Just like the name says, customer relationship management systems help you manage and maintain strong relationships, as well as build trust with your customers.
But did you know that boosting customer retention rates by 5% can increase profits by up to 95%? As the speed of innovation accelerates on every front, powered by AI and machine learning, taking your CX offerings to the next level becomes increasingly necessary for earning and retaining more customers.
As in any other relationship, once you’ve begun building and investing in customer relationships, it takes work to maintain them. And that work looks a lot like sparing no expense in the pursuit of learning who your customer is as a human being.
Discover the full power of customer relationship management systems
But CRM systems do so much more than the name suggests. They offer end-to-end enterprise visibility, including a single, unified 360-degree view of the customer and their every interaction with your company, across channels, and at every touchpoint.
Beyond that, customer relationship management systems provide powerful digital tools for managing all the relationships within your organization, as well as between your organization and those individuals and companies with whom you work.
Here are just a few of the benefits of customer relationship management systems:
- Streamlined business functions and automated manual processes to free up resources
- Leveraging AI, machine learning, and complex data analytics to boost sales and improve customer satisfaction
- Generating, capturing, prioritizing, and nurturing high-quality leads
- Monitoring social media platforms and engaging with customers directly
- Training employees to build strong customer relationships built on trust and empathy
- Developing stronger empathy from a better understanding of customers as people
- Automating marketing, workflow, lead management, sales force, and contact center operations
- Implementing and integrating on-premise and/or cloud-based CRM solutions
- Facilitating human resource management
- Creating better products, better experiences, and better customer service
- Delivering exceptional customer experiences
- Segmenting customer groups
- Providing more personalized and individualized customer experiences
- Accessing real-time actionable information across the organization and the supply chain
- Increasing conversions, sales, productivity, decision making, customer satisfaction, and revenue
- Strengthening B2B operations and relationships
- Identifying problems and correcting them proactively
- Enabling collaboration from anywhere
- Updating software automatically
- Reducing costs
Customer relationship management is business ecosystem management
Facilitating clear communication and making real-time information available to any team, at any time, from anywhere is crucial to business success.
Sales teams have the loneliest desks in any office because they’re usually on the go. To maintain the highest quality customer experience standards, they need dynamic and robust tools that give them easy access to the exact information they need when they need it – whether they’re scoring and nurturing leads or closing the sale.
The name “customer relationship management” is appropriate. After all, the purpose for establishing and maintaining this ecosystem of team members and suppliers and partners (B2B) is in service of the customer.
Increasing revenue and driving growth are important goals, but without making it all worth it for your customers and potential customers, they’ll cease to be that for you. And the vicious cycle quickly resolves itself.
Communication, communication, communication: Too much and not enough?
The flip side to the ease and omnipresent ability to communicate is that keeping everyone on the same page becomes a constant battle against directed attention fatigue. The sheer volume of communication, interactions, and transactions between and among your sales and other internal teams, customers, suppliers, partners, and anyone else you work with (B2B) can become a huge obstacle to clear and complete awareness of past interactions.
People get busy and tired and just plain forget to pass information along. Whether miscommunication or lost in translation, you end up with anything from strife and misunderstanding within and between teams to mistakes to frustrated customers and, inevitably, lost revenue, lost customers, and damaged reputation.
Because bad word of mouth travels exponentially faster than good, implementing the right CRM system for your organization can go a long way toward reducing and eliminating these sources of lowered productivity and revenue.
Like magic, only real: CRM systems deliver powerful results
With the right customer relationship management system in place, you can gather all that basic data in one place, accessible to anyone who needs it. Additionally, you can gather data from a far wider range of sources, including social media and other platforms where customers will tell you exactly what they’re thinking, what they need, and how they’re feeling about you, your competitors, or anything else.
Gathering this wealth of data that customers choose to share with you is a good start. CRM data analytics then makes sense of the broad swaths of data to give you deep insights into consumer thoughts, behaviors, sentiments, and intentions.
Making sense of that data to inform actionable insights will unlock new dimensions of your ability to understand and empathize with your customers, allowing you to engage with them in authentic and meaningful ways, and to truly deliver the exceptional customer experiences they expect.
All of the good things driven and increased, from ROI to revenue to business growth, will naturally enhance engaging and serving your customers at a fundamentally human and individualized level. Customer: engaged, served, satisfied, earned. Relationship status: complex, but not complicated – human.
