Customer experience is the heart of any business. So when a business’s customer experience starts lacking it really shows. We all know the undesirable feeling of receiving an annoying marketing email, impersonal customer service call, or insistent pestering by a pushy salesperson: and it’s something we all actively seek to avoid.
The impact of this poor CX can be astronomical, causing customers to flee instantaneously. And, of course, your competitors are always waiting there to welcome your previous customers with open arms. That’s why most businesses are embracing customer experience management through the CRM experience.
This article will give you everything you need to know about the CRM experience, covering CRM software, CRM strategy, and how you can use a CRM software to deliver high-quality communication, bottom-line-affecting marketing, and retention campaigns, all while improving customer service.
What is a CRM experience?
Customer relationship management (CRM) refers to software for managing a company’s relationships and communication with existing and potential customers. When someone refers to CRM, it is usually about a CRM tool, which businesses use to help with things like storing customer data and using predictive analysis for growth. The CRM experience therefore refers to the way you optimize your CRM to ensure the best possible customer experience.
Imagine you owned a brick-and-mortar store that sold shoes…
A customer, Jane, comes in, looking for a new pair of shoes. With a CRM, you have a team member who recognizes her immediately. It whispers to you…
“This is Jane. She bought a pair of size 7 tennis shoes from us 18 months ago. She’d just gotten back into tennis and was looking forward to getting on the court. She also came in two weeks ago to look around. She was approached by Sean, but waved him off and didn’t buy anything, though she did peruse the running shoe section. You should ask her how she’s enjoying tennis and recommend a size 7 New Balance running shoe we currently have at 25% off.”
The value is clear. It’s not just amazing for bottom-of-funnel conversions, though. A CRM, point blank, improves the customer experience.
It works for front-end sales and supports the employees who interact with customers directly. But it’s equally useful for back-end employees like marketing managers, operations personnel, IT, and more by giving them access to customer data and contact information that enables them to make data-driven marketing and product decisions.
How popular are CRMs?
By 2025 the CRM industry is expected to be worth more than $80 billion. The number speaks for itself.
How can the CRM experience help your business?
The CRM experience grants a number of benefits that can be applied to the customer experience across the board. Let’s take a look at a few leading benefits…
1. Workflow automation
A modern CRM management tool helps take a lot of the stress off of employees through marketing automation, freeing them up for other tasks. Case in point, when a new prospect requests email-gated information (like an ebook or industry report), the CRM can trigger an automated email to be sent with relevant marketing materials.
It also automatically creates a profile for the new potential customer in the CRM system, saving your sales reps from another repetitive task. Alongside the content itself, a CRM can also automatically segment your new lead. If they requested your “Complete Guide to Facebook Ads,” you can add them to your “Interested in Ads” segment, so your sales team (and perhaps an automated email nurturing campaign) knows the type of content they might want to see.
2. Lead management
Your CRM can track leads throughout the buyer’s journey, into “customer” territory, and beyond. A whopping 74% of businesses have stated that CRM software has improved their access to customer data.
Sales representatives can review information on a prospective customer before an interaction occurs. They can also schedule tasks like touch calls or emails. Email outreach can be automated, with a personalized message going out to a lead or existing customer at predetermined intervals. This ensures that cold leads and potential resale options are still getting some light contact to remind them that you’re there.
One of the best lead management features in a CRM is the ability to take notes on every interaction, then store the interaction in that customer’s profile for easy access down the line.This helps you review a lead’s journey without having to rehash information or be reminded of something.
Here’s how note-taking looks in monday.com’s Sales CRM software:
This is also great when it comes to customer service. If the lead or customer is calling with a repeat issue, they won’t have to repeat themselves on support calls because the representative can just review the notes within the lead’s profile and see exactly what’s going on.
The lead management function of a CRM is great for when a customer has to deal with multiple points of contact in your organization. Since everyone has access to the same information, the customer can receive the same level of service with no bumps in the road regardless of which team member is assisting them.
For better lead management, you can also integrate a sales intelligence platform like Vainu into your CRM. This way, you can clean and enrich your CRM data with reliable company information, so you can build advanced lead-scoring models and set automatic updates to eliminate data cleanup forever.
3. Analytics
A good CRM is an endless source of quality predictive analytics. The ability to gather information from your leads and customers is huge in the era of data-driven marketing. Through a CRM solution, you can get a slew of audience information, including ages, genders, geographic locations, occupations, interests, and more.
This allows you to segment your audience into buyer personas. That’s useful when it comes to personalized marketing. Different sections of your audience live in different geographic locations and have different likes and interests. So naturally, you’ll want to market to each buyer individually.
For instance, the monday.com CRM displays the local time for each lead (with easy-to-interpret icons) so your sales team never makes the mistake of calling at 3am:
Then, after implementing your data-driven marketing efforts, your CRM helps you track their success or failure. This will allow you to allocate your budget better in order to feed your strongest initiatives.
4. Human resources
CRM platforms aren’t just for managing your customers. They can also help your HR departments keep track of your employees. By using CRM apps, you can easily stay on top of employee performance reviews, benefits, contact management, vacation days, and more. You can even take notes on the interactions that specific employees have with HR representatives or keep track of documented coaching efforts.
You’re also able to store emails to show when certain announcements or requirements were communicated to employees in order to hold them accountable for their jobs. This matters to your bottom line, because engaged, accountable employees are more loyal and more productive than employees just waiting to get home.
The best businesses are the ones that build a positive atmosphere around their employees. A CRM platform can help with that.
How can you implement the CRM experience in your business?
It’s easy to implement a CRM system for your business, especially with the monday.com CRM template:
You have the option to use the template as is, but it can also be easily personalized to show the information, metrics, and touchpoints you care about most. You’ll be able to use the template in conjunction with existing apps, allowing you to operate everything from within monday.com’s cloud-based platform.
You can even export and import customer information from Excel spreadsheets to make it easier to run reports or set up data. The template also automatically makes calculations, allowing you to easily forecast what’s coming through the pipeline by visualizing the customer journey.
Optimize your customer relationship management with the right CRM tools
There’s a reason why so many businesses are relying on CRM systems for a better customer experience. CRM technology ensures that nothing falls through the cracks and that any holes in the customer experience are identified and rectified as quickly as possible. This improves customer interaction, increases customer satisfaction, and helps generate customer loyalty.
Optimize your business with a CRM software today and you’ll be able to bring your company’s sales, social media marketing, customer service, and human resources efforts to a whole new level. Try monday.com now, no credit card is required!
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