Regardless of your industry and the kind of product or service you offer, customers must always be a priority for you. They play a significant role in growing your company and improving your products and services by providing feedback. They are also responsible for bringing revenue streams, so you need reliable Customer Relationship Management software.
CRM software enables businesses to streamline different processes that involve customers and scale the sales operation. CRM software helps companies to create a deeper customer relationship and convert leads into sales.
In this blog, we discuss the different benefits of CRM and how you can capitalize on them to improve the productivity of your sales teams, increase customer satisfaction, and overall customer retention.
1. Deliver Superior Customer Engagement
Customer engagement plays an essential role when it comes to increasing brand loyalty and customer satisfaction. This aspect refers to the interaction of existing customers and prospects with the brand across all touchpoints.
However, customer engagement can be challenging to achieve, especially when it comes to large-scale operations, because it is time-consuming and requires a lot of consistency. But, by using CRM system features, it is possible to attain superior customer engagement and overall customer satisfaction.
Here are some of the features of CRM systems that will help you meet the customer’s needs and deliver superior customer engagement:
a) Centralized Customer Database Management
A CRM system can provide your sales reps and other customer-facing teams with easy and instant access to every customer’s interaction data with your brand. This data can include information about their purchase history, chat history, and customer tickets. This information can significantly help your sales team, marketing, and support executives to understand the customers’ needs and meet them with the best possible experience to boost customer loyalty.
Centralized customer database management is one of the essential features offered by CRM software. In some cases, there are software providers that include this feature on their basic or free plans.
b) Readymade Templates
One of the widely available CRM benefits is templatization. Many CRM systems have the features that allow them to produce attractive and effective email templates that incorporate different elements, information, and Call-to-actions.
Content editors can simply drag and drop the elements they want to include in a marketing email with this feature. You can choose specific templates for particular customer demographics to increase the click-through rates and acquisitions further.
2. Save Time & Increase Productivity
On average, CRM can help improve the productivity of your sales reps by 34%. It can do this by streamlining the repetitive tasks and making them more manageable.
Here are some of the features of CRM that can help you save time, increase your company’s productivity, and impact customer acquisitions:
a) Sales Automation
CRM automation is the process of automating customer service and sales functions to enable teams to track and manage customer and lead engagement. CRM automation can be applied to the following aspects:
- Contact Management: CRM can help you organize the customer data in real-time and make it more accessible to support goals like customer retention and acquisition.Lead Distribution: Lead distribution is a strategy that involves assigning leads to different sales representatives. By using CRM systems, this process can become less time-consuming because it is easier for sales representatives to access the necessary information they need when interacting with a lead to convince them to make a purchase.Email Automation: Email marketing is a widely used strategy that can be maximized with the use of CRM systems having marketing automation features. Some CRM solutions have features that enable you to run customized email campaigns for specific demographics. These CRMs also have email management features that allow you to filter emails according to your priorities.
b) Team Collaboration
Some CRM platforms offer built-in collaboration tools that enable multiple team members to work on one file simultaneously or follow the progress of a specific document like a sales quote.
The team members who have access to your CRM can collaborate seamlessly using shared records. It also significantly reduces the risk of misinformation and miscommunication among the different departments, fostering healthy and consistent internal communications.
c) Integration with 3rd-Party Applications
Many CRM tools are designed for seamless integration with other business management solutions such as project management, accounting, and data processing software. This ability allows a more holistic view because you can match your customer’s information with all the other aspects of your business process.
These tools can also integrate with email and social media solutions that will enable you to prioritize, manage, and respond to customers promptly.
3. Leverage Data-driven Decision Making
A business decision can either make or break a company. This is why, as much as possible, you need to have in-depth and timely information to make the best possible decisions. To do this, you can leverage the sales reports and other data from CRM software, which is one of the top benefits of CRM for businesses, including small business owners.
CRM data is primarily composed of identity data, descriptive data, quantitative data, and qualitative data available via rich & intuitive dashboards. Identity data refers to the customer’s name, mailing information, phone number, email address, etc. Meanwhile, the descriptive data refers to the lifestyle details of a particular lead that helps you establish a profile of who they are and what their possible choices are.
The quantitative data includes measurable data points that can assist you in interpreting how to interact with a customer. On the other hand, qualitative data include information about your customer’s attitude, behavior, and motivations. This data stored and processed on CRM systems can be used to generate reports, forecasts, and permanence measurements to make informed business decisions and increase revenue.
4. Maximize the Impact of Sales & Marketing
If you ask around for what are the benefits of CRM, the most common answer is that it can help maximize the impact of sales and marketing. A good CRM does this by optimizing and prioritizing the daily tasks to ensure that customers’ preferences are well taken care of, and leads are contacted on time. This can all result in increased closed leads and better overall customer relationships.
