More and more businesses are shifting their operations online, especially as the world itself has become more digital. However, many businesses have not shifted their processes online as well, often relying on outdated structures and attitudes to guide them. However, with the rise of online platforms that can help with organization and productivity, it is easier than ever for businesses to track their processes. One of the best ways to do this is through the use of a CRM.
But what is a CRM? A CRM, or customer relationship management, is both a software and a process that allows you to better organize your customer data and make data-driven decisions based off this data. This can be very helpful for various teams and stakeholders in your business, and can help the marketing, sales, and customer success departments work in tandem to increase customer happiness and reduce customer churn.
Having recurring and happy customers and clients is, of course, the goal of any business. Not only does a business need customers to survive, but it needs happy customers to thrive. Customer and client referrals are one of the most important and sustainable ways to drive new business relationships, and making sure that customers are satisfied with their relationship with you is key to driving these.
Fortunately, using a CRM can allow you to keep on top of your customer relationships a lot more. Using a data-driven approach a CRM allows you to create customized customer profiles and use data to gain better insight into what parts of your process need work. For example, a bottleneck may be occurring from the handoff to the sales team to the team that provides core services, and this delay may be causing customers to not feel that they are getting the value they deserve from your business.
If your customers feel that way, they may try to get out of contracts early or even say negative things about your business online. Once this occurs, it is difficult to recover your brand reputation. Using a CRM, you can track where all of your customers are in the customer journey and preempt any issues they might have when transaction with your business. You can also give the marketing team access to your CRM so that they can create data-driven marketing campaigns based on the buyer personas of your current customer or client base.
Implementing a CRM into any business is a challenge. However, the key goal of using a CRM, or any digital tool for that matter, is to increase business efficiency and improve processes. Using a CRM, a business can easily get a better handle on its customers and have a greater understanding of what they are going through at all stages of the customer lifecycle. By analyzing these trends and coming up with holistic processes based on the data, businesses can improve their customer retention rates and increase customer happiness, which should be the goal of any business looking to make inroads with customers.
