Gaining and leveraging customer knowledge

Businesses live and breathe thanks to their customers, including those in the forex industry. It seems simple, but it bears restating. Customers are the lifeblood of any business and understanding them, their needs and how they interact with your business is vital if you’re going to thrive.

 

Even if a business has a good understanding of their customers, and interacts with them through efficient, well-established channels, it also needs to use what it has understood through these interactions to better its own business or services. A report by McKinsey and Company found that companies that leverage customer insights outperformed their peers by a staggering 85% in sales growth and over 25% in gross margin.

 

Now that we’ve grabbed your attention, let’s go over what customer knowledge is, and how you can leverage it.

 

What is customer knowledge?

 

As a world-leading, Cyprus-based forex CRM provider, we understand that customer knowledge involves more than just understanding your customers, it also involves knowledge management. At its core, it’s a simple concept, but it’s one that many businesses don’t fully understand.

 

In order to gain an understanding of your clients, you will have to engage with them, through your sales and support teams, through meetings and also through social media and other channels you might have.

 

You need to understand who they are, what they need from you and what they seek to do. Every business is different, and we’re not all forex CRM providers, but there are commonalties that every company should be aware of. A few key areas to understand are as follows:

 

·       What do they need and are they communicating those needs to you? Perhaps you can identify something they might benefit from, but are unaware of.

·       What services do they buy from you? What are they searching for? What might you provide in the future?

·       Personal information. Who are they? What drives them? Where are they going? What challenges do they face? How can your business make their professional lives easier?

·       What are they purchasing? What are they searching for? Do those two things clearly align, or are they looking for something that isn’t available to them?

 

Taking it a step further

 

Once you’ve created, and taken steps to maintain, sources of information, you can take it a step further:

 

·       Ensure that your customer insights are available to your sales and support teams. Ensure that the information is organized and easily understood and that new information is input in a simple, clear manner. Finally, you might leverage the cloud to ensure that all your internal stakeholders are able to access your client information and insight databases.

·       If you have access to subject matter experts within your industry, canvas their opinion to create a pool of understanding about what your clients might need.

·       Internally, you might set up regular meetings with your key staff to discuss what they’ve been seeing across your business and any insights they’ve gained when talking to customers. You can also encourage your developers or product teams to make suggestions in collaboration with your client-side staff.

 

A vital step for your business

 

Once you’ve established your channels and created a mechanism to ensure that your staff can access your customer knowledge, it’s time to take further action. Companies can leverage customer knowledge in four general ways:

·       Creating new products: By discovering your customers’ needs, you might find gaps in your product offerings. In the forex CRM space, this allows us to add updates to our CRM systems, adding additional functionality our clients might need. In other companies, this might lead to a new product launch, or expanded services. These could be products your clients have directly requested, or products that you conceive when you find a gap.

·       Up-selling and cross-selling: You might find that you don’t need to create a new product. Our forex CRM and back office tools offer a huge amount of flexibility. Often, when approaching new clients we discover that we already offer the tools they need, it’s just a case of introducing them to the product and fully explaining it. Outside of the CRM world, perhaps your clients are unaware of your premium products, or a new product that might just answer all their needs, all they need is for you to point them in the right direction.

·       Improving customer service: If you discover your clients are confused about your products, or feel unsupported, you can address this. By sharing additional information on your channels, or by increasing the efforts of your support teams, you can make your clients’ lives easier and avoid dissatisfaction that will hurt future sales.

·       Indentifying trends: If a significant number of your customers are asking for the same thing, or need the same thing, you’ve identified a trend. This might well allow you to move faster than your competitors and to respond to the market first. The benefits of this are obvious: You’ll gain a reputation for bringing new services to market, and you’ll be the first in the new space.

 

Something you have to do

This all seems very simple. Until you look at the numbers.

 

A November 2021 report on personalization by McKinsey ended with one shocking fact.

 

Companies that personalize their products, services, marketing and interactions by using customer data can generate 40% higher revenues through targeted services. The pandemic has changed how customers interact with companies, they expect higher levels of personally-tailored service as never before.

 

The takeaway is clear. This is not something you should do, it’s something you have to do.

 

Thankfully, we have the answer.

 

CRMs and customer knowledge

 

On top of all the bells and whistles that allow your clients to do their work, a CRM system is also a database.

 

As a Cyprus-based CRM provider, we leverage intelligent design and our industry expertise to create forex CRMs and back office tools for companies around the world. Our systems have to be responsive, reliable and intuitive in order to serve a global client base.

 

As a result, our clients’ data is held under industry-leading security protocols and systems, but it’s also easy to navigate, easy to understand and easy to read, allowing our clients fast, uncomplicated access to every piece of data they enter into our systems and to generate custom reports.

 

A CRM makes accessing, sorting, reading and understanding complex client and customer information simple. It allows you to quickly understand the needs of your clients, your own potential shortcomings and any gaps in the market you might benefit from.  Our intuitive systems will allow you to leverage the greatest data resource you already have – your customer information – and translate that into tangible results.

 

Get in touch

 

Contact us today for a demo of our systems and talk to our sales teams to discover exactly how our forex CRM can help you understand your customers and get you on the way to hugely expanding your revenue.