How CRMs Can Improve The Customer Experience

CRMs are well-known for the incredible benefits that they can bring to small businesses and companies. They can help you plan and automate marketing campaigns, define success metrics and follow your conversion rates.

Further, they create a platform that can be used to store valuable information about your company’s contacts, leads and opportunities. This data can later be used to monitor the sales process, improve ROI and grow your business organically.

However, CRMs were initially designed to help manage customer relationships (hence, the name – Customer Relationship Management) and customer experiences. While they can bring a variety of other benefits, it’s customer relationships where CRM systems truly shine and bring the best results.

With that in mind, we’ve decided to bring you this comprehensive article which will explain what customer experience is, as well as how CRMs affect and improve it.

What is customer experience?

Customer experience (CX) represents the way a customer perceives its communication and interaction with a business. It’s what the customer sees, feels and does when it interacts with your company. This does not mean it refers to existing customers only.

In fact, it covers the entire sales process, from the first time a person comes into contact with your business. For example, a customer experience can start when someone:

• Visits your website
• Browses through your offer
• Interacts with an employee
• Reads a promotional email
• Sees a commercial

This is only an illustration. Customer experience can come in many shapes and forms and each interaction affects how people see your business.

However, customer experience should not be confused with customer service or customer satisfaction. Customer service is a narrower term that encompasses the interaction between a business and a customer at the point of sale and shortly after the sale.

Customer satisfaction, on the other hand, measures how company’s services or products fare compared to the customer’s expectations.

This means that customer experience actually covers both terms to create a 360-degree view of your business in the eyes of an average customer.

Why is customer experience important?

Considering the scope of what customer experience covers, it may seem that it requires too much effort and brings little in return. However, nothing could be farther from the truth.

Research shows that customers want an experience and businesses that provide an exceptional experience reap many benefits. In fact, a recent study by Harvard Review concluded that:

• Customers who have a positive experience with a business spent 140% more compared to customers that did not enjoy their past experience with the company.
• Customers who have a great experience with a business stayed loyal for up to six years, while customers with a poor experience left within a year.
• Providing good experiences actually reduces costs. While it’s true that optimizing the customer experience requires an initial investment, many companies, including Shift, found that they reduced their customer support costs by a third when they focus on customer experience. This is hardly surprising, because customers do not feel the need to contact support if they’re enjoying their experience.

A recent poll from Customer Management IQ confirms how important customer experience is to business leaders and managers. More than two thirds of business executives assigned high priority to customer experience.

5 ways a CRM can improve your customer experience

It creates a simple onboarding process

It’s well-known that people often find it hard to introduce and adopt new technologies in their everyday life. This is especially true for customers who are paying for a service or a product – they’re paying money and they naturally expect a certain degree of service.

A CRM helps new contacts by simplifying the onboarding process when they first become interested in purchasing your product or service. Thanks to workflows and automated tasks, a CRM allows you to set up a step-by-step introduction that will be sent to clients when they reach a certain phase in the sales process.

Of course, it may take some time for you to create a template introduction that works for all the different types of contacts. However, once you configure everything, your sales department will not only streamline the onboarding process, but they will also need to spend less time on each contact.

This means that they can focus on finding new leads and prospects and generating more revenue for your business. In other words, you will be providing a better service for your customer, as well as increasing your team’s productivity. It’s a clear win-win.

It allows your employees to quickly access customer data

At its core, every CRM is a database that stores information about each person associated with your business. It organizes and presents the data in a beginner-friendly manner, allowing you to quickly browse quantitative and qualitative client data.

This is especially important for service and support teams working on long-term contracts because it lets them quickly examine the communication history between the client and the company. This way, your employees can provide a more timely response and deal with customer issues more effectively by avoiding unnecessary repetition.

Furthermore, it means that the quality of support and service won’t depend on the specific person handling the case. It will remain consistent, regardless of the person working on it, because all team members will have access to the same information before they interact with your customers.

This means your company can have a unified voice in all customer interactions, no matter what support agent is dealing with the customer.

It personalizes customer interactions

Now, this may seem contradictory to the first point, but bear with us.

A CRM essentially acts as a company-wide platform, allowing each team member to access all customer data at all times. This means that your employees can easily check this information before they respond to the client’s inquiries. In turn, this means that they can create a more personalized approach, according to the information at his disposal.

For example, if you notice that one of your regular customer has complaints, you may want to act more generously to preserve their account. Additionally, you can check their purchase history and offer them a special deal to reward their loyalty.

Similarly, you should even consider developing a customer loyalty program that accounts for past purchases and automatically creates bonus offers to your customers.

While it may seem insignificant at first, this type of personal customization is very important, as new research shows that almost half of customers leave their preferred businesses due to poor personalization. Furthermore, Accenture estimates that businesses lose $756 billion per year from customers who decide to take their business elsewhere.

It improves customer satisfaction

By now, it should be fairly obvious why and how a CRM improves the customer experience of your business. However, let us break it down in any case.

A CRM improves customer satisfaction because it creates a single point of reference that allows you to examine past engagements, assess the overall business and become more proactive.

Your employees can analyze the communication history with each customer to create a customer-specific service that will naturally result in higher customer satisfaction.

Preserving clients and converting them into loyal customers is essential for the success of any business. One research shows that it takes 7 times more resources to acquire a new customer than to preserve an existing client.

Another study claims that the most loyal customers spend as much as three times more than the average consumer. It’s clear that loyal customers have a significant effect on the health of a business.

It reduces customer churn

Before we explain why it’s important to reduce customer churn, let’s briefly go over what customer churn is.

Customer churn represents the percentage of customers that stopped using your product/service within a certain time frame.

For obvious reasons, businesses aim to keep the customer churn as close to 0% as possible. In fact, it’s not uncommon for a company to spend a relatively high percentage of their revenue on decreasing churn. This is because even a modest churn improvement can significantly increase the profit of the business.

As we mentioned earlier, customers typically switch between companies due to the lack of personalization and CRMs help solve that issue.

Final words

There you have it! A CRM can help all types of businesses ran more optimally and improve the customer experience of its users. If you would like to test a CRM system on your business, you can sign up for a free trail with Simply CRM.