CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is the activity of creating positive relationships with your customers. Your business may use various means and methods to achieve this, out of which using CRM platforms and a polished CRM process are the most important.
According to a FinancesOnline survey, CRMs can increase process efficiencies by 73%. Let's understand how.
A CRM process is a collection of five essential steps (more on this in the next section) that aim to establish and maintain a personalized, meaningful relationship between a brand and its customers.
Using a robust CRM platform, the tasks and workflows associated with the CRM process can be streamlined and made more efficient. The software provides all the essential tools, functionalities, and features necessary to foster a positive customer relationship.
CRM, as it stands for Customer Relationship Management, is a collaborative effort between multiple departments of your business. Marketing, sales, service, support – everyone is involved in the CRM process.
The typical CRM process consists of five distinct steps that are either the sole or collective responsibility of the departments involved. Let’s understand in detail what they are.
Customer relationship management begins by letting the world know that your brand exists.
In simpler terms, your business needs to make efforts to improve brand awareness. This is the job of your marketing teams to ensure your brand is represented with the best possible resources and in the best light in front of consumers.
The marketing team employs various strategies and methods to achieve this objective like:
CRM software can prove to be instrumental in gathering marketing data, segmenting it based on specified cohort parameters, and generating insights to inform marketing strategies.
The second step in creating a relationship with your customers is acting upon brand knowledge. Brand awareness has already been established in the first stage; now, your brand must take action to encourage consumers to know more about your business.
Depending on how you operate your marketing and sales departments, this responsibility could fall on either one – or both in some cases.
For the marketing team, the strategy to acquire leads would differ a little bit from the sales team. In order to encourage visitors to engage more with your brand, the marketing team can set up sign-up calls-to-action on the brand channels to capture lead information.
In fact, a CRM platform is an excellent tool to help your marketing teams capture lead data about your brand through sign-up forms, giveaways, whitepapers, eBooks, and more.
The data captured through these methods get automatically compiled in the user profile on the system.
When a sales team handles consumer engagement, they do it through modules like live chat or instant messaging.
This allows the sales team to proactively reach out to the customer and encourages them to know more about your business. They may build the conversation enough to get to know the customer’s email ID.
With no-code platforms, you can build a CRM with a live chat module for your sales team.
The third step is to qualify your leads to understand how you can nurture each one to convert into a paying customer.
The actual process is more complicated than it sounds, and it is essential to work with a robust CRM platform in this step to increase the likelihood of conversions.
Not every lead you capture would be interested in your products with the same intensity or purchase intent.
Your sales teams must be trained to identify this level of interest and label each lead with the corresponding attribute (like warm lead for someone mildly interested or hot lead for someone ready to purchase).
Using the CRM platform’s labeling and categorization capabilities, your sales team can qualify each lead based on how ready they are to convert. The best part is these lead-qualification criteria can be custom-set by your business.
The methods your sales reps undertake to nurture each lead are guided and informed by the pipeline maps created by the CRM software.
For example, for a lead that is mildly interested, the sales rep can share more information through whitepapers and studies.
On the other hand, for a lead ready to pay, the sales rep can share information about modes of payment, EMIs, BNPLs, related and relevant products such as add-ons, and more.
CRMs are capable of displaying all of this data to the sales rep based on purchase histories and relevant attributes.
If you think your business’s responsibility ends when a customer converts, you are wrong. According to a Zendesk survey, it was discovered that customer service is the most influential factor when determining customer loyalty to a brand.
The fourth step in a CRM process, thus, is to provide and improve your customer service.
Think of it from a different perspective: assume you bought an electronic device from a brand. You require some help to set it up, but their customer support is only available on certain days, and they aren’t very responsive. Would you go back to that brand for a second purchase? The most likely answer is “No.”
To ensure the continuity and growth of your business, you must foster positive relationships with your customers while acquiring new ones. To that end, CRM proves to be an instrumental software that helps your business:
A good CRM software puts together all the data of your customers in one place to improve customer service and encourage loyalty.
Your brand has now taken steps to secure customer loyalty by leveling up customer service. However, true growth happens when you can encourage your customers to try more products by your brand and switch to the higher-value items that increase your average order value.
The best way to do that is to leverage the power of CRM to understand your customers' needs. When you know their concerns, needs, preferences, and choices, you can attempt to make a highly relevant upsell that your customers cannot say “no” to.
Additionally, it is important to keep your customer data updated for relevant cross- and upsells. CRMs allow you to design feedback forms that inform you whether the needs and choices of your customers have changed.
This is great help considering the strategy angle; it can help with customer retention, loyalty, and growth.
This is the age of technology. A software makes every aspect of running a business more efficient and streamlined, and your CRM process is no exception.
Listed below are twelve key benefits your business can enjoy by employing software to govern your CRM process.
With well-designed CRM software, your business gets a 360° view of each customer. This enables your customer care executives to deliver a better level of service regardless of the pipeline stage a customer is in.
