We’ve acknowledged the customer experience (CX) era for some time, but as consumer expectations take a digital shift, even more stress is being placed is being placed on keeping customers happy. The CRM system is often hailed as the heart of CX, yet many businesses don’t give their CRMs the attention they deserve. Here Renaud Charvet, CEO of cloud communication solutions provider Ringover, shares his insight for a successful CRM strategy.
A CRM is a business’s gameplan for how it maintains the relationship between its customers and its sales, marketing and customer service teams. This can cover an array of channels: telephone calls, social media interactions, chatbot conversations, email, websites, and a variety of marketing materials can all be integrated into a CRM solution. That’s a lot of data for businesses to track, manage and evaluate.
Without a good plan in place, it’s information overload. So how do you build a CRM strategy that works?
It’s a Strategy, Not Just Software
To get the most out of a CRM, businesses need to know what they’re doing with it. Reducing sales cycles? Keeping churn to a minimum? Offering more personalized services? It’s vital a business defines its goals.
Knowing the ins and outs of the customer journey will give a clear picture of all the potential touchpoints a customer has with the sales funnel. Users of the CRM can then reflect whether their current sales and marketing funnel truly reflects the buying journey.
It’s no good just telling staff members to use a CRM — they need to know how to make the most out of it. It’s important to set up internal usage guidelines on what, how and when staff should enter data into a CRM system. Adopting a CRM as a way of thinking, rather than ”just a piece of software”, is key. Getting into the mindset that all data must be stored in one centralized, accessible location is the key to long-term success.
Getting Automated
A major pain point in customer facing roles is data entry. Sales teams often get tied up with other tasks and keeping records updated is forgotten. This means there’s no unified data system, resulting in plenty of missed opportunities to improve CX.
Businesses should consider automating some of these manual processes, so that employees can focus on more complex tasks. Automated communication in the early stages of a customer relationship and e-mail templates for frequently asked questions save customer facing staff time and effort to channel into other, more challenging tasks.
A CRM strategy can involve these automation steps, but it can go even further too. New Internet of Things (IoT) enabled technologies aren’t just for complex industrial applications. They have their place in business management too, and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) integrations can make CRMs more intuitive.
For example, revenue intelligence tools can be integrated with CRM and call software to automatically scan for upcoming meetings. The AI bot then joins any calls automatically, transcribes the call and analyzes the transcription to suggest the best next steps. This takes the headache out of keeping records up-to-date, while making sure nothing slips through the net.
Time to Integrate
Making use of AI and automation will certainly make CX more manageable. For a CRM to be truly streamlined, it needs to integrate with a business’s phone system. Using several, siloed pieces of software isn’t going to make life easier for anybody in the business.
Any customer facing team will spend a large majority of their time on the phone, so it’s worth considering a cloud calling system that can be directly integrated into a CRM.
Incoming calls can be automatically linked to the caller’s account to give agents all the information that the company holds on the client in just one click. Calls, texts, voicemail messages and recordings are automatically logged in the CRM to give a comprehensive overview of every time a customer has contacted the company.
It goes without saying that good customer relationships are the core to profitability. Whether a business has never invested in a CRM system before, or if they’re in need of a refresh, it’s never too late to assess your CRM strategy.
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