, about 72% of millennials consider email marketing their preferred channel to receive information from a company. Therefore, you should use automated email marketing campaigns to enhance your company’s customer relations.

– Use automated webinars

Webinars are powerful tools that can help improve your company’s customer relations. You can use them to hold important meetings and inform your customers, leading to enhanced customer relations. You can also create webinar content based on your customers’ queries and problems.

Today, you can access various customer relations automation tools such as ClickMeeting to create and launch your webinar. Through such tools, you can manage videos, polls, and calls-to-action. The tools can also automate concurrent video streaming on different platforms and make events available for later viewing. Therefore, by enhancing the reach of your webinars, you can improve customer relations.

Providing your clients with helpful content through webinars empowers them and helps build a robust customer relations culture. By continuously interacting with your clients, you can increase their engagement with your business. Besides, this helps create brand awareness, invokes conversations about your company, and leads to customer referrals.

– Use automated customer relationship management (CRM) tools

CRM tools automate your customer relations by enabling the efficient sharing of your clients’ information. These tools help store all email and phone interactions between your business and customers in a single database. Additionally, CRM tools can help your company automate reporting and analytics to learn your customers’ buying behavior. In the end, this will help forecast your customers’ future needs and build better customer relations in 2021.

As indicated by McKinsey & Company, using CRM tools throughout your company minimizes information replication. Besides, this eliminates manual data entry and leads to better discount offers, enhanced convenience, and customer experiences. Research indicates that over 90% of clients consider a company’s customer relations when making purchase decisions. The study further reveals that businesses in the U.S lose over $1.5 trillion when clients shift to competitors due to poor customer relations.

Over all, the main objective of automating customer relations in your company is to drive satisfaction among your clients. Prioritizing your customers’ experience during transactions can eventually create loyalty, leading to better sales. For instance, you can automate your online chats, email marketing campaigns, webinars and use automated CRM tools. Ultimately, automating some functions of your business can help drive customer relations in 2021.

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Stephanie Caroline Snyder graduated from he University of Florida in 2018; she majored in Communications with a minor in Mass Media. Currently, she is an author, a freelance internet writer, and a blogger. Find her on Twitter @Stephan62979719.