6 Key Benefits of Integrating a CRM Software
Key Takeaways:
● The way you manage your customer base determines the success of your business. But maintaining a strong relationship with customers is equally difficult as finding new customers.
● With a CRM system, businesses can manage their customer data to create better campaigns for them. This helps the sales team to prioritize opportunities for closing a deal and the marketing team to nurture them.
● A CRM platform helps your business to focus on key customer relationship areas such as identifying leads, categorizing them, making consistent and timely interactions with customers, creating effective marketing campaigns, and offering better customer support.
Customer relations lie at the core of any business as they directly impact the bottom line revenue of any business. But with the growth of the customer base, it eventually becomes difficult to centralize and streamline communication with customers, both potential and existing ones.
With customer relationship management (CRM) software, businesses can plan, strategize and manage all the interactions with the customers to increase profits for a business. But first, let’s understand the basics.
What is a CRM?
A CRM software connects all the different departments, right from marketing, sales to customer service to organize all the activities and metrics into one cohesive system. This allows every user to have direct access to the real-time client data and easily coordinate across teams and departments.
How CRM Software Helps Your Business
Using CRM software, businesses can provide customers with a personalized, one-to-one customer journey and interact with them in a scalable way. A majority of businesses adopt CRM software to improve the quality and consistency of their relationships with their customers and build customer loyalty.
According to Software Advice, contact management is the number one feature that is requested by 88% of CRM users, followed by the ability to track customer interactions (80%) and schedule tasks and set up reminders (75%).1
To better understand, let’s take a look at the following statistics:
● 74% of all CRM adopters found that CRM “offered improved access to customer data. (Source: Software Advice)2
● Meanwhile, 61% of sales distributors claimed CRM allowed them easier access to key customer information and data. (Source: Software Advice)3
● 47% of CRM users claimed that customer retention and satisfaction were significantly impacted by the use of a CRM system. (Source: Capterra)4
6 Benefits of Using a CRM Platform
CRM offers numerous benefits for your business to help you improve your conversion rate and grow.
1. Better Customer Knowledge
One thing is for sure – marketing without a thorough knowledge of your customers is a waste. Your sales and marketing efforts will not reap results if you don’t know who your customers are. You’ll end up catering to the wrong people and solving the wrong problems.
A CRM software gives your sales, marketing, and customer service teams a competitive advantage by collecting all the customer information in one place. It provides details such as a contact’s full name, email address, telephone number, postal address, website, and social media accounts as well as the critical business facts like a contact’s position within the company, relationship with other contacts in your database, the languages they speak, and even their birthdays.
CRM software makes communication personal, easier, and more impactful by putting all information at your fingertips. Users can also save all projects, sales, live chat messages, email exchanges, invoices, orders, contracts, or customer service requests that the contact has ever been a part of.
In short, a CRM enables you to gain a better understanding of who your contacts are and what they are interested in.
2. Easier Customer Segmentation
CRM allows you to break down customer data and categorize accurately, making it easy to segment the clients. With a focused list at fingertips, sales can convert a lead into a customer and marketing can identify the areas where prospects need more nurturing.
CRM enables them to conduct customer-centric campaigns and account-based marketing to analyze the sales process and focus their efforts where they are most effective. Knowing who to address allows you to make better use of your marketing budgets, gain a competitive advantage over others, and, most importantly, demonstrate a better understanding of your customers’ needs and wants.
3. Better Customer Retention
Retaining customers is a lot more cost-effective than acquiring new ones – anywhere from five times to 25 times less expensive.5 It’s also a lot harder to establish a solid relationship with a new customer than an existing one – up to 16 times harder.6
The basic objective of using CRM software is to improve customer retention. It offers several customer retention benefits such as –
● It reminds you of all the appointment that helps you to keep your commitments.
● Tells you when to send follow-up emails.
● Prompt you to reach out to those customers who have not been contacted in while.
With CRM software, you interact better with your customers by keeping your business more organized. It helps you to understand which messages work best for different audiences and what audience resonates most with. It helps you to create consistency across your campaign which leads to higher engagement and increase ROI.
4. Understanding Needs
CRM acts as a bridge between your offerings and customers’ needs. Not only it captures the data from customer interactions and online marketing content, but it also uses modern machine learning tools to provide users with an analytical interpretation of customer actions and behaviors.
It gives users insight into customer interactions history through the entire customer journey allowing the sales team to anticipate the customer needs and come up with better marketing offer at the right time.
5. Better Customer Support
When it comes to dealing with customer service requests, speed is everything. A CRM software helps you to provide high-quality customer service by drafting messages and emails and even scheduling their dispatch in advance. It allows your support team to see the person behind each ticket by giving them access to the history of previous conversations with each customer.
You can offer faster and personalized support at any time of day, reply immediately to recurrent problems, send links to FAQs and videos and even call straight from the system. It even helps to improve customer experience more effectively.
6. Data Privacy and Protection
Since CRM programs contain so much customer data, they present a potential goldmine for hackers. Hence it’s very important to have CRM software that has inbuilt GDPR related functionality.
GDPR is an acronym for General Data Protection Regulation. Using GDPR compliant CRM software helps you save a lot of time and effort and also saves you from data breaches. Your customers are important but so is their data.
Integrating Salesforce CRM
Salesforce is the most common Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. It provides cloud-based sales, operation, and marketing solutions for organizations of all sizes and types with an emphasis on sales and support. It combines all of your customer data into a single, integrated framework, allowing you to create a customer-centric company that covers marketing, sales,
customer support, and business analysis. This gives you a better understanding of your customers, ensuring the growth and success of the company.
About iLink Digital
iLink Digital recently acquired a majority stake in the Platinum Salesforce Consulting Partner – Dazeworks. Read more about our partnership. With this powerful partnership, our experts can help you earn more conversions and increase profits. Get in touch with us. We look forward to helping your business grow.
Endnotes
1. https://www.softwareadvice.com/resources/crm-trends-2016/
2. https://www.softwareadvice.com/resources/crm-trends-2016/
3. https://www.softwareadvice.com/resources/crm-trends-2016/
4. https://www.capterra.com/customer-relationship-management-software/user-research-infographic
5. https://hbr.org/2014/10/the-value-of-keeping-the-right-customers
6. https://martech.zone/infographic-customer-retention-number
