Have you ever experienced bad customer service while you were eagerly waiting for something? You must have felt disappointment and fumed with rage. Well, you have been a victim of unplanned customer life stage management.
While you are dealing with customers, you need to understand what customer life stage means. It describes the status of a customer from showing interest to become a potential customer. This means customer life stage management creates, cultivates and constantly improves your relationship with your customers.
We are going to use the CRM module of WP ERP for demonstration as it is FREE and anyone can check it out for testing or practice easily.
You are about to dive deeper into customer relationship
The importance of customer life stage and how you can manage them will make the big difference for your sales and support centre. Additionally, we will focus on how customer life stage management helps you to increase efficiency and makes things better for your company.
Basic customer life stages
There are different types of customer life stages available for different types of companies. Companies tend to customize their own stages according to their product and service. We will focus on four most common and basic ones.
At first, your contact is a “Subscriber”
When a customer first shows interest in your product or service, they usually sign up and subscribe. This is the first life stage in the life-cycle management of customer. Customers seem to research your product on the internet and it indicates they are interested in your services. This helps you to built up strategies for this kind of customers.
The subscribers are initial people who can become potential customers later. So, it is important to interact with them. You can schedule newsletters and emails for your subscribers. Besides that, you can create logs and assign tasks to your team members to contact them. This can help greatly to take subscribers to the next stage.
Talking about your products already? You got a “Lead”!
When a subscriber shows a keen interest in your products, they seem to visit your blogs frequently. Sometimes they ask relevant and random questions about the products or service or just seek assistance. These type of people are considered as lead. They are in the second stage of customer life stage management.
You should consider these types of people to mark as leads in your CRM system. Sending them different promotional emails and newsletters will build a strong communication. Thus, it will be easier for you to take them to the next stage and turn them into opportunity.
Are things getting serious about pricing and service? It’s your “Opportunity”
After showing a generous amount of interest and asking about different questions about your products, a lead becomes an opportunity. You should mark them as they are in the third stage of customer life stage. They are a simple step away to become your potential customer so it is very important to interact with them. You should inform them about the new features of your products and services. You should also answer to their queries properly.
This will make sure you are on the right track as opportunities are potential customers. You must keep notes about your opportunities and contact them regularly. You can also assign tasks and schedule meetings, calls, SMS, and emails.
You are finally making a sale. Congratulations, you have a “Customer”!
This is the final stage of your customer life stage management. When an opportunity buys a product or service from you, they become your customer. And this is not the end of the cycle. You should make a good relationship with them. To do so, you must send them newsletters, reminders, birthday wishes, holiday discounts, promotions etc.
You should remember, a better customer service comes from a proper management of customer life stage management. Otherwise, your customer will be disappointed in you if you cannot provide adequate service.
Manage your Customer Life Stage Using WP ERP
WP ERP is a handy plugin that provides you easy CRM module and it is absolutely free! This module has amazing features that can boost your relationship with your customers. You can create contacts very easily and specify them according to their life stage. This helps you a lot to prioritize your work. Besides that, you can successfully increase efficiency when you have a proper strategy to follow.
Most importantly, you can easily manage all your contacts and segment them according to life stage. You can also create manual search segments, which can help you to identify potential customers very quickly. WP ERP has many features that can help you to built a powerful customer base and open new doors and opportunities.
