Think about the last time a lead slipped through your fingers because you didn’t contact them in the right way or at the right time: that won’t happen with customer relationship management tools (CRM tools).
Among its many benefits, CRM tools can help you automate project tasks, maintain relationships, improve sales delivery, and more.
What do CRM tools and customer experience (CX) have to do with one another? CX is a top priority for executives across organizations in 2021, and with 88% of customers viewing salespeople as trusted advisors, it’s clear that CX plays a vital role in a business’ success.
In this article, we’ll walk you through how a CRM solution can transform your company’s customer experience.
What are CRM tools?
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. A Customer Relationship Management tool helps you keep track of leads and customers, schedule tasks to move them through the sales funnel, retain them after they’ve converted, and gather vital data from their behaviors.
CRMs are essential to modern businesses because they help your marketing team manage, organize, and schedule customer interactions with leads and existing customers alike.
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Get started What are CRM tools used for?
Providing an exceptional customer experience involves keeping track of a lot of information. On average, companies use 10 separate tools to maintain customer relationships and keep that information aligned. But how does that impact the customer experience?
As you can imagine, more disparate tools can mean more headaches. That’s where CRM tools can help.
A CRM tool helps your teams serve your customers and improve project success with the help of automation. A CRM platform can help sales, marketing, and operations collaborate.
With the right CRM tools, businesses can provide a streamlined customer experience. But that’s not all a sales CRM can do. A well-designed CRM platform can improve the employee experience, too.
Having easy-to-use CRM features allows employees to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time working with clients.
Most salespeople only spend 37% of their workday selling, and the rest of their day is spent managing repetitive tasks.
Meanwhile, 54% of workers say they could get back 5+ hours a week with automation tools, and 16% of workers feel they could get 10+ hours of their week back.
The best cloud-based CRM solutions go far beyond simple lead management, or tracking won deals. These resources help you reimagine your sales funnel and create an overall sales methodology, which includes aspects like project management, product delivery, managing repeat business, and growing your business.
What are the benefits of using CRM tools?
To improve your customer experience, you need to see the whole picture.
It’s a drastic oversimplification to say sales drive a business. We all know that a customer relationship doesn’t end when you close the sale. If you want to maintain a good relationship, you have to deliver well beyond the sale, too.
CRMs make important data available organization-wide
CRM software can connect your customer data to departments across your organization for a streamlined customer experience. That can increase the likelihood of turning a new customer into a repeat buyer. That’s a game-changer because it costs 500% more to get a sale from a new customer than it does to keep a repeat customer.
CRMs help teams see data patterns
Even beyond customer retention, a CRM system can also help teams notice patterns in their own data.
For example, activity tracking can show the average number of calls it takes to close a sale. Meanwhile, on the project management team, activity tracking can show how different length projects impact the customer relationship.
In 2021, “data-driven” is more than just a buzzword.
Successful sales teams regularly consult CRM data and look for patterns to improve conversion rates. In fact, 48% of salespeople review patterns in lost business data, and 49% discover patterns in the business they won.
With the right CRM tool, data is readily available on a customizable dashboard, making it easier than ever for sales teams to succeed.
The right CRM takes time-consuming repetitive tasks off your team’s hands
With powerful automation tools, your teams can get back to work doing what they do best. Tedious tasks can be a big time-waster at work, which increases the likelihood that workers get burnt out.
By creating a CRM strategy, you can identify tasks that don’t need a human touch to automate sales, lead generation, and project management tasks more effectively.
Ultimately, CRM software can lead to fewer burnt-out employees. Higher employee engagement can foster an improved customer experience, which helps your business grow.
When you see the benefits a CRM can offer, it’s obvious why 97% of sales professionals call technology an important or very important asset for their jobs. But, many teams overlook how a CRM can empower their whole organization, not just their sales team.
5 Types of CRM tools
Different areas of your business need different CRM tools to provide the best customer experience. These tools help your teams collate and share customer data to offer a holistic experience for your customer, no matter who they’re talking to.
Many CRM features handle contact management and your sales pipeline, but don’t manage anything that happens once the sale has closed.
This can pose major challenges for account managers and sales professionals alike.
It’s common to overlook how marketing, project management, customer service, and other departments impact customer engagement.
Without the proper tools to maintain CX in every customer interaction, it’s much harder to create an exceptional experience that keeps customers coming back again and again.
