Looking to Switch CRM providers? Here’s Why You Should Prioritize Customer Experience
CRM tools help businesses better organize and align their daily activities. There is no wonder many organizations need to explore new solutions that enable better collaboration and a better, more accurate view of the customer. However, customer experience (CX) is closely related to these aspects. A streamlined CRM will also contribute to helping businesses deliver streamlined interactions with customers, thus improving CX. Let’s see how a CRM system can help you meet customer needs.
CX: What Is It, and Why Should You Prioritize It?
Focusing on your customer experience strategy is a sure way to solidify your business in uncertain environments. A properly executed CX strategy will help you increase customer satisfaction, retention, and, most importantly, loyalty. A positive customer impact will help your business build and retain a good market position and will help in multiple ways when it comes to your marketing efforts. For example, a good CX strategy will ensure that all prospects are effortlessly nurtured into buying customers and, ultimately, loyal customers. Along the buying lifecycle of a prospect, it will help you deliver positive interactions along all the points of contact that lead to a purchase.
Improving your CX strategy ultimately means delivering positive customer interactions with the ultimate goal of converting and prolonging their lifecycle. Here’s how:
- CX strategies will make your business more profitable. Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than their competitors.
- Increase your reach. According to this data, 23% of customers with positive interactions with your business will tell at least 10 people about it. At the same time, 92% of the interviewed people will likely believe a friend or family’s recommendations.
- Customers who receive positive customer interactions are more likely to return. Strategic CX efforts are more likely to drive customer loyalty, which helps businesses secure their market position and outperform competitors.
How Can CRM Systems Improve CX?
Streamlined CRM tools will help you deliver better CX in several ways. Such tools effectively capture customer data across multiple entry points (marketing, communications, website behavior, etc.) and enable businesses to tailor more personal and specific interactions for each customer. But let’s get specific ourselves and see how a CRM system can help you improve CX.
1. Tailor Meaningful Communication Strategies
Each customer is unique, and they respond differently to brand messaging. With that in mind, you should tailor your communication strategies (web page content, blog content, email campaigns) with several buyer personas in mind to reach a broader audience base. A good CRM will help you gather data across all entry points and enrich it with external information for a deeper understanding of customer behavior. The insights generated by a complete CRM tool will help you customize your messaging according to each customer’s preferences. It will help you deliver a more personable experience with each interaction.
2. Deliver Consistent Customer Experiences
Consistency is the cornerstone of a solid market position. One less-than-perfect interaction will damage brand reputation and is enough to make your customers look into what the competition offers in search of consistency. Delivering prompt and consistent responses each time a customer reaches out to your company through a purchase request or customer support inquiry is essential.
With that in mind, when looking to switch CRM providers, look into solutions that allow you to automate responses and support requests and offer all departments a 360-degree view of each customer. Looking for solutions that support consistency will help you improve loyalty and long-term brand reputation, as consistency generates a sense of reliability among customers and prospects.
CRM tools can help you generate consistent experiences for your customers by expanding the ways you gather customer data. Apart from the traditional ones we mentioned in the previous paragraphs, such tools will help you automate surveys, scheduled follow-up messages, emails, or calls with the ultimate goal of learning more about your customers and their needs.
3. Increased Efficiency and Better Response Times
All companies encounter support inquiries, which is not a CX red flag. But how you handle those inquiries and requests can quickly become. If a customer receives a solution to their issue in weeks, after numerous calls or emails, this can soon damage the brand reputation and market position. CRM tools automate responses and solutions, so customers can gain peace of mind. For example, once a ticket is submitted to your Support department, you can send an automated message or email with a rough time frame in which they can see their ticket resolved.
Then, with all the information centralized internally, support representatives can get an accurate view of the customer and current situation. This will help them deliver better solutions in faster timeframes.
4. Centralized Customer Information
Siloed data is the number one enemy of businesses today. With a growing number of business applications and software, gathering all customer data in one place becomes increasingly difficult. However, specific CRMs are built with this scope in mind: to offer a hub where all app data is gathered, cleaned up, and processed in such a way as to deliver a complete view of the customer, regardless of the internal department that needs said data.
Such software should offer the same information to all departments, be it Marketing, Support, or Sales. For instance, Sales can effectively use the information generated from marketing interactions or support inquiries. In many cases, such data can serve as a conversation starter, so having information regarding cross-departmental customer interactions can help your teams deliver better CX in the long run.
It’s a Wrap!
Looking to switch CRM providers? Learn how a CRM vendor and solution can help you enhance customer experience and ensure higher satisfaction levels across the buyer journey. CX is quickly becoming the golden standard no matter the industry, product, or service, so neglecting it will negatively impact your strategic positioning and competitiveness in the market.
