Maintaining healthy relationships with customers can advance any exceptional business, but each individual customer is so complex as to have different needs. To maintain those healthy relationships, you need to understand the demographics of your clients well enough to provide them with what they ultimately need. Whether you have a small company or a large one, this holds true.
For any business, sticking to modern standards means employing a customer relationship management tool (CRM), a digital interface to enable better communication between a business and its customers. A personal CRM may sometimes be of use. What separates a personal CRM from others is that it’s a set of simple tools to aid in daily life, from calendars and to-do lists to fora and chat boxes. Let’s talk about the best cases for CRM use.
- Automation
One activity that marketing professionals are reluctant to perform is writing a cold email to a lead. When a new lead is discovered, a new email must be written from scratch, but why do this? Why not develop a template in some form? A CRM can help automate one such activity. With a CRM, enjoy creating email templates with custom placeholders for a product or client with no prior experience. Every time a new lead is registered with your CRM, an initial cold email will automatically reach that lead.
- Discover What Makes Customers Tick
A great way to learn more about your customers is through the interactions they have with customer service, but how do you record the dense quantity of information? Again, a CRM can help you do this. A CRM can allow customer service departments to input information into a database in real-time. Once the process of recording information is complete, the CRM can pull conversations between customer support and customers concerning tickets, employing that information against any future problems a similar customer might have. Recording these conversations can also allow for prioritization in the sense that you can discern who is a high-value loyal customer and who isn’t. You can place your most loyal customers at the top of any queue.
- Get to Meetings Faster
Let’s talk about field sales. There are times when you might need to drive across the city to meet someone. Transportation slows everything down, but what if a CRM could help you plan transportation alongside meetings? Many CRMs can be accessed on a smartphone and can connect to ridesharing apps. Whether you’re planning for a meeting that’s one week in advance or in an hour, enjoy ridesharing access without leaving your company’s CRM.
- Prioritize Leads
You can hand a CRM a rubric and a lead’s value. Feel free to base these rules on demographic information, industry, or geographical location with a point system in place. Leads would receive points based on whatever rules they followed. If a lead is a CEO, that might inflate that lead by 20 points. If a lead opens your cold email, that might bring about another 15 points. Those with the highest scores will be the best and the most willing to talk to you, ultimately purchasing your product or service.
- Mid-Call Assistance
Throughout a cold call, you might realize that a colleague could offer more expertise than you could. A CRM can offer a quick way for you to transfer a call to someone else with a single click. With a CRM, you can send your leads to helpful colleagues without putting those leads through a frustrating series of holds. After all, constantly putting people on hold isn’t going to draw in any leads. If anything, it’ll send them away, so make sure to use a CRM’s ability to connect customers with the most helpful agents.
- Tracking a Project’s Age
Generally, you want to know how long the average project takes to complete; this could help you figure out which stages of a project’s process take the longest. You can discern which stages are easy and which need improvement. CRMs can illustrate this information in a way that will actually be meaningful for you and other employees. By itself, information is not enough. A CRM offers graphs and charts, among other types of comparisons, to see the relationships between all data points.
Conclusion
The versatility of the CRM ought to be evident by now. Interdepartmental communication is hard enough, let alone intradepartmental communication, but a CRM can take these processes out of the stone age, beyond the present, and way into the future with a simple installation and an uncannily intuitive digital interface.