Customers today expect an imaginative, high-quality experience in a multichannel environment. Regards this as an opportunity, companies can leverage new strategies and technologies to create operations capable of making good on their customer-centric promise and grow their business.
According to infographics, the key to turning a small business into a sales powerhouse is customer relationship management (CRM).
Knowing who your customer is, what their interests are and having tools to monitor social engagement is an important part of any successful business. Customer relationship management or more specifically apps/software that are designed for this purpose, can help give small businesses valuable insight into their customers that also, when paired with the proper processes, can improve the productivity and efficiency of a company.
Think Like a Customer
Many companies, ensuring that every customer has a tailored experience remains an elusive goal. Some studies suggest that failing to deliver a high-quality customer experience can result in a staggering erosion of a company’s customer base - a loss of as much as 50 percent over a five-year period.
Why some companies succeed while so many fail is often because of internal barriers they made. Even the best-intentioned attempts at customer-centricity can be sabotaged by strategies, organizations, processes, technologies and data, which can result in disconnected sales, marketing and service functions. Customer must be able to view all of the company's functions and business units as a single company.
Thinking like a customer is the first challenge, and delivering a positive customer experience is even more difficult. Achieving customer-centricity requires rethinking the way business is done.
Identifying the obstacles, knowing that the competition is expanding, customer that evolves, hearing the voice of dissatisfaction, killing the back-office mentality and the need of effective connectivity are some of the obstacles in the dramatically altered market and customer environment.
Why CRM?
CRM is a model for managing a company’s interactions with current and future customers. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize sales, marketing, customer service, and technical support.
CRM comes in variations. These include:
- Sales force automation - A software to streamline the sales process. It's a contact management system for tracking and recording every stage in the sales process for each prospective client, from initial contact to final disposition.
- Marketing - CRM systems for marketing track and measure campaigns over multiple channels, such as email, search, social media, telephone and direct mail. These systems track clicks, responses, leads and deals.
- Customer service and support - CRMs can be used to create, assign and manage requests made by customers. CRM software can also be used to identify and reward loyal customers.
- Appointments - Automatically provide suitable appointment times to customers via e-mail or the web, which are then synchronized with the representative or agent's calendar.
- Small business - Small business CRM may consist of a contact manager system which integrates emails, documents, jobs, faxes, and scheduling for individual accounts. CRMs available for specific markets for professional markets are frequently touted for their event management and relationship tracking opposed to financial return on investment (ROI).
- Social media - Some CRMs coordinate with social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+ to track and communicate with customers who share opinions and experiences about their company, products and services.
- Non-profit and membership-based - Systems for non-profit and membership-based organizations help track constituents, fund-raising, demographics, membership levels, directories, volunteering and communications between individuals in the organization.
With these in mind, there are two areas CRM apps focus on that can improve customer relationships: CRM Apps and Customer Interaction and CRM Apps paired with Accounting Software.
CRM and Customer Interaction
CRM app’s primary function is to provide marketers and their companies with customer engagement data from a mixture of different social channels, such as social media and email, and present this information on a platform. According to the infographic there are six key components for a CRM application to be at its full potential:
1. Real-time Feed: Information about customer engagement is presented in a newsfeed-like fashion.
2. Task Management: Being organized is a key to being successful and this doesn't change when it comes to CRM. According to the infographic, a CRM app should enable users to quickly and easily organize and add or delete tasks.
3. Email: A CRM application must give marketers the option of responding to customers as quickly as possible. A good CRM app will effectively collect and synchronize engagement and trend data with a user’s preferred email client.
4. Leads: A business has to make sure that this person becomes a repeat customer. This is where leads come in, as they give marketers the chance to organize data into a singular platform, manage and track social channels and manage lead conversion making sure that a business is up to date on what their current and potential customers are doing.
5. Social Media: Social media have become advertisement and promotional platforms. CRM tool should not only be able to monitor as many channels as possible and find out relevant personal data about a customer, such as their location, but track a customer’s social media interactions by looking for questions they may have, conversations they are having and other relevant information.
6. Performance: CRM should give a business the tools to monitor their own performance by being able to compare customer data with sales projections and manage client information and adjust it accordingly when changes are needed.
Pairing with Other Softwares
On their own, CRM apps are effective tools, but their effectiveness can be improved if they are used in conjunction with other products. For example, with accounting software a company will be able to see important data such as customer’s account history and communications, but overall having this data in one place is a time efficient solution to improving employee productivity.
Merging this data with accounting software can help users not only gain insight about past trends, but also helps them create a more accurate forecast for the future.
By adapting a CRM platform or application, businesses will not only be able to better their customer engagement efforts, but use this information to improve their company as a whole.