In a digital day and age where the customer reigns supreme, every growth-oriented company needs to have a comprehensive CRM tool at their side. Simply put, a strong CRM tool gives you a bird’s eye view of every customer and allows you to nurture your relationship with your audience, generate quality leads, drive conversions, and boost just about every other department in your business – sales, marketing, and customer support. Looking at the broader picture, CRM can transform your company in the new normal, and help you build a popular and authoritative brand in a competitive online market.
After all, the key to building a loyal brand following and acquiring new customers without breaking the bank is to elevate CX as much as possible. To do this, you need a good CRM solution, and you need to use it to fuel other teams in order to improve external communication – mainly sales and customer support. Let’s take a look how all of this ties together and how you can use your CRM software to drive customer experience forward.
It all starts with personalized interactions
Personalization is the name of the digital marketing game, but it also permeates the business world as a whole. Sales, marketing, support, PR, all of these and other external processes can be personalized to address the unique needs of the individual or the target group of consumers and your online audience as a whole. If you’re not personalizing your interactions and communication, then you’re just another faceless brand that doesn’t care about its customers – or at least that’s how the world is going to perceive your company. This is why personalization is imperative, and why it is essential in elevating the overall customer experience.
Of course, you can’t hope to achieve this without the right customer information in your hands, which is where your CRM tool comes into play. Aside from personalizing just the marketing processes, you want to use your CRM data to personalize your entire digital presence, including your website and social media, as well as all external communication whether it’s via phone, email, direct messaging, or other.
Keeping in touch to build customer loyalty
Customer acquisition and customer retention should be your two primary objectives; however, there is no denying that the latter is the key to long-term success. Customer retention typically denotes customer loyalty as well, because returning customers are a clear sign that their past experiences and interactions with your brand have been positive and rewarding. It also means that your brand is memorable and engaging enough to keep them coming back instead of heading over to your competitors’ websites.
There are many ways to build customer loyalty, but for all the fancy solutions and strategies out there, simply keeping in touch is much more affordable and highly effective. CRM allows you to send regular emails, messages, news, updates, and tailored offers. This is a great way to check in on your customers, but if you really want them to fall in love with your brand, you will stop pushing products and instead ask them how satisfied they are, if there is any way you can assist them, and just let them know that you’re here to address their every need. The modern customer appreciates a brand that keeps in touch for their well-being instead of using the opportunity to make a quick repeat sale.
Pouring CRM data into external communication
Communication is the driving force behind sales, marketing support, and many other processes, which means that you need to optimize and perfect it to appeal to your online audience. Two things you need to achieve that: CRM and a comprehensive communication system like VoIP. Voice over internet protocol already brings call analytics to your company that you can use to make smarter decisions, but when complemented by your CRM data, you can take external communication to the next level.
That said, it’s not just about the data, it’s also about the VoIP system and the features it brings to the table. For example, the leading VoIP provider Nextiva offers call analytics but also the numerous communication tools that allows you to put that data to good use. After all, what good is knowing that your customers prefer mobile communication if you only use email? Find the right VoIP plan, and use your CRM data to communicate more efficiently and effectively.
Building an offer they can’t refuse
Personalized communication is a powerful way to build loyalty and bring new customers to your website, but so is building an offer tailored to the individual. If you want to make every customer’s experience in dealing with your brand a positive one, then you need to tailor your offer and even your online presence to their needs and preferences.
This means pulling the data from your CRM and VoIP analytics tools to optimize your website to the exact liking of a repeat customer, for example. In practice, this means that different returning customers will see different versions of your site based on their past interests, browsing history, purchases, and interactions with your brand. You can use this data to craft tailored offers that will inspire them to make another purchase and keep coming back to your brand.
Responding quickly and being omnipresent
Lastly, it’s important to note that CRM software allows you to identify the right channels for external communication, but more importantly, it helps you develop other sales and communication channels to drive the customer experience forward. Leveraging CRM data and its various features allows your sales and support staff to become omnipresent in the online world, meaning that they’re always ready and able to respond to messages, pick up calls, and engage with leads in a way that fits their needs and preferences.
Wrapping up
Focusing on continuously improving the customer’s experience is the way to ensure long-term growth, and to do that, you need a good CRM tool. That said, CRM is not the answer to all your problems, so make sure to leverage its functionalities to fuel all other departments, particularly sales and support in order to generate leads and build a loyal customer base.
