How to improve Customer Experience using CRM

Customer Relationship Management or CRM is not merely a tool for improving sales and tracking customer profiles, it is an all-encompassing data system that can help further your business in terms of marketing, sales, and customer service. All of which are interdependent with Customer Experience (CX) and its management.

By providing an excellent Customer Experience, your business will be a leader in the industry and a step above its competitors. Your company can massively improve its CX by strategically using CRM and its features. But first, let’s get to the basics:

What is Customer Experience?

Customer experience is the consumer’s perception, reaction, and subjective views in exchanges made with a brand. What they saw, what they thought, and how they felt define their experience. It is made through interactions with the company’s product or service, and its people.

The goal for any business should be to make each step of the sales cycle easy, convenient and a pleasant experience for the customers.

Why is Customer Experience Important?

Many studies and business leaders have recognized the impact and importance of having high customer satisfaction rates. Providing a good customer experience boosts customer advocacy, gives your brand good word-of-mouth reviews, better customer retention, increases revenue and the overall success of your brand.

With that being said, the consequences of customers having a negative experience with a brand, however, can be quite costly.

A report made by Zendesk in 2020 reveals that for 80% of consumers, all it takes is one bad customer experience for them to stop doing business and switch over to a competitor.

Moreover, according to Ruby Newell-Legner’s “Understanding Customers”, to regain a customer’s trust and make up for just a single customer experience mishap, 12 positive customer experiences are needed.

People currently have unlimited access to information online. They have more options, better access to product reviews and information, and the convenience to make informed choices.

Nowadays, the business is the one chasing the customer, not the other way around. This makes it all the more important to leverage your resources, including CRM, to strengthen the company’s overall customer satisfaction and experience.

Using CRM to Improve your Customer Experience

Here are a few pointers on how to get the most out of your CRM in terms of providing better customer experiences. This is not only for the convenience of your consumers, but also for your CRM users, as it helps make their jobs easier, faster, and more efficient.

Know your Customers at a Deeper level

One core function of a CRM is to better understand a company’s customers. The common way of doing this through CRM is by creating Customer Profiles which include a customer’s basic personal details like their name, birth date, occupation, etc. It also includes their preferences, previous interactions, call logs, and many more.

One common issue with customer profiles is that it gets outdated fast if you’re not careful. A customer’s life is not static and it’s very important to update your data when things change.

However, it’s very tiresome to have to enter and update new data every time. A company can have thousands of customers, so it’s not practical to manually monitor and update all these changes. Services such as Voice to CRM however mitigates the hardships of CRM data entry by automating the process by only speaking or uploading a recording.

Personalize Customer Interactions

Customers highly appreciate it when a representative remembers a customer’s previous concerns and knows their preferences right off the bat. It shows that the company is paying attention, and actually cares about meeting the customer’s needs in the best way possible.

Using your CRM to automatically pull up a customer’s profile during a call or meeting, equips the representative/CRM user on how to best handle the customer and personalize the interaction. You can also use the customer profile in making email offerings and effective customized marketing.

For example, your CRM shows that Lisa’s previous purchases from your online store were jackets that she found through your blog. What you can do is to send her blog articles through email that are related to or similar in content with the blog post she read when making her previous purchase. If you find that Lisa only tends to view jackets, marketing shouldn’t present ads that promote hats or shoes instead.

“Take what they like and give them more of it to show that you respect their preference. ”

– Dimira Teneva, Word Pixie, Metrilo

Furthermore, you can also use a common CRM feature called Pipeline Management and Segmentation, to aid personalization. People on similar purchasing stages or people who are grouped together based on a category like age, and location, may have similar interests and characteristics. You can use this principle to create ready-made templates for email, chat, or ads that are customized according to each category, or stage in the pipeline.

Lastly, CRM has the ability to unify communication channels by integrating social media platforms, calls, texts, and email into one convenient place. Therefore, you can interact with your customers using their preferred communication methods, or through an Omnichannel approach. This can all be done right through your CRM.

Communicate efficiently with Automations

With CRM, there are so many ways to automate processes, especially in data gathering and communications.

You can use Email automation and provide newsletters to continue reaching out to customers and keep them informed, as well as Social Media automation to automate and schedule posts. Your company can also utilize Chatbots that can automatically assist your customers when a live person is currently unavailable, and automate follow-ups and call reminders to never lose a potential client. You can even automate data capturing during meetings, and take audio notes using Voice to CRM. 

Whenever possible, use your CRM to automate processes. It saves time and reduces manual effort. More importantly, it allows for faster response times and better customer support, two things that will greatly improve customer experience.

In Summary

There are so many features and capabilities that you can use in your CRM to improve, automate and optimize the customer experience. This includes, but is not limited to, customer profiles, omni-channel communications, social media automation, and Voice to CRM. Make sure to leverage each one and use them effectively to reap the full benefits of not just your CRM, but also your improved customer satisfaction.