DECA customer relations performance indicators

Explain the nature of positive customer relations

Positive customer relations mindset is believing your customers deserve the very best, are your employers, deserve your focused attention, have the right to expect things of you, and have important problems and complaints. It yields benefit to the business, employees, and customers.

Demonstrate a customer service mindset

Customer service it the process of ensuring customer satisfaction with a good or service. It often takes place when performing a transaction for a customer. Consists of three parts, pre-transactional, transactional, and post-transactional.

Develop rapport with customers

Employees can develop rapport by exhibiting empathy with customers and being understanding to complaints and concerns. Employees should always consider positive customer relations and the mindset to keep with interactions

Something else businesses can keep in mind is relationship marketing. This is marketing based on the idea that a relationship between the customer and supplier/service creates additional value for both parties (on top of value of good/service exchanged)

Reinforce service orientation through communication

Service orientation: ability/desire to anticipate, recognize, and meet other's needs, sometimes before those needs are even articulated. To enforce the idea of service orientation, employees need to ensure that it is clear that their intention is the help the customer

Respond to customer inquiries

Be considerate and offer any necessary assistance to the customer to satisfy their needs or problems

Adapt the communication of the cultural and social differences among clients

Globalization: the movement beyond national and domestic markets toward international markets.

When considering communication, as a general rule it is important to be respectful, being suggestive of issues when a problem occurs, and avoid being overly-direct and bold

Interpret business policies to customers/clients

Business policy: a general rule to personnel that they should follow in order to avoid misunderstanding and apply fear and consistent treatment to all situations

Guidelines for interpreting business policies to customers: state the policy and explain how it applies to the situation, stress the desire to maintain fairness through the use of the policy, and remain calm and answer questions on store policy

Build and maintain relationships with customers

Customer loyalty: the likelihood of previous customers continuing to buy from a specific organization.

Attention is given to marketing and customer service to retain current customers by increasing their customer loyalty. Organizations also often employ loyalty programs which reward customers for repeat business

Handle difficult customers

There are many different types of customers: slow/methodical, domineering/superior, suspicious, disagreeable, dishonest, etc.

Depending on the type of customer, the methods of handling are different

Handle customer/client complaints

Listen carefully to what the customer has to say

Put yourself in their shoes and apologize without blaming

Ask what would be an acceptable solution and solve the problem (or find someone who can solve it quickly)

Identify company's brand promise

Brand promise: benefits and experiences that marketing campaigns try to associate with a product in its current and prospective consumers' minds (acts as an extension of the company's positioning)

Demonstrate ways of reinforcing company image through employee performance

Brand image: impression in the consumer's mind of a brand's total personality (real and imaginary qualities and short comings)

Developed over time through advertising campaigns with consistent themes

Employees are the customer's perception of the company and are on the front lines. Consistent customer relations and good impressions can maintain company image

Discuss the nature of customer relationship management

It is a business strategy (usually using computer technology)

Refers to the practices, strategies, and technologies that companies use to manage and analyze customer interactions and data through the customer lifecycle

It is designed to improve customer service, manage customers, and gain new quality customers (all increasing business profitability)

Explain the role of ethics in customer relationship management

Businesses have a responsibility to the consumers to behave ethically, judging what is the right and wrong thing to do.

In customer relations, the primary concern in behaving ethically is to maintain the confidentiality of the customer's information

The company has a moral obligation to safeguard personal information collected from the customer and are legally culpable if the information is mishandled or not properly protected

Describe the nature of technology in customer relationship management

By gathering and organizing customer information a business can determine and fulfill its customer's needs and wants

At the most basic level, CRM software consolidates customer information and documents it into a single CRM database, this way business users can more easily access and manage it