The Importance of CRM: Trends That Can Help You Improve Customer Experience
Customers are at the heart of any business because without them, a business cannot prosper. After struggling to find customers comes the challenging part, keeping them. Maintaining a strong relationship with customers increasingly becomes the cornerstone of any business looking to stand apart from the crowd. Providing a great customer experience helps you attract more leads and convert them into customers. Happy clients willingly refer you to other customers, which improves your brand and revenue stream—this is the importance of CRM.
Creating a satisfied and consistent customer base is the goal of any Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy. Several CRM platforms and techniques have been designed to help with structure and organization, as far as customer relationships are concerned. Whatever the size of your enterprise, it is essential to improve your CRM strategy continually. That's the key to effective CRM management. One way to achieve progress is to incorporate trends into your CRM strategy.
Here are important trends you can use to enhance your customer experience.
Big Data and Personalization
Excellent customer service boils down to the personal experience a client has with your business. How do your customers feel when they approach you for assistance or a product? Customers increasingly gravitate towards brands that listen to them and understand them. One way to ensure that your clients feel cared for is to personalize their experience.
With personalization, you can keep each customer satisfied and increase the likelihood of generating referrals.
However, with hundreds or thousands of clients, how can you ensure that each customer receives individual treatment?
Fortunately, advancements in technology have made it easier to monitor clients, store, and analyze their information. You can track customers through their social media, web visits, sales, marketing campaigns, and other contact points to ensure that your outreach and feedback deliver customer needs.
With simple details such as customer names in your database, you can personally address a customer in emails, while predictive analytics from customer data helps you improve your digital customer experience. Ultimately, utilizing big data enables you to deliver a personalized experience in an automated and efficient manner.
Mobile CRM
When was the last time you looked at your smartphone? An hour ago, five minutes ago, or perhaps you're staring at your phone as you read this. Research shows that the average American adult spends 3 hours and 30 minutes on the mobile internet. The average time is expected to grow by 20 minutes every year.
As the old saying goes, time is money, and if your average American client spends a significant chunk of the day on their phone, your business needs to be there too.
To keep up with customers, your sales and marketing team needs to respond to clients on their phones. Fortunately, CRM platforms have mobile apps to help your team perform actions on smartphones and tablets. Also, mobile CRM is easy to integrate with social media, making it easier to respond to clients on different social media platforms.
With mobile CRM, it's easier to collect client data from several social media channels, automatically integrate the contact data to create reliable customer insights, and use the information to deliver a personalized experience through your marketing or sales rep.
Marketing Automation
Traditional CRM relies on human input, which, while beneficial, can be ineffective, inefficient, and erroneous. Automation reduces the need for human input and increases efficiency in your business operations. In marketing, automation reduces the need for manual data entry, endless spreadsheets, and manual customer outreach.
Marketing automation utilizes technologies that optimize human effort while reducing opportunities for error. For example, chatbots offer a personalized experience and increase your engagement, while automated lead scoring helps your team engage leads at crucial marketing funnel points. Each of these technologies improves your CRM, saves you time, increases your speed, and ultimately boosts your business.
AI as Part of CRM Systems
Artificial intelligence is transforming our lives through technologies such as intelligent assistants and predictions on streaming platforms such as Netflix. Combining the power of AI and CRM helps you deliver a more personalized and predictive customer experience.
Virtual assistants and bots interact with customers to reduce tedious workflows and improve engagement. AI-powered platforms enhance sentiment analysis and ultimately improve your customer service. With more and more people transacting virtually, AI-powered tools that dig through comments and conversations help deduce client emotions. If a client is unsatisfied with a service, your customer support can intervene to mitigate the situation.
What's more, AI-powered CRMs help you sift data and determine what's beneficial to your business. Incomplete, stale, and duplicated data chokes your databases and gives poor insight. However, since manual cleanups waste time and increase human error, automatic tools are necessary. AI-powered tools clean your data and ensure that your sales and marketing team uses clean data to deliver the best customer experiences.
IoT Technologies and CRM
Smart devices, scanners, and sensors are increasingly becoming part of daily lives. This explosion of IoT devices expands the capabilities of CRM because it expands access to customer data. Drawing this data and transforming it into actionable insights depending on the context is the key to delivering better customer experiences.
For instance, take contextual data such as geolocation, time, purchase patterns, usage pattern, and lifestyle. What can your business achieve with this information? Geolocation helps you deliver location-based marketing, while usage pattern and time help you contact a lead when the possibility of a positive response is likely. Purchase patterns are relevant when recommending similar or related items for purchase on your e-commerce store, while lifestyle helps you recommend products relevant to a lead.
From Omnichannel to One Channel
Most companies avail themselves of different communication channels to maximize customer engagement and deliver a seamless customer experience. However, a single platform that integrates CRM functions is increasingly becoming a popular option for businesses.
What are the benefits of taking the single-channel approach? Your team can integrate all customer comments, data, and reports on one platform, enhancing the delivery of a consistent customer experience. All your service agents can access information on one platform, which streamlines internal operations.
Why the Importance of CRM Matters for Your Business?
The importance of CRM shouldn't go overlooked. Fostering a rapport with your client and delivering a personalized experience is essential for customer relationship management. By integrating the mentioned trends with your CRM strategy and platform, you can improve your marketing and sales operations. For these and more practical tips, reach out to Viral Solutions today.
At Viral Solutions we are committed to seeing YOU succeed. It is our goal to grow your business with proven digital marketing strategies that will help your business for the long haul.
Stay Up To Speed in the Ever Changing World of Marketing!
Sign-up today for FREE, monthly marketing tips, loopholes, and news to EXPLODE your Return on Investment!
Share your knowledge and gain exposure by becoming a guest author on our blog! Learn how to write for us.