Whether your company is a tech startup or a medium-sized e-commerce brand, you can agree that your customers are the lifeblood of your business. You need to treat them well to improve your bottom line. However, delivering 100% customer experience and satisfaction all the time is a challenge, especially if you’re just growing your business.
Improving your customer relationship management (CRM) is one way to provide a high-quality customer experience consistently. You can do this by integrating a CRM platform with your business tools. But first, let’s take a deeper look into what CRM is and how it affects your business.
What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?
CRM used to refer to the company-wide business strategy of improving business performance through increased customer loyalty, reduced costs of customer acquisition, and improved profitability and revenue. Nowadays, CRM also applies to the tools and technologies that manage your company’s relationships and customer interactions.
With a CRM platform, all customer information from your customer-facing departments is streamlined and made available for everyone in your company to use. Employees from marketing, sales, and customer support can use this information to improve customer communication and guide sales and marketing campaigns, ultimately providing a seamless experience for customers as they interact with your company.
Aside from keeping and documenting customer information, a CRM platform has other core functionalities:
- Marketing automation – Automate repetitive tasks to boost marketing efforts at different stages of the lead generation’s lifecycle.
- Sales force automation – Track customer interactions and automate necessary business functions, like following through leads and building customer loyalty.
- Contact center automation – Handle customer requests using pre-recorded assistance audio and chatbots.
- Location-based services – Create marketing campaigns with geolocation technology. Through CRM tools, you can find prospects based on locations.
Why CRM Matters for Your Business
CRM can help your business gain new customers and retain existing ones. In a Capterra study, 47% of polled CRM users said CRM had improved their customer retention and satisfaction.
With the rising standards of customer expectations, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to secure brand loyalty. Using a CRM tool, you’ll be able to prioritize your sales and marketing efforts to reach customers at different points in the sales cycle, allowing you to increase your conversion rate and improve customer experience.
You’ll get insights into customer behavior and preferences. The more you know about your customers, the better you can understand their needs, improve your product, and provide great service. Whenever you provide your customers with a positive experience, they are more likely to patronize your business.
How a CRM Platform Helps Your Business
While better customer experience and retention are the primary benefits of using CRM, they also provide other business advantages.
Improves employee performance and workflows
A CRM platform doesn’t only improve the company-customer relationship but also employee performance. With this tool, employees can learn from how others communicate with customers, which helps strengthen different parts of their jobs whether they’re part of customer support or marketing.
CRM software can also increase your team productivity by allowing employees to tag each other on projects and send notes, messages, and emails all within one system.
Better communication with customers and prospects
Apart from managing internal communications, a CRM platform allows your team to track your customers’ buying journey. It means that you can follow through each interaction with every customer, whether it’s via email or phone call.
Since you can track a customer’s journey, you’ll also have access to their key information, like their full name, email address, job title, and birthday. All of these can give your team a competitive advantage because they’ll be able to personalize their communication with the contact while allowing your business to have a better grasp of what your customer wants.
Helps with customer service efforts
Modern-day customers have high expectations when it comes to customer experience. Your company must provide fast customer support that’s available any time.
A CRM platform helps your team keep track of customers’ orders and interactions. With these resources, you can solve problems quickly as the platform shares status updates that you can then communicate to customers. It’s also a helpful guide for understanding how to serve your customers better and improve their satisfaction.
Allows for better sales forecasts
CRM platforms have automated sales reports that can help you review your past performance and plan for future strategies. Specifically, it shows key trends where you can get an idea of how your future sales cycle performance will look like. Through accurate sales forecasts, you can adjust your goals and metrics to meet your desired projections.
Provides better analytics
A great CRM platform has built-in data analytic capabilities, contextualizing data and breaking it down into actionable items and understandable metrics. With data such as click-through rates, demographics, and bounce rates, you’ll be able to evaluate, create, and optimize more targeted marketing campaigns, which will lead to better customer satisfaction rates. This will also present more opportunities for cross-selling, which will increase the average lifetime value of a customer and drive up profits.
Makes scaling your business easier
Your team can use gathered customer data to identify which business processes work for the company and which needs improvement. As your business grows with CRM, you’ll recognize what resources are no longer useful for the company, enabling you to scale your business and reduce costs.
Choose a CRM Platform Integrated into a Cloud-Based ERP
A CRM platform helps improve your relationships with existing customers, find new prospects, and win back former customers. In addition, it organizes, collects, and manages all customer information so that you can tailor your marketing and sales initiatives.
Having a standalone CRM platform is good, but it’s even better if it’s fully integrated with your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. By incorporating a CRM platform in your cloud ERP system, everything from your supply chain and inventory to service delivery and accounting is in one accessible system. This makes all your processes more efficient as you don’t need to hop from one platform to another.
Acumatica is a cloud ERP with top-notch business management solutions that can help your company thrive in today’s digital economy. It has a CRM module fully integrated within its system, so you don’t have to worry about it being compatible with your ERP system.
Yondu is Acumatica’s partner in the Philippines. If you’re planning to take your business strategies to a whole new level, schedule a consultation with Yondu’s ERP experts today!