Here are some of the features of CRMs that enable it to maximize the impact of sales and marketing efforts:
a) Data Segmentation
CRMs enable you to break down the data by criteria and category to make it easier to generate a focused list for better understanding of customer needs. This will make running customer marketing campaigns and analyzing sales processes and pipelines more manageable.
Moreover, data segmentation will enable you to tailor your offers to a particular group, such as new customers. You can even make your sales pitch attractive for enhancing customer interactions in that demographic.
It helps you identify which leads are really interested in your product and services, who are still thinking about it, and who are not interested at all.
b) Targeting Upsell & Cross-sell
Upselling happens when you encourage customers to add on or buy more expensive products or services to increase their value. Meanwhile, cross-selling happens when they sell products or services that complement or supplement purchases that they have already made.
Top-tier CRM systems offer centralized communication features that allow you to filter and analyze customer feedback. These pieces of information can guide you to where you can maximize your upsell and cross-sell efforts.
The incorporation of AI in modern CRM software allows you to sieve through humongous data sets of customer interactions to draw insights for running heavily personalized upsell & cross-sell campaigns.
c) Maximize CLV
CLV stands for Customer Lifetime Value. This represents the overall amount of money a customer is expected to spend on your company or product during their lifetime. CRMs can help you maximize this by streamlining customer feedback, knowing where to implement upselling and cross-selling techniques, and boosting personalized customer engagement.
d) Close Leads Efficiently
CRM can help make the entire sales cycle easier, which can significantly increase the closure of leads against the sales quotas and make your sales pipeline more efficient. In fact, statistics show that companies that use CRM systems can increase their sales by 29%.
e) Increase ROI of Marketing Campaigns
Marketing campaigns are significant investments. Despite that, many companies still heavily invest in their marketing efforts because of its potential ROI. You can compute the ROI of your marketing campaign by subtracting the cost of your marketing efforts from the sales growth then dividing it by the marketing cost. According to Nuclear Research, for every dollar spent, $8.71 is the average ROI for CRM.
5. Delight Customers Across the Touchpoints
As mentioned above, it is essential to engage with your customers across different touchpoints. Consumer touchpoints can be categorized into five categories which are the following:
- Brand Promise- The brand idea can be used to distinguish your brand from others. You can capitalize on your distinct features and benefits. This can be incorporated in the packing of your products or the slogan that you use.Brand Story- This refers to the message that will motivate consumers to feel and act. This message must be aligned across the different means of communication. This can be highlighted on advertising campaigns and other media platforms for your brand.Innovation- This is essentially the product or service you offer, and it should be coherent with your brand idea.Purchase Moment- The brand idea must encourage customers to make the final purchase decision to close the deal.Customer Experience- Customers’ satisfaction level is reflected in their feedback about their experience with your brand. CRM features like Live Chat can help you respond to customer queries readily, allowing you to serve them in an agile manner & draw a positive sentiment.
Dealing with all these touchpoints and ensuring that customers get a satisfying response and experience can be challenging to handle. But, CRM solutions have capabilities that enable these to be easily managed. These capabilities include the following:
a) Social Media Integration
CRM solutions can merge CRM databases with social media to add valuable information about customers. With this, you can view customers’ interaction with your brand across different channels to provide you with a better insight into handling them.
This is essential because many customers expect that brands are aware of their previous contacts, especially when it comes to purchase history when they reach out to you through different social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Fulfilling this expectation can significantly help improve their brand loyalty and overall customer experience.
Aside from that, the CRM social integration feature also allows you to tailor your social content. CRM solutions can provide you with insights about topics, influencers, and hashtags within your target demographic. You can leverage this information to create timely, relevant, and engaging content.
b) Email Automation
Another CRM solution feature that can help customers across all touchpoints is email automation. CRM email automation works by automatically integrating customer information into your system when they do particular actions. This triggers a reaction from your system and sends them appropriate emails as a response.
Moreover, many customers nowadays use email as a method of inquiring about different services and products. But, the common problem is that it can take days for them to get replies. In some cases, they get none at all, making customers feel neglected and causing you to miss out on potential leads. Email automation can prevent this from happening.
However, do not depend too much on this particular feature. Suppose you often send out automated emails to your customers and do not follow up. In that case, the interaction can be considered cold.
Conclusion
As your business grows, it can be difficult to rely on basic databases and spreadsheets to track customers and their details. Doing this can be very time-consuming and tiresome for your employees. But, with the benefits of CRM for small businesses, these dilemmas will not be an issue anymore. It can streamline many different processes to focus more on implementing various strategies that will help increase your sales conversions and drive business success.
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