Two essential things run a business – money and people. While the monetary aspect takes control of decision-making, it is essential to remember that a business runs essentially through customers. Therefore, customer retention and satisfaction should be the primary goal of a business.
Everything about your business that can be should be automated in the world progressing towards complete automation. Automating customer interactions with your business and how you manage their information can be done through CRM. But what is CRM? Let’s learn in this article.
What is CRM?
CRM is an acronym standing for Customer Retention Management. It is a software that manages a business’s past, current, and potential customers. It stores all the interactions a person has with the company and stores them for better marketing, sales, commerce, and service experiences.
CRM system is the process or a tool of managing a company’s contacts, sales, productivity, and after-sales services. It is the way of building a great business relationship with a customer.
A CRM Software aims to connect all the information the company has on a potential or current customer to all the relevant company departments. By gathering a customer’s browsing information, feedback, and sales conversion information.
With the help of CRM, you can ensure clean streamlining of every step of the business interaction process with the customer. Since CRM stores detailed information regarding a customer’s purchasing behavior, personal information, and browsing history, it can provide a customer exactly what they want.
What Does a Typical CRM System Do?
When we look at CRM Software from the most basic leans, its function is to allow salespeople and marketers to analyze business and customer relations. Through this analysis, they can create meaningful business relations with potential and current customers.
CRM Software keeps track of all the information a customer has ever provided to a business. It then allows access to many relevant departments to allow personalized interactions between the business and the customers. Personalization, in turn, increases the chances of conversion and boosts customer loyalty.
The various places where a CRM Software might take information from a customer are:
- Search engine history
- Online contact with the business
- Google forms
- Shopping history with the company
The various places where CRM points create touchpoints for customer-company interactions are:
- Emails
- Phone calls
- Search engines
- Contact forms
- Social media
Not only can CRM Software make the company’s functioning easily through customer information retention, but also some task facilitation. Following are a few things you can expect CRM software to do to make things simpler.
Marketing Automation
Some of the best CRM Softwares allow automation facilities like Marketing Automation that make tedious tasks simpler. Such automation might include creating automatic mailing lists, responding to sales funnels, publishing social media posts on a schedule, etc.
Sales Automation
For products and services that run on subscription, keeping a manual record of everything can be a huge headache. A CRM software can keep track of all the subscription sales and notify the required people on time. For example, the customer will receive emails to renew their subscription when it is about to end or will auto-renew it.
Workflow Automation
Simple things such as changing digital calendars, marking holidays, data entry, and other routine and mundane tasks take up too much time. A CRM Software takes charge of all the daily digital tasks so that the employees can focus on more important things in the business.
Analytics
A typical CRM system comes with a built-in analytics tool. This tool can collect customer feedback and analyze retention rates. You can then view certain statistics automatically, ready for further marketing planning.
Artificial Intelligence
CRM systems are built to recognize marketing and workflow patterns that boost sales. This artificial intelligence streamlines a business’ functioning for performance growth.
Personalization for Customers
A CRM software can be used to create personalized shopping and dealing experiences for each customer. Such personalization is sure to increase conversion and retention.
How CRM Can Benefit Your Business
A CRM Software can take a business that is not able to grow because of the lack of automation to a whole another level of success. Even though each business might have different requirements, there is absolutely no business that will not benefit from CRM Software. Let’s have a look at some ways your business will benefit from CRM Software today.
Connects Your Business
One of the biggest problems of non-automated working is how difficult it is to connect informational channels throughout a company. When a customer’s information is needed by multiple channels in the company, it only makes sense for everything to be connected to one another.
When your business has a shared CRM, connecting the entire business together becomes exceptionally simple. Each customer has their own informational profile that can be accessed by all necessary requirements throughout the company for better workflow and connectivity.
