Capturing the interested customers with a perfect marketing strategy can be a difficult task for companies, on a daily basis. So, these companies have started segregating the customers into different categories on the basis of their satisfactory feedback levels.

Primarily six categories have been identified that fit into the customer hierarchy. It includes:

1. Endorsers – These are the people, who have bought and used the product/service offered by an organization. They are highly satisfied with the offerings and are willing to share their delightful experience with other people about the organization. Usually, new customers are highly capable of falling in this category.
2. Buyers – These people are frequent buyers of the product/services from an organization, but would hardly advocate it to anyone else. This clearly shows that due to some unpleasant experience the customers have downgraded from Endorsers category and is no longer willing to vouch for the product. It is a great loss for an organization and would take at least 20 positive touch points to bring back the loyalty.
3. Satisfied Mutes – These people fall in this list because they buy products/services, but would never interact with the organization to give any kind of feedback. Most organization also do not worry about their opinion, as they keep on buying the same product again. Nothing can deter their choices and everything is just fine with them.
4. Dissatisfied Mutes – These are the people, who have downgraded from the satisfied mutes’ category and the organizations do not know about it. The simple reason behind this change is lack of communication. It would take ages to ask these people and upgrade to endorsers category.
5. Grumblers – Every organization has these set of customers and they know it. But it is hard to admit that nothing can be done to earn a positive review from them. In the past, they have experienced so many negative incidents and are unwilling to change their perception.
6. Complainers – They constitute a very small number of customers, but can cause really good damage to any brand. They make sure that they share their unpleasant negative experience with others and spread the word.

All the above analysis was meant to simplify the equation that it takes six times more effort to make a new customer, than retaining the old one. If the problems experienced by the customers are resolved immediately, they will continue to buy from you 96% of the purchase.

Going by the orthodox methods, organizations still capture the customer orders and inquiries using papers and excel sheets print out. In the long run, this entire process becomes so confusing and time taking that it spoils the customer experience.

As a result, there are some major consequences that are widespread among the customers. They are illustrated below:

1. Lack of process visibility –
2. As all the customers’ orders and inquiries are recorded in papers and spreadsheets, it becomes very hard for the organization to budget the process. No plan can forecast the demand of the customers.
3. Organizations often complaint about limited control over the entire process and there is high probability of non-compliance with the audit purposes.
4. It is impossible to identify urgent orders without extra effort.
5. Any update about the order status inquiries is very hard to obtain.
6. High Order Processing Cost –
7. Organizations allocate very little amount of budget for the R&D’s and order fulfillment processes.
8. As a result, they continuously miss out on opportunities for gaining the competitive edge.
9. Order Processing Errors –
10. Any delays caused by the production & imbalanced inventory levels can incite huge misconception and eventually loss of orders.
11. In order to rectify the errors, organizations often resort to skilled resources and invest heavily in problem solving.
12. Slower Processing Cycle –
13. Any delay in the order placement and dispatch slows the processing cycle.
14. As a result, the customer experience is damaged and SLA’s are not met.

In order to combat all the above consequences, paper should be immediately replaced with a dynamic catalog management system.

Catalog Bar, is a dynamic catalogue management system which can solve all the above problems. The mobile application in the offline mode can also be used in remote areas to capture sales order and inquiries. This will make the old methods of record-keeping obsolete and simplify the customer experience.

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