With CRM software in place, your business is able to reduce the response time to customers. Also, quicker response times lead to better customer satisfaction, which results in a good brand positioning for your business.
Furthermore, CRMs enable you to deliver a good customer experience as far as support is concerned.
Sales and marketing don’t end at selling one item to a customer. You need to identify opportunities to sell more items to customers by analyzing what they are shopping for.
CRM proves to be instrumental software in analyzing your customers' shopping patterns and behaviors.
Depending on the shopping data of your customers, your business can identify avenues to effectively cross-sell new products to existing customers, helping improve sales.
Mapping customer shopping patterns and habits help your business sell relevant products to customers.
Customers do not necessarily engage with your business from a single source or channel.
When you think about social media, websites, instant messaging, emails, SMS, etc., you realize that the disparity of your customers’ data trail may drag your business down.
This is where CRM helps the most. A good CRM software consolidates all the data pertaining to a customer in neatly organized, accessible formats so that you can peruse it whenever you need.
The elimination of disparity allows you to see the lifecycle of a customer with your brand.
Sales isn’t a straightforward operation. It is onion-layered and branched; it is highly decision and action-dependent.
Reduced productivity of your sales staff can potentially lead to lost customers, whether it be a delayed follow-up email or missing out on a lead-capturing opportunity.
With CRM software, alerts and notifications help your sales teams put important tasks on the calendar and execute them by the clock.
Certain mundane tasks and workflows can be automated (such as sending out newsletters) to ensure that things get done on time and that productivity remains high.
CRM software is equipped with state-of-the-art tools that enable your business to:
Customer satisfaction directly depends on how well a brand knows a customer and how well it responds to their needs.
With a load of quality insights that a CRM makes available for your business, it is possible to elevate the standards of the customer service you deliver to your customers.
Data centralization isn’t limited to gathering consumer information across all brand channels and compiling them in one place.
It is also about collating this data with other relevant information available from various departments of your enterprise and creating a big picture for the sales and marketing departments.
For example, gathering the shopping patterns of a consumer cohort and collating them with the data from inventory and marketing helps your business better prepare for predicted shopping behavior.
Every department across an organization has clerical and mundane tasks that do not require much mental input. However, they require time to get done, which wastes precious human resources.
CRM answers this problem with automation capabilities. Powerful CRMs allow your business to automate all the mindless tasks like:
Many more tasks in the sales universe can be automated using CRMs.
CRM software is loaded with team collaboration features that allow your sales representatives to get the information they need quickly.
For example, say a customer is unable to check the shipping status of their order, and they end up contacting your sales team.
Your representative, using a robust CRM platform, is able to see not only the details of the order placed but also the external stakeholders (like logistics partners) involved.
CRM software has the capability to let the logistics partner update the order status, which the representative then communicates to the customer. The process becomes seamless.
Every customer is different. So are their preferences, shopping habits, budget, and choice of brands.
With a view to personalizing the recommendations and polishing your cross-selling efforts, it is essential to have some insight into these details of your customers.
A CRM is capable of capturing these minute details of your customers’ shopping patterns and creating a holistic view.
The software then converts it into numbers, actionable insight, and recommendations that your business can leverage to improve the quality of the customer journey.
Your brand may have a preferred target audience, but not all of your customers belong to the same bracket.
Even your target audience includes people from different places, of different ages, and intent of purchase.
With that in mind, it is essential to segregate your customers into meaningful cohorts that would allow you to design targeted marketing and sales campaigns for them.
With CRM software, this can be easily done. Each consumer that interacts with your brand leaves a data trail behind. The software gathers information from this data trail and creates cohorts based on:
These parameters can be customized for better marketing efforts.
The best part about adopting a CRM platform is that with the advancement in technology, CRMs have become extremely cost-effective.
Whether your business is a full-blown enterprise or a small business, there is a CRM available that resonates with your budgets and needs.
Furthermore, no-code platforms in the market today let your business design its own CRM software from scratch, further optimizing the costs.
Every module and functionality your business needs a CRM to have can be incorporated into your custom-designed solution.
CRM platforms are extremely scalable and highly flexible.
Various functionalities in CRM software enable your business to deliver the best service, support, and shopping experience to the customers.
In turn, this earns your brand a good impression and customer loyalty, setting the foundation for business growth.
CRM platforms grow with your business since most of them today are deployed over the cloud as SaaS. You can purchase additional resources and functionalities as and when the needs arise; even if it comes to sizing down, CRMs are flexible.
Additionally, being a centralized source of truth, CRMs make all your data accessible on any device.
Needless to say, CRM is a revolutionary software that has the potential to turn your brand from low sales to a high-demand business. It all begins with a solid strategy and an in-depth understanding of how you must leverage the CRM tool for maximum returns.
On that note, Hubler – a robust no-code platform – gives your business the opportunity to create your own CRM with specific and customized needs.
Designing a CRM from scratch helps address specific bottlenecks and specialized requirements to really transform the customer service ecosystem at your company.
For more information on how you can achieve this, get in touch with us.