Identifies and Segregates Leads
One of the biggest benefits of using CRM software is its ability to identify and segregate leads. Once the software has segregated leads into neat categories, it becomes exceptionally simple for marketers to reach their target audience. A CRM Software’s artificial intelligence allows marketers to focus on strategies instead of focusing on getting leads.
Improves Sales Efficiency
From identifying leads to nurturing meaningful business relations with customers and clearing the pipeline, CRM Software does everything. A CRM Software streamlines the company’s efficiency and supports the sales and marketing team through every step of their job.
From scheduling appointments, follow-ups, and service renewals, to suggesting the right deals and offers, the CRM Software does it all. The sales team can get all the information they need about a customer as soon as they need it.
Improves Customer Service
The biggest benefit of CRM is to create the best possible customer experience for all people who come in contact with your business. A CRM Software will help your business provide maximum assistance and support to your customers.
By keeping track of the customer’s shopping trends and core interests, your business can gain great insights. It is through these insights that the various teams in your company can smoothen the customer experience.
Allows for Product and Service Improvement
One of the most important but hidden benefits of CRM Software is that it can help your company improve its products and services. A CRM Software can gather feedback and information regarding customer satisfaction through various channels. Artificial intelligence is one of these ways.
Once you can see the feedback and the sales trends changing when you make alterations to your product or services, you can be sure of going in the right direction regarding changes.
Saves Time and Money
As a business grows, you will see an increase in the mundane tasks you and your employees have to do on a daily basis. Tasks such as aa entry, date changes, subscription renewals, and sending follow-up emails can waste a lot of executive time. A CRM Software combats that problem since it will automate most of these mundane digital tasks.
When software does so many things for you, needless to say, you will have to hire fewer people. Even though the amount might sound less, any reduction in the business’ running cost makes a huge difference in defining its success. If you use an open-source CRM, you will gain even better cost and time reduction benefits,
How Can You Use a CRM Software to Increase Sales?
When you have a handy CRM system in place, it has a role to play in every single step of the business. Earlier, CRM used to focus only on sales. However, the system can now take the customer’s information to make the marketing, sales, customer service, and commerce departments work quicker and more efficiently.
Not only can an effective CRM system help you convert potential customers but also retain the current ones by providing exemplary service. Let’s understand how the system works in every step of business development and management through an example of an eCommerce business.
Taking Information from New Potential Customers
Whenever a new customer stumbles upon your store and looks for something, your CRM system will get information regarding it. Your company’s sales and marketing team and take the information and add the potential customer to your mailing list.
Converting Potential Customers
Once the CRM system has the potential customers’ mailing list, your business’ sales team can know what they want. The marketing team can also send a personalized message to the potential customer telling them about a deal they can get on the product they were looking for. More likely than not, such a message will encourage your customer to make the purchase.
Making Add-On Sales
Since your company’s CRM system retains a lot of information regarding the new customer, you can know a bit about their preferences. Your company’s commerce and marketing team can work together to form a personalized list of add-ons the customer can buy.
For example, if the new customer has bought a smartphone from your e-commerce store, you can sell them covers and mobile accessories as well.
Personalizing Their Experience with Your Business
One of the best things an online business can do to retain customers is to personalize their experience. A CRM system keeps track not only of the customer’s personal information but also their preferences and buying trends. Therefore, the commerce team can create a personalized page or a buying list for this customer.
After-Sales Service
The CRM software will keep track of all the purchases the customer has made. The after-sales team can tally this record and contact customers to ask for feedback and product maintenance tips. This is not only an opportunity to please and retain customers but also make more sales for maintenance.
Customer Retention Follow-Ups
You can set the CRM Software to check for dormant customers. The sales team can then contact these customers and see if they would like to make further purchases with you. Your business can also offer a suitable personalized deal to this customer in an attempt to get more sales.
Customized CRM Software Solutions
No two businesses work exactly the same, making each business’ requirements unique. One particular CRM system cannot work with equal efficiency for all types of businesses. While a retail business will have different customer retention requirements, a hospital will have completely different needs.
