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Customers are the lifeblood of any business and offering an excellent customer experience is vital to long-term success. According to PWC research, 73% of people say that customer experience is an important factor in their purchasing decisions. Given the importance of customer experience, businesses need effective tools to manage and enhance their customer relationships.
Square Customer Directory is a free tool that helps you build lasting customer relationships and grow your business. It’s a customer relationship management (CRM) software that stores all your customer information in one place so you can easily understand how customers interact with your business and engage with them.
We’ll explain how you can use Square Customer Directory and customer groups to provide an experience that keeps your customers coming back for more.
1. Creating and customising customer groups
Every time you make a sale with a new customer on your POS or Square website, a customer profile is automatically created in your Customer Directory. You can segment your customers by creating groups. To get started, choose a suggested template, such as ‘recent purchasers’. This will show you all the customers who bought from you in the past two weeks.
Once you’re comfortable creating groups using templates, you can start to customise your groups so they’re relevant to your business. Perhaps you own a clothes shop, and a ‘recent’ purchase is one that’s occurred within the last eight weeks. You can change the filter criteria to whatever makes most sense to you.
You can also combine different filters to drill down to more specific segments of your database. For example, you can find out who your ‘regulars’ are. You might define this as customers who have visited your business at least three times and who have visited within the last eight weeks. Simply set the filters and create your ‘regulars’ group.
Having segmented your customers into groups, you can send them targeted communications and get insights into their purchasing habits. We’ll look at these in more detail below.
2. Automating and personalising customer interactions
Square Customer Directory helps you get to know your customers so you can meet their needs. Using Customer Directory, you can see which items are most popular with customers in certain locations. If you find that ladies jeans are selling particularly well in your London boutique you can optimise your in-store merchandising so these items are front and centre.
When it comes to keeping customers engaged, automation is a powerful tool. With Customer Directory and Square Marketing, you can create automated email campaigns to keep your brand front-of-mind. If you provide a service, why not follow Buzz Wax Malibu’s example? This car concierge business uses automation to send reminder emails for follow-up appointments. Another easy win is to celebrate your customers’ birthdays by sending them an automatic coupon – our data shows that this is the marketing email that customers click on most.
You can also keep in touch with customers through regular scheduled emails, like a monthly newsletter. Using customer groups, you can make these communications more relevant for the recipients and more effective for your business. For example, you could create a group for your loyal customers who are male and based in Oxford, then send them an email containing a loyalty reward, menswear product listings and an invite to an event at your Oxford boutique. By understanding your audience, you can build an effective email marketing strategy, ensuring that you send them the right message to generate engagement and maximise sales.
3. Tracking customer engagement and feedback
With any marketing activity, it’s essential to know how it’s performed, so you can keep improving your efforts and increasing your ROI. Square Customer Directory has built-in reporting tools that let you monitor the key metrics for each campaign. With Square Dashboard you can see how many people opened your email, clicked through, and made a purchase.
Your Dashboard will also give you powerful insights into your customers’ behaviours. You can see peaks and troughs in visits, which items are selling and which are not, and monitor the purchasing habits of new vs returning customers. Armed with this knowledge, you can make smarter decisions about your business.
Perhaps the most instructive insights are the ones you can respond to in real time. With Square Feedback, you get direct messages from your customers about their experiences. Customers can leave feedback, right from their digital receipts, so you can track satisfaction levels. View your messages – and the corresponding transactions – and send responses straight from your Dashboard. Any issues are resolved privately and instantly.
If you have a Square account, you can start using Customer Directory straight away to better understand your customers and provide a service that converts them into loyal advocates for your brand.
