Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems help companies to manage their relationships and interactions with both existing and prospective clients. But rarely do companies make use of their CRM to achieve its true potential. CRM can be used to elevate your customer experience to the next level. It can be leveraged to make sense of every little detail you know about your customer and to use it to craft and design experiences for them.
Why is CRM Vital for CX?
Today’s customers look for both good products and top-notch customer service.
- 86% of customers will pay more for good service.
- Conversely, one in three customers abandon the company after a single bad experience.
A good CRM helps to –
Pre-Requisites for Success
The CRM is a powerful tool that improves customer experience. To get the most out of it:
- Cleanse data before analytics to ensure use of relevant data.
- Have strong leadership and a competent team to act on analytical insights.
- Automate your routine processes along with deploying entire features and functionality for prompt interventions.
- Have mobile versions or app for anytime, anywhere interventions.
- Optimize good content through social media support and engagement for effective interventions.
Here are some quick tips and tools to create a better CX through your CRM
Automation & Alerts
Customer Experience is not just about ‘wow’-ing your customers by putting them in the limelight and showering all your attention. Instead, good CX is all about consistency. You don’t need to ‘wow’ the customer at each and every turn. Your attention should be on being reliable and trustable consistently. A CRM can help ensure this with automation and alerting systems. It lets you provide attentive customer support and respond quickly, which enables consistency.
Analytics, Analytics & more Analytics
Customer experience boils down to the customer’s perception about you. This is where analyzing the VoC helps. Some of the insights that can be unearthed using analytics are response times, open/reads of emails or posts, website visits, clicks, etc. helps a business visualize what the experience is really like for your contacts. If you have long call resolution times or if you are constantly bombarded with negative feedback, then you know there are particular areas that need improvement. Without relevant insights, you would just continue along the path to deliver even proper experiences to your customers and worse, towards negative growth for your company. Analytics provides the ability to test out different strategies for customer engagement so that you will be able to figure out the right experiences for the right kind of customers.
Event Tracking
Certain CRMs can track the user activity intelligently on a website, and chronologically arrange the activity as a timeline to the relevant record in the CRM. This goes above and beyond traditional customer relationship management, or the information a person can possibly comprehend and record. This kind of information helps the sales team understand the lead better and alter their conversation with the customer in time. It also helps alter the marketing content and other customer touchpoints based on what the leads typically look for.
The support of a strong CDP
CRMs were inherently designed for sales teams to capture, track and handle information about new leads and potential customers in a sales process. Customer Data Platforms or CDPs are data centers created with the marketing department in mind – they help in in-depth analysis of behaviours of customers and thereby finding new methods to engage with the customers. CDPs have become the source of truth for every little detail about customers, as it brings together customer’s associated data from a range of applications, systems, and channels.
Because of this reason, CDPs are no longer used just by marketers, but by almost all teams that contribute in one way or the other towards a better customer experience. CDPs are equipped with features like data quality, modeling, real-time personalization, automation and many more. As a result, CDPs are able to provide a holistic 360-degree view of every customer which helps in creating a fluid customer experience with a data-driven, robust and flexible approach.
Integrating an easy to use CRM with a CDP is a powerful combination for customer experience in which the CRM essentially acts as a means to collect data and thereafter as an enabler for bringing customer focus based on data driven approach for various departments like sales, customer support, marketing etc.
Mobile CRMs
Mobile CRMs are critical in the era of Buyer 2.0, who knows what they want and have no time to waste. Mobile CRMs allow sales teams to access customer data quickly through a mobile app or through a web based browser with cloud CRM. Customers expect information available “now”, which means sales need access to all information in real-time, not just when they reach back to the office. On an average, sales teams spend more than 50% of their day remotely. So it’s imperative they have access to all information all the time from anywhere around the world. It also enables your sales team to not just think more effectively on their feet, but to come up with impactful conversations and solutions.
CRM for the entire team
To deliver consistent customer experience, it is necessary that all departments that can influence customer experience have access to information like customer behaviour, needs, wants and preferences. It is critical that the entire team (this includes developers) have reasonable access to the customer data that help them better understand who they are speaking to and working with. It also helps tailor engagements and craft experiences and provide consistent CX across all channels.
Customer Feedback
When customer feedback is initiated and collected through CRM platforms, the entire process can be automated and further engagement can be personalized. CRMs can also consolidate and structure data received from multiple sources, send alerts when issues or exceptional behaviors are identified, create and assign tasks for regular follow-ups with reminders, auto-create reports based on critical KPIs, and unearth correlations and patterns from the customer’s feedback.
Key Takeaway
This roundup doesn’t do justice to the number of ways in which CRM solutions can help elevate customer experience. But this is a great start! Here is a quick summary of the key takeaways from this blog:
- Make use of automation & alerts
- Deploy analytics for the 360 degree view
- Track events to understand behaviours
- CDP can act as your bible
- Use mobile CRMs to make life easier for sales
- Share your CRM with the entire team
- Reduce assumptions with an effective VOC