Businesses vary in the product or service they deal in, size, work nature, and many other factors. It is important to consider all those factors while creating a tailor-made CRM Software solution for each business model. Let’s look at some unique CRM solutions for different types and sizes of businesses.
Retail CRM
Retail CRM is the best way to streamline the workflow and customer management in a retail business. It helps in boosting customer satisfaction, improving the company’s performance, and reducing running costs. Retail CRM also helps in creating real-time analytics and similar reports to enhance a retail business’s productivity. It can do five unique things:
- Managing daily retail sales plans
- Capturing maximum information and feedback from the customer
- Predicting future orders in light of past sales
- Delivering enhanced experience to the customers
- Personalizing interactions with customers
A Retail CRM software is built to identify the best utility and power of your business’ retail network. It helps your retail business retain the most customers from an extremely competitive market.
ECommerce CRM
One of the best things about integrating an online business with an eCommerce CRM is the mutual digital operation. Since both your organization and the open-source CRM system function online, an eCommerce CRM can best help your business do the following things:
- Discovering and attracting more customers through adverts.
- Collecting personal and browsing information from customers to help you streamline their interaction experience with the business.
- Providing you with a customer’s buying history and preferences to help build customer loyalty through personalized plans.
- Reducing customer management and organizational workflow costs.
- Connecting the organization in a more efficient manner.
Building and maintaining customer relations for eCommerce businesses is very difficult due to a lack of physical interaction. However, with the help of the right CRM software, your business can be just as interactive with its customers as a traditional offline business.
Enterprise-Level Business CRM
The biggest a business gets, the more difficult the management process becomes. When a business reaches enterprise-level operations, not only does it have a plethora of departments to deal with but also a huge number of customers or clients to work with. This is why an Enterprise-grade Business CRM is expected to perform all the basic CRM functions properly and more.
It is important for enterprise-level CRM software to be able to identify different departments within the company. With such identification, the CRM software can then locate information according to the task required to be taken to improve business.
An enterprise-level business CRM is the best way to cut down on mundane manual tasks and operational costs. It is also the way to go to deal with hundreds of customers without making any faults.
Real Estate CRM
Real estate requires the agents to be very well connected. Agents not only have to narrow available properties but also maintain superb customer relations for success. Below are a few ways in which a real estate business can benefit from a Real Estate CRM system.
- Creating online channels on popular third-party sites to get the projects, locations, & budgets on which you can deal a property.
- Managing Various online & offline campaigns to generate leads. Sending automated texts & emails to potential customers & sellers.
- Planning site visits on a well-updated calendar.
- Giving insights into the kind of properties a potential or active client is looking for.
- Providing proper sales and sealing analytics for future improvement.
Managing a business where the customer-agent relationship is long-binding can be difficult. A real estate agent does not sell to the same customer time and again, but mostly only makes two to three or even fewer sales per customer. Therefore, having a proper record of each sale and client makes a huge difference in the way the business functions.
Small Business CRM
Regardless of the size of the business you run, the task is never easy. Not only do you have to manage customers, but also huge operational costs and employees. All of this needs to be done when you are in a shortage of resources. Therefore, the best Small Business CRM is one that provides maximum efficiency at minimum cost.
A Small business CRM should do all the following things seamlessly.
- Maintaining customer information in a single location for easy access.
- Building lead generation through analyzing website visitors.
- Automating email and text campaigns.
- Foreseeing future sales through past business patterns.
Summing Up
Running a business takes a lot of patience, resources, time, energy, and stability. There is only so much that humans can do. Therefore, whenever there is a scope for automation and improvements, it is important for the business to do it.
Customers are the most important aspects of a business. Therefore, it only makes sense to make customer retention automatic and seamless. No matter how different requirements each business has, there is no business that cannot benefit from CRM. Therefore, if you are a business owner, do not think twice and invest in good CRM software for your company.