When people first start using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, they are often amazed by what an effective tool it is. The software does far more than just data management, it actually creates opportunities to improve the customer experience as well as help achieve challenging business goals.

CRM software stores information about customers and their interactions with your business. Companies rely on this tool to organise important customer data that can be used to enhance both internal and customer-facing functions. If used correctly, a CRM can also play a major role in improving employee productivity as well as driving customer success.

How CRMs boost the customer experience

If your company doesn't have a CRM, you may want to strongly consider adopting one as you grow over time. Even small companies can benefit from a CRM as many of the tools are often available for free. But let’s take a closer look at the top five benefits that CRMs bring that extends beyond company performance and profitability - the customer experience.

1. Creating self-serve and painless onboarding

Customers can be easily intimidated by the idea of learning a new product or service.

This isn’t helped by the fact that onboarding processes are often confusing and time-consuming. A CRM can assist with onboarding by making the process self-serve and far more painless.

For example, employees can customise contact record fields to trigger workflows within your company. These workflows signal to employees which actions to take with an individual customer and when.

The CRM can also be set up to automatically alert employees to set up onboarding meetings with new customers once a deal is closed. By taking these proactive measures, its possible to guide customers through every step of the onboarding process to ensure customer success.

2. Quickly access customer information

The primary function of a CRM is to organise and store quantitative and qualitative customer data. This includes past support and service interactions with the company where customers don't want to waste time having to repeat the same information to different service reps.

With a CRM, when a customer reaches out to your service teams, it's easy to quickly reference the customer’s communication history and avoid simply giving them the same response they’ve heard before. This is incredibly helpful for technical support teams that work on long-term, customer-facing issues. It helps build trust with customers as people can rely on the company to provide timely support. Positive customer experiences are a highly effective way to generate word-of-mouth praise. With these customer referrals then directly leading to company growth.

3. Personalising customer communications

Customer communications are important.

This is evident from the fact that over 40 percent of customer churn can be attributed to poor personalisation.

People simply don’t want generic information or communications that aren’t relevant to them. However, a CRM puts all of your customer information at your team's disposal, allowing each new interaction to be fully personalised. For example, they can pull up a customer's contact record, determine immediately if they have a history of poor experiences with the brand, then implement steps to avoid potential churn.

Or in the opposite case, having a way to easily identify your best customers allows you to reward customer loyalty. This can be via points to use towards future purchases or services or via personalised emails that include discounts and special offers. The content of the emails can be based on the customer’s purchase history as well as their most frequently purchased products. This type of personalisation makes bonus offers or promotions more appealing and adds more value to customer loyalty programs.

4. Strengthening customer relations

Customer relations are developed by building trust between the company and the customer. A CRM can help build this trust by storing important customer information that can be referenced at a later time. Customers often interact with a business more than once, so it helps to log each interaction for future reference.

For instance, this can be very beneficial for service teams that are working on long-term support cases. There may be a small detail or piece of data that was referenced early on in the case that turns out to be essential to finding a solution. Having your data properly organised makes your support team more effective at finding answers quickly, which strengthens customer relations over time.

5. Improving customer satisfaction

A CRM will improve customer satisfaction at your company because it acts as a roadmap to each customer's specific needs. Since each interaction is stored in centralised software, all team staff can analyse past interactions to determine the best methods for reaching out to customers.

This is particularly important for retaining high-value customers. Studies show that the top 10 percent of your most loyal customers spend three times more per visit than the average customer. This puts significant pressure on your business to satisfy these customers' needs before they decide to take their business elsewhere.

Making the move

Moving to the use of a comprehensive CRM that all staff have access to is a sure fire way to improve your internal and customer facing processes. Their ability to categorise data and provide your team with resources that produce positive customer interactions is unmatched. By embracing a CRM, you’ll be immediately optimising your data management as well as keeping your customers happier, for longer. 

To find out more about the power of CRMs and how they can transform your customer experience, get in touch with FinXL and we’d be happy to share our knowledge with you.