In a highly competitive business marketplace, keeping your finger on the pulse of your customers isn’t just a nice to do, it’s a must do, to accelerate growth and improve your bottom line.
But retaining – and building – a loyal customer base is reliant on more than an email once a quarter, and definitely shouldn’t to be stored in spreadsheets or in a book. It requires a robust CRM system – Customer Relationship Management – to make them stick.
If customers are King, then the CRM is the best tool to dually serve them and business owners’ best interests. A CRM system streamlines all customer communications, activities, information and interactions into one bundle. In syncing with a business’ touchpoints – emails, phone calls, social media, in-person meetings – to track potential and current customers interactions, and enhance their journeys.
Regardless of business size or industry, CRM has become the necessary touchstone to improve customer experience via strategic data and communications management, securing a business’ stake hold in customer loyalty.
A good CRM system doesn’t just pivot on one facet of a business’ operations – it covers all interaction bases – ensuring everyone, in any department of your business’ is up-to-date and across customer activity in the real-time. With all customer actions – past, present, and future-forward – centralised, collectively tailoring your daily work operations to fulfil customer demands, expectations and goals, can successfully play out.
So, what are the key facilitators of a CRM for a business – and how do they feed the customer-centric trajectory?
Central Park
A CRM is a one-stop-shop for business growth. All customers are feed into a centralised system – leads included – this means whichever stage of growth your business is experiencing; no customer is left behind. An individualised customer experience is what a CRM hones, this means removing all friction points – unifying all tools, integrations and teamwork – to ensure customer information is accessed, shared, stored and communicated seamlessly.
Share and sync alike
Building a strong business unit, alongside a stalwart customer base is what CRM achieves. Sharing data and information between teams, managers and operators, not only creates a cohesive end-to-end journey for the customer, it also cements company confidence and builds unity.
Alongside real-time sharing, is a CRM’s immediate syncing of customer interactions – no matter who is speaking to a contact, what time of day, or for how long. All things customers are instantly recorded and stored within the platform, allowing greater ease and efficiency of information sharing and customer experience personalisation.
Automate the flow
A CRM is a business’ everyday go-to-guy, reducing manual workload by automating all customer activities, including:
- Data entry
- Record updating
- Email logging and sequencing
- Sales workflow – quotes and invoicing
- Campaign analytics
Top performing CRM systems – like HubSpot’s – will perform complete workflow organisation to save you precious time. This means you can retrofit your own workflow criteria (certain customer actions and records you want to take) and CRM will do it all for you – be it quotation updating, issuing tickets or promoting custom deals.
Simply does it
At the heart of any good CRM is greater customer engagement efficiency. With so many platforms vying for customer attention, it can be hard for businesses to keep pace. CRM, meets the challenge face on, by integrating with the services and channels customers engage with your business on.
For example, a CRM will allow your business to:
- Track emails and calls
- Live chat
- Monitor social media management
- Personalise your sales and marketing activities
Business matters
CRM is focused on making your business matter to customers – and customers matter to your business. CRM engages reporting and analysing processes within the customer pipeline to help you identify areas to grow upon i.e., leveraging your social media status.
CRM solutions – like HubSpot – even allow you to create custom dashboards and reports that gift your CRM data the way you want to receive it – daily, weekly and monthly, to the whole team or individual members.
Want to learn more about what a good CRM can do for your business? Contact one of our HubSpot CRM Implementation Specialists today.
