CRM Advantages: How CRM Enhances Customer Relationships?

What is your customer satisfaction rate?

This isn't just about the customer service you provide, but rather how you interact with your customers on a daily basis.

Here's a little survey to find out:

Chances are if you answered 'NO' to any of these questions, your business is suffering from an ineffective or disorganized contact management system, which adversely impacts the quality and consistency of your relationships with customers and prospects.

CRM systems can help you improve your performance in these six areas by centralizing, optimizing, and streamlining customer communications.

1. A better understanding of customers

It may seem simple, but CRM's ability to store all contact information in one place makes it an incredibly powerful communication tool.

A CRM system software provides your sales, marketing, and customer service teams with quick access to key information.

Not only do they have a contact's full name, email address, telephone number, postal address, website, and social network accounts, but they also have information about the contact's position in the company, his/her relationship to other contacts in your database, the language they speak, and even their birthdays.

Having all this information at your fingertips makes personalizing your communications with contacts a breeze.

Secondly, customer relationship management allows you to save all activities, projects, sales, live chat messages, email exchanges, invoices, orders, contracts, or customer service requests that contact has ever been involved with.

By using a CRM system, you can get a better idea of who your contacts are and what they want.

2. Improved segmentation

No one wants to do business with a faceless crowd. Everybody wants to deal with the right people.

You can do this by segmenting contacts (customers and prospects) into target audiences. CRMs do segmentation better than almost anything else out there.

With CRM software, you can break down data by categories and criteria, making it easy to create focused lists. Such segmented lists in sales and marketing allow you to run specific customer marketing campaigns (and account-based marketing campaigns) and analyze your sales process and lead pool.

When you know whom you're targeting, you can tailor your offer, your tactics, and even your sales pitch!

Essentially, a good CRM system helps you determine who is really interested in what you have to offer, who is still on the fence, and who is cold as ice.

3. Improved customer retention

Along with being a great tool for finding and nurturing new customers, CRM is also a great tool for keeping existing customers happy.

You can benefit from a CRM system by keeping your promises by keeping track of appointments or sending follow-up emails.

CRM management software  can also prompt you to reach out to customers who have not been contacted for a while and may feel neglected.

According to a report by Bain & Company, keeping an existing customer is 6 or 7 times cheaper than getting a new one.

 Additionally, a CRM system can help you orchestrate your marketing activities: send email campaigns, free trial offers, or post-purchase surveys - all at the right time.

4. A better understanding of needs

When we know what to expect, we feel more confident.

Business is no different. Keeping track of a customer's buying habits makes cross-selling and upselling easier.

One of the key benefits of CRM systems is that they enable salespeople to sell more and sell faster by keeping track of customer interactions over a long period of time. This allows sales reps to anticipate customer needs.

By knowing the contact's purchase history - what they bought and when, what contracts they were offered, what buying habits they exhibited, and even how they became your customers, you can come up with new or better offers at just the right time!

Providing great customer service requires a CRM system as well. Having access to interaction history makes it easy to provide timely support.

Within seconds, you know whether your contact had any problems with your product, how their service requests were handled, and whether they were satisfied or not. If they complained in the past - now is your chance to redeem your reputation.

5. Better and speedier communication

Professionalism means promptly responding to your customers' requests.

CRM software solutions save you and your customers' time with customizable, ready-to-use templates for emails, letters, documents, proposals, quotes, invitations, newsletters, etc.

Here's a ready-made template for you.

90% of companies do not use autoresponders to acknowledge they have received a customer service email, according to our most recent Customer Service Benchmark Report.

You can easily stand out from the competition by copying and pasting the following template into your CRM system:

Additionally, a CRM system can help you draft SMS and emails and schedule their dispatch weeks or months in advance.

When it comes to customer service requests, speed is everything!

With all contact history at your fingertips, CRM lets you customize your communication, send quick solutions to recurring problems, send FAQs and videos, and even make phone calls directly from the system.

6. Better protection of data privacy

Let's not forget the "buzzword" of the last few years - the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)!

To comply with the new EU regulations on data privacy, it is vitally important to have a CRM system that has GDPR-related capabilities built-in.

CRM offers the main benefit of saving time and effort as GDPR compliance is a major undertaking, not to mention the unpleasant legal consequences if you don't comply.

With GDPR, it’s better to be safe than sorry.

CRM systems can help you obtain and document the consent of your customers to store and use their personal information (consent), send automatic notifications to all new contacts that you wish to store their data, manage your customers' subscriptions to email communication preferences, and even set rules to update personal details for groups of customers - all at one time.

Manually completing this process will take most of your time, and you also run the risk of making mistakes. However, setting up a CRM system to handle that for you is a fast, safe and reliable way to make your communications with customers GDPR-compliant, which in turn builds trust as you handle the data with respect.