Member Article

CRM technology - helping businesses stay above water

By Ambroży Rybicki,CEO and co-founder of ARP Ideas

Amidst the current economic situation, where both corporate budgets are tight and consumers are being more stringent, businesses are working hard to beat out the competition and maintain sales performance.

In order to do this, businesses need to maintain and nurture existing customer relationships. But it’s not something they can do alone.

Customers are the lifeblood of every business and relationships with them can make or break a company. As such, businesses need to find an effective way to manage and communicate with their customers and enhance their overall experience.

This is where not only investing in a well-executed Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 or another equivalent, but also determining an effective strategy behind its implementation, is vital. But how will it help businesses?

The below points provide insight into the top five ways CRM technology can help businesses weather the storm during an economic downturn and secure their goal of future growth.

1. Understanding the customer journey

The key to any relationship is to understand the other party’s needs. When it comes to businesses and their customers, unless the former knows what the latter is looking for from their business, they can’t deliver it. Companies that do not know or do not understand the needs of existing or potential customers will take actions that are at variance with the facts and thus may lose a significant portion of the market or potential revenue.

Understanding customer behaviour and preferences is crucial for the success of any business. And CRM technology can help with this. By gathering and analysing valuable customer data, including purchase history, browsing patterns, and demographics, CRM solutions can inform businesses on these trends, provide a 360-degree view of the customer and thus enable them to set their strategy accordingly, be that at the level of an individual customer, a group of customers or even an entire market.

However, it’s not just a matter of collecting the data and having the CRM system process it appropriately, as the key is the relevant use of the data by those interacting with the customer. CRM technology helps those in sales and customer service departments to properly manage the customer relationship by setting up automatic tasks and reminders or by prompting AI-supported action sequences to a specific case. This allows them to interact with the customer at the appropriate level of intensity or depth, and thus customer service teams can explore the needs of the customer continuously. This makes customers feel taken care of and treated in a personalised way, even if the interactions with them are heavily backed by CRM technology and automation.

2. Improve customer service and experience through a properly built customer journey

Once businesses have insight into their customers’ needs, it’s important they communicate and build relationships focused around those. Personalised approaches will always be important, however, for large businesses, reaching out to customers manually is not realistic, whereas going fully automated isn’t always the answer either. The perfect solution to this problem is a properly configured customer journey in CRM, which guides the customer through the purchasing and after-sales process in a controlled manner, providing them with the right type of interaction, and giving the vendor the ability to fully automate.

CRM solutions with built-in customer journey capabilities provide businesses with the tools to provide efficient and personalised customer support, in a time efficient manner. What’s more, integrating CRM systems with other communication tools such as live chat, email, VoIP, and social media, allows businesses to seamlessly collate, manage, and track customer cases such as inquiries, complaints or after-sales matters, accordingly.

Using a well-configured CRM system with multi-channel integration enables businesses to automate the flow of cases, resulting in prompt responses and resolutions from customer service agents and ensuring customer experience remains at an appropriate standard.

Having oversight of the entire customer case also means businesses can collect data on their service level objectives, such as time to resolve, as well as foster long-term customer satisfaction and loyalty.

3. Boost efficiency

Whether you’re an e-commerce business or a fintech, efficient operations will always be key to success, especially in areas where human interaction is required, such as sales or customer service agents.

By integrating CRM systems, businesses can automate workflows, reduce manual errors, ensure timely order processing, and identify customer renewals, amongst other functions. This not only improves customer satisfaction, but also helps businesses to optimise time-consuming internal processes and reduce operational costs.

Furthermore, whilst efficiency is relatively sustainable for businesses at a particular size, the majority of businesses are looking to grow. Therefore, having a system that also allows for flexibility and scalability, will ensure that efficient operations continue. As a result, companies can gain a cost advantage over their competitors, which allows, with good management, further market penetration, accumulation of savings and access to capital for growth.

By leaning on CRM to integrate new functionalities and handle increased customer volumes or other operational demands, businesses can expand and scale back as they need.

4. Facilitate better collaboration and integration

While CRM is extremely beneficial for employees in customer facing roles, it also provides advantages for internal communications and projects.

Most businesses will be using multiple communication tools both internally and externally so it’s vital they have a system that aligns all of them. Having this alignment allows colleagues to collaborate by putting all the information they require in one place, leading to seamless handovers and accurately assigned and resourced projects whilst also preventing the doubling up of tasks or any issues of miscommunication.

A good CRM system will act as a well-informed advisor that employees can consult on both internal and external matters, allowing for both the operational efficiency and good customer experience I mentioned earlier in this article.

5. Maintain sales pipelines

Finally, business growth is not possible without a strong sales pipeline.

Where CRM can be really effective is when it comes to multichannel integration such as that which occurs during sales and marketing campaigns.

The customer landscape is very competitive, especially in today’s current climate, so targeted and tailored campaigns are vital.

CRM technology helps businesses distinguish their customer base in regard to various categories, such as purchase history, browsing behaviour, and demographics. These can then be used to create personalised marketing campaigns or direct sales activities that resonate with specific customer groups.

By leveraging CRM data, businesses can deliver highly targeted advertisements, email campaigns, and promotion in a matter of minutes. This targeted approach not only improves marketing ROI, but also enhances customer engagement and drives repeat purchases.

Overall, CRM can be incredibly helpful for businesses looking to maintain momentum during a difficult economic landscape, however, in order to help it help you, it’s important to get the implementation and strategy right from the start.

I’d advise any business looking to invest in CRM or enhance their existing system to outline their goals and understand how they wish to use the system before jumping in. Even with the high success rates accompanying CRM implementation, and the benefits highlighted in this piece, the software will be relatively meaningless unless used appropriately.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Lucie Hayes .