Here are some valuable tools that can improve how you manage customer relationships.
1. Seamless collaboration tools
What happens when it’s time to deliver on a sale?
Sales teams are often left in the dark about a customer’s experience once the project starts. This makes account management difficult when communications, notes, and deliverables aren’t all in the same place.
A customer relationship management system can keep all your customer information in one place, so following up on projects is easier than ever.
By connecting the sales and customer management experience with project and portfolio management, you can offer customers a more cohesive and transparent experience.Seeing full communication threads directly in your CRM software guarantees that nothing falls through the cracks.
Not only is connecting customers with projects good for clients, but it improves cross-team collaboration too.
Sharing customer information can make communication flow more smoothly as a project progresses. Then, when it comes time to re-engage a client, the sales team is ready and informed on what next steps could best serve the customer.
As a Work OS, monday.com combines tools for seamless collaboration across departments.
Using boards like the Customer Projects template and connecting projects to a customer in the Contacts template can make getting on the same page with coworkers easier and faster.
Integrations like Slack and Gmail can bring cross-team communication to the next level and keep everyone on the same page throughout the customer life cycle.
2. Workflow automation
Staying on top of the details doesn’t have to be a huge headache. Automated workflows can help provide an exceptional customer experience without demanding all your team’s attention.
Sales automation that connects sales processes and project management can keep projects moving forward, offering the stellar experience customers expect. This makes it faster to get necessary information from the customer. It can also automate follow-ups to maintain relationships.
Developing workflows with “if this, then that” recipes can make managing customer relationships and projects less time-consuming. Workflow automation can boost productivity and make sure customers are never forgotten.
Did you know a CRM system can help with marketing automation, too?
Integration with powerful marketing apps like Mailchimp, LinkedIn, and Facebook Ads prevents accidental data silos and offers more robust ways to make marketing automation work for your business.
There are tons of apps available in the monday.com Apps Marketplace that will allow you to start creating automations with tools you already use.
A CRM system offers full control over creating marketing campaigns, tracking data, and analyzing where automation can have the most powerful impact on your lead generation. Companies like Genpact noticed a 40% improvement in cross-team collaboration with monday.com marketing automation tools. That means automation is a CRM tool you definitely won’t want to miss out on.
3. Mobile CRM tools
Being able to use CRM software everywhere is essential to provide exceptional service. Having a mobile app for your CRM solution can make sure your teams never miss an opportunity to respond to a potential customer, which can increase your sales success.
With the right mobile customer relationship management tool, you can empower your team to respond in real-time when an inquiry comes in.
Being the first responder has become especially important in 2021, where 56% of customers are open to experimenting with new brands, products, and services.
As remote work becomes the new normal, your potential customers aren’t chained to a computer. Your teams don’t need to be, either.
Responding to customers, updating project milestones on the go, and reviewing campaign details is easy with monday.com’s robust mobile CRM system.
4. Activity recording tools
When 72% of customers only respond to personalized marketing messages, a hands-on approach is crucial for your sales and marketing team. Ongoing communication is one way to foster strong customer relations.
Tracking what’s getting done is an essential part of managing those ongoing relationships.
Activity recording tools in your sales CRM can keep notes in one place so all teams can see them. Plus, these tools keep all teams on the same page about project status, so account representatives can readily update clients.
Digging through emails and notes to find where you last left a conversation can be a huge waste of time.
CRM software can remind you when to reach out to a prospect, record email threads, and house notes your team compiles during calls. These CRM features make monday.com’s sales pipeline template even more effective.
5. Powerful analytics dashboard
It’s hard to see your team’s success without the right data available to you.
monday.com’s customizable dashboard helps each of your teams see the most important data the moment they sign in. This can help people measure their own success and show opportunities for the whole team to improve.
Teams can get data from other tools in one dashboard, too. Integrations allow team members to seamlessly use the tools they need for their job from one place.
With all your data readily available in customizable dashboards, it’s easy to find new opportunities to improve sales success, project delivery, marketing strategies, and business processes no matter where you go.
An integrated dashboard makes tracking KPIs and demonstrating business success a breeze.
Get all the CRM tools you need in one place with monday.com
There are plenty of CRM systems out there that offer valuable tools, but monday.com Work OS seamlessly integrates tools for a better employee experience.
With monday.com, teams have the tools necessary to collaborate and share data for streamlined marketing, customer interactions, and project delivery on one comprehensive platform.