The current business landscape has become dynamic and competitive, making it harder for businesses to thrive. This means businesses need to adopt fool-proof strategies to sustain themselves in this hyper-competitive market.
Customer Experience (CX) is quickly becoming a priority for businesses due to shifting customer expectations. What used to be just the touchpoints in market and sales journeys has evolved to become so much more. According to Accenture, CX is how the customer perceives a brand or business. Moreover, every interaction a customer has with a company directly impacts CX.
Due to its dynamic nature, CX is a good place for businesses to start to survive. For this, we have been seeing a rise in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools and platforms that can help businesses improve their CX.
Here are some reasons why businesses should invest in CRM.
What is a CRM?
A CRM (Customer Relation Management) is a tool or platform that centralizes customer data into a single place. This includes both potential and actual customers. This centralized management, storing, and collection of data allows businesses to know their customers better. This allows them to personalize their customer interactions which aids in improving business relationships.
While a CRM can have several features, some of its main features are:
- Contact Management: this allows you to collect and manage all prospect, lead, and customer information.
- Pipeline Management: this allows you to manage your sales pipeline productively with sales automation and forecasting features.
- Lead Management: this collects all relevant information that is needed to communicate with prospects to nurture them into customers.
- Email Marketing: this allows you to create and send email campaigns to specific customer segments and track their performances.
- Live Chat: this gives immediate assistance to prospective leads on your website.
- Analytics and Reporting: You can see your sales and marketing performance data and get actionable insights for better decision-making.
- Ticket Management: this lets you effectively manage all your customer support requests, and resolve them in a timely manner.
Benefits of a CRM
A CRM can productively streamline all your customer facing departments like sales, marketing, and customer support. Here are some major benefits of investing in a CRM.
1. It Allows Data-Driven Decision-Making
A CRM allows you to tap in the power your data. With AI-driven data analytics, you do not have to manually crunch numbers. It does the hard work for you and gives you valuable insights. This insights can be on your email marketing campaigns, customer sentiments, or even your support team’s performance. You can also get insights based on customer groups. This data helps you see what is missing and equips you to plan ahead better.
2. It Boosts Your Sales
Sales is an important department but an overworked Sales team can barely think out of the box to mature leads. A CRM can automate the most menial of your sales workflows while organizing customer data for sales steam. With automated data entry and centralized customer data, your sales team will be empowered to easily track customer interactions while closing deals. Moreover, some CRMs’ AI capabilities even prioritize leads with the most potential to turn. This gives your sales associates a jump start.
3. It Improves Your Customer Retention
Customer is king in today’s business world. A CRM allows you to know your customers better with centralized data, AI data analytics, and customer segmentation. This knowledge is fruitful when your customer wants a personalized experience. This increases customer loyalty and retention. Moreover, a CRM also acts as an alarm clock for unresolved tickets. This allows you to provide support on time and make the customers feel valued.
4. It Automates the Menial Tasks
Repetitive tasks like data entry, ticket management, and tracking customers are very time-consuming. A CRM can automate these tasks to increase employee productivity. On top of that, automation also removes the possibility of human error. This automation also allows employees to handle large chunks of data in a small amount of time. Therefore, a CRM’s automation abilities can save your business time and costs. Lastly, it allows your team members to focus their attention on tasks like closing deals and making customers happy.
5. It Increases Business Profitability
All in all, a CRM can do wonders to improve your business’ sales, marketing, and customer support processes. Getting a CRM can make your organization customer-oriented. The best part is that customer-centric organizations tend to grow 4 to 8% faster than their competitors. Many studies suggest that customer-centric organizations have higher revenue and cost savings. This means CRMs have a great ROI (Return on Investment) and can boost your business’ fiscal performance.
Bonus Tips for Using a CRM
- Make sure you get a CRM with a Mobile App functionality, so your employees can stay connected even on the go. CRMs like Zoho, Pipedrive, and Zendesk come with mobile apps.
- Since a CRM is a cloud-based tool, so make sure you have uninterrupted internet access. If you don’t, you can check out Optimum Internet for fast and dependable internet. After all, connectivity is key to productivity.
- Make sure you get a customizable CRM that gives you multiple options as add-ons. This allows you to customize your CRM according to your business goals.
- Conduct employee training so that they do not get stuck trying to navigate around the CRM. These trainings will also help employees see how they can use digital tools to increase productivity.
