What is CRM and why do businesses need it?
Building and maintaining a positive relationship with your customers can be quite complex. Time evolves, customers’ demands change, and keeping in pace with those changes requires being constantly in touch with your customers. To make this happen, you need a lot of time, and more often than not an 8-10 hour working day is insufficient. This is where Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems come to aid. A Customer Relationship Management System ensures properly storing and managing customer and prospect information, identifying sales opportunities, easies the process of finding new customers, helps closing deals faster, recording issues, and managing marketing campaigns. Implementing a CRM supercharges businesses regardless of the size, keeps your business connected, and ensures that you are on the right path to business growth.
But, how can you gain more value from your CRM?
An efficient CRM system should provide a 360-degree customer view to your agents so that they can provide exceptional customer service. In order for your CRM to do that, it should be centralized and gather data in one place. Besides this, it should allow easy navigating through applications and finding customer information and history fast. To do this you need to automate and integrate your CRM with other external systems. There are a lot of tools that can be used for that purpose, but in this blog post, we will focus only on some of the crucial benefits that you will get from doing that.
Benefits of CRM automation
- Improved customer service
An automated and integrated CRM ensures that all customer information is stored in one place and all systems are connected. This, on the other hand, gives your salespeople information to efficiently resolve any issues that your customers might have. In cases when your CRM is disconnected, there will be a lack of easily accessible and complete customer information hindering your efforts to provide exceptional customer service and leading to dissatisfied customers, which further leads to low profitability. Thus, if all the information that you have related to your customers, invoices, communication, etc., is stored in one place, and you have fast access to it, you will not only respond to your customer inquiries in no time, but you will provide them a more relevant and personalized response.
- Enhanced operational efficiency
An automated CRM and a 360-degree customer view ensure better cross-department collaboration and not only between sales and marketing but service and operations included. When all your departments share the same customer view, they can easily pass all important information to each other. This not only improves the collaboration among the teams, but it also improves the work of your sales and marketing campaigns by being data-driven and having their decisions based on data.
- Analysis & predictions
When you log your customer data in one place, and when you know what your customers have done and are doing, you will be able to use this data to make better forecasts and create more reliable predictive analytics. Having a complete picture of where your customers stand at the moment, will allow you to better understand where they are heading and what they will need in the future. This, in turn, will increase the chances for cross-selling, and re-ordering, and not only that but it will help you forecast the behavior of your customers if you plan to introduce a new product or feature to your product.
Conclusion
Having a CRM that is automated and centralized, and provides a 360-degree view of your customers will not only drive new business but will also retain the customers that you already have, which leads to longer-term sustainable growth. Besides this, having access to timely and relevant data will help you predict the needs that your customers might have, and will positively influence your communication with them. As long-term partners, SnapLogic and ⋮IWConnect have been working on integrating and aggregating CRM silos, accelerating 360 customer analytics, and connecting omnichannel lead-to-cash and customer service processes for a while now. If you are interested in finding out more, please do not hesitate to reach out either to us or our partner SnapLogic.
