How does CRM provide strategic insights to drive business value?

In an increasingly competitive environment, customers are getting spoilt for choice with a bouquet of products and services to choose from. Customers have become more discerning and demanding than ever before, and businesses must come with innovative solutions to connect with customers to build more personalized and lasting relationships.

As per research by Forbes, Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable, and 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience.

And since not all customers have similar preferences and habits, as a business leader or entrepreneur, how do you ensure that you are better engaged and offer a personalized customer experience?

Customer Relationship Management is an effective tool that can capture and store immense amounts of customer data – from basic information such as their age, gender, and location to their shopping habits and favorite brands. You can use this data to get a clear understanding of who your customer is and what are his likes, needs, interests, and limitations.

A CRM system can create a massive difference in whether you gain a new customer or retain an existing one. Customers who feel valued, mean happy customers and satisfied customers mean repeat business – not to mention, improved bottom lines. CRM provides the structural foundation to create the capabilities and processes to build lasting and profitable customer relationships. Meaningful customer insights and data can drive better customer relationships.  A valuable customer experience is an integral part of CRM, according to Gartner’s report, on “Improving the Customer Experience”.

Companies are leveraging this data collated from CRM to form more personal relationships with their customers, ultimately resulting in a better customer experience, higher levels of engagement, and increased customer loyalty. This kind of personalized data enables you to introduce personalization in marketing, which leads you to offer a personalized experience as is being expected by customers these days.

When you gather such in-depth information about your customer, you can identify new opportunities to cater to his unique requirements and address any problems in a proactive as opposed to a reactive approach.

A CRM software collects information from different departments and aligns the data of sales, marketing, and customer service to provide one holistic view of each customer in real-time.

Let’s take a look at some of the critical insights and benefits that CRM offers.

1.      Supports a customer-centric strategy

A CRM system supports a customer-centric strategy with clear goals and a vision to offer an enhanced customer experience. A CRM strategy focuses on the customer-facing processes and gives you sufficient data and insights into meeting the needs of the customer.

2.     Improve Customer Retention and Revenue

By using CRM software for your business, you can increase the retention rates for existing customers, which usually translates into increased revenue for your organization. As per the Harvard Business Review, a 5% reduction in your customer defection rate can propel your sales or profits from 25% to 85%. With the data collated, your team can use CRM to proactively prospective as well as existing customers at the right moment and encourage them to repeat purchases.

3.     Initiate meaningful conversations with your business

This allows customer-facing employees in areas such as sales, marketing, and customer support to make quick and informed decisions. They could engage with their customers in more productive ways such as through up-selling or cross-selling, increasing the quality of customer communication, and also be in better coordination with their sales and marketing campaigns.

4.    Direct marketing more effectively.

As potential customers participate and respond to your marketing activities through various channels such as feedback forms, blog posts, and email, you can efficiently study their buying patterns and trends. Marketing CRMs allow you to gather, store, and analyze this data to create more successful marketing strategies. CRM systems provide your team with a comprehensive view of client records so they can send personalized responses and reply with context.

5.     Capture high-quality customer leads

As CRM captures high-quality leads, you can deliver a more personalized marketing effort, increasing by attracting and acquiring new customers. Using these leads, since your data shows who your potential customer is, what service or product he is searching for based on his shopping history, you can better target in-app mobile and social media ads to the right audiences. You can display an advertisement for a complementary or similar upsell product.

6.    Better collaboration between teams

With a CRM strategy, you can share customer data between different departments that will enable you to help optimize the customer experience. One significant advantage the CRM platform offers is that it helps in creating better internal communication within the company. Each employee is better informed to respond to a customer’s query due to the shared data and better engage with the customer, without having any dependency on another department or team member. This facilitates the functioning of a well-informed team, increasing the company’s overall efficiency while offering a seamless service to customers.

7.     Deliver real-time insights on customer and sales activities

To succeed, you can use CRM data to capitalize on emerging opportunities and refine advertising campaigns to boost your sales performance. Marketing teams can depend on the analytics drawn from CRM to gauge the Return on Investment (ROI) on their activities and campaigns. It also gives them accurate insights about whether their Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) and how to connect with them proactively, and also to identify the right demography and location. CRM enables your marketing team to keep a close eye on the marketing systems to analyze and determine where to spend the advertising budget.

8.    Gain Valuable Insights to maximize profits

With all the information from different departments stored in one central database, it becomes easier to analyze the performance of your business in a holistic way. By looking at data of leads generated, the budget spent on marketing campaigns, and the results from these campaigns, as also the income generated, it becomes easy for you to create meaningful reports. These detailed reports facilitate strategic business decisions and in turn, profitability. A properly implemented CRM solution can yield an ROI of $2.50 to $5.60 for every dollar invested.

9.    Increase Sales Forecast and Pipeline Accuracy

While a marketing CRM provides the tools to attract, engage, and nurture relationships, a Sales CRM focuses on closing deals. As customers move closer to a buying stage, having the right tools helps your team stay on top of sales opportunities without missing out on tracking or closing of deals. A sales CRM also enables companies to predict expected revenues more accurately by analyzing value, estimated close dates, and the likelihood of closing a deal throughout their sales pipeline. As per a report published on Finances Online, CRM software can boost sales by 29%, productivity by 34%, and forecast accuracy by 42%

10.            Create a Central Database that Manages and Monitors deals

Sales CRMs such as Commence are devised to deliver quotes, track performance, and organize activities. It also provides your sales rep with a centralized hub to manage time effectively, automate manual tasks, and receive feedback in real-time.

11.  Seamless Customer Support

Managing customer relationships requires interactive tools to receive and record complaints, address problems, and follow up effectively. A CRM for support teams includes a ticketing system to handle customer queries efficiently. All customer inquiries that come in – whether, by email, social media messaging, or phone calls – are captured and organized centrally in a CRM database.

A dedicated CRM equips your team to deliver a seamless customer experience – such as a knowledge base, live chat support, and automated response. All-in-one ticketing system to track, communicate, and resolve customer inquiries along with a CRM database to align your support team’s action with automated responses leads to a seamless experience.

12.  Process automation

Adapting process automation for CRM purposes is beneficial from two perspectives, as it decreases process cost (manual handling) while improving process performance (cycle time, faster process output). Although primarily adapted for highly repetitive tasks, some companies already started to automate more sophisticated processes using the current opportunities of technology and blending it with defined business objectives.

Summary

To summarize, CRM is considered one of the most important aspects of sales right next to lead generation and lead engagement. As per statistics recorded, 64.2% of businesses view CRM tools as impactful on their bottom line.

With automation, seamless connectivity, and advanced analytics CRM’s capabilities can help you to build deeper engagements with customers, promote new products and services, streamline processes, and build profitable business models.

Depending on your business objectives, complete CRM may not be necessary. However, empowering your marketing, sales, and customer support teams with the right tools can enable them to deliver a better experience to your existing and potential customers.

Deskera CRM software for businesses has one of the best CRM software solutions that are cost-effective and customizable according to your organization’s needs. With over 500,000 downloads, we have an award-winning mobile app that caters to all your CRM needs. For more information and a free trial, visit our website.