Want to know an easy way to build customer trust? Data integrity. Having easy access to reliable, accurate data has huge implications for the success of your company and for building trust among your customers. Not only do customers want to know that you’re keeping their data safe, but they also want to know that you’re maintaining accurate data so that you won’t double charge them, get their order wrong or send product to the wrong address. The best way to maintain accurate data records is to implement all-in-one business management software. Having a single solution and database to manage all information about your customers, accounts, vendors, inventory and finances makes it easy to share information across multiple departments. Business management software today also provides tools for ensuring the integrity of data – such as data audit trails, time and date stamps, the ability to automatically add notes, update fields and insert a record after performing a task in the system, user tracking and other checks and balances that help prevent and identify bad data. But, before we get into exactly how business management software can help manage your data, let’s first explore the importance of building customer trust.
Getting, maintaining and increasing customer trust is important to building brand loyalty. To keep customers happy and to grow as a business, we all want our customers to trust our company, our brand, our product and our services. But even the most trustworthy businesses need a way to manage this consistently over time. It’s not enough to be trustworthy if the customer is not aware. What makes a customer trust a brand? According to a recent study by Edleman, the reasons can be divided into three distinct areas: product-oriented concerns; customer-oriented concerns; and societal-oriented concerns. By far the most common area of trust relates to product-given concerns with 87% of global customers citing this area as the most important. The best example of this is customers trusting a brand because it delivers good quality products and services. Customer-oriented concerns ranked second highest for why customers trust brands at roughly 56% globally. Examples of trust in this area include businesses that treat the customer and others well, can quickly address customer service problems and that do a good job of protecting the privacy and security of customer data. Why is trust so important? According to the same Edleman study, consumers rank brand trust as one of the top factors they consider when making a purchase decision.
Now that we know how important customer trust is, and how data integrity is an easy way to increase customer trust, let’s explore some specific examples.
Inventory Management
Proper inventory management is crucial for building customer trust. Maintaining inventory data from within one system allows you to easily track incoming sales orders, open purchase orders, product on backorder and product available for sale in your warehouse. Customers need to trust that when they place an order for product across all available sales channel, inventory information is accurate and up to date. If customers cannot rely on the information your company provides about inventory availability and shipping times, they will look somewhere else to buy product.
Customer Relationship Management
When it comes to customer service, maintaining accurate customer data can have a huge impact on how quickly your business can respond to and remedy customer services issues. Tracking customer communication, follow-ups, account details, sales history, contact information etc. also allows you to easily reference information in the system without wasting time looking through multiple solutions and spreadsheets. This helps to address customer concerns more quickly and ensures people from different departments can easily find information about any particular customer. Maintaining accurate customer account information provides customers with peace of mind that they will get the product they ordered, when they want it, delivered to the right location at the right price. When customers trust that you have the correct information and can address their concerns quickly, it improves the overall customer service experience.
Accounting and Finance
There is nothing more frustrating than trying to get a refund, cancel an order, pay a bill or place a new order when the customer service team does not have the correct information about your account. Business management software that includes accounting functionality allows your company to easily update accounts, automatically email customers information such as invoices and past due notices, manage multiple pricing contracts and provides easy access to customer data – all from within one system.