No matter what business you’re in, the goal is always to keep moving forward. You want to eliminate inefficiencies and maximize your profitability in order to ensure the future of the company, and you need to take steps to do that.
There are so many ways to do this, but one simple way is by introducing the right CRM software. CRM can ensure your business is working more efficiently across all departments, greatly reducing poor communication and allowing different branches to work more coherently.
Introducing the right CRM software for your business can make a huge difference in several areas and transform the service you offer your customers. Here are six ways the right CRM software can boost your business.
Managing Contacts
Contact management is the lynchpin of your customer relationship management software. It allows you to efficiently log vital information about your customers, such as name and telephone numbers and stores them for easy access.
A good CRM system goes further than just collecting important data though, it allows you to track the entire interaction history on a potential customer. If an individual salesman has had an interaction with a prospect, then this interaction, and notes about the interaction are logged in the prospect’s file.
Collecting this data allows customers to have a seamless experience when dealing with different areas of your business. If a customer is speaking to a member of the technical support team, not only does that team member have access to the customer’s vital information, but they can also see other interactions that a customer has had with your company.
This helps your business to give far superior customer service. For example, in a hotel, a cleaner may notice that a regular guest enjoys roses in their room. The cleaner can then log this information in the CRM software, and then when the receptionist sees a new booking for that customer, they can ensure some roses are placed in the room.
As they say, “information is power,” and a good CRM system gives you access to that information.
Managing Opportunities
While CRM grew out of this need to be able to accurately log and access information about customers, today’s CRM software does so much more.
One such area where CRM software can make a big difference to your business is in managing pipelines and sales opportunities. When you’re managing a complex pipeline and balancing many clients at one time, organization plays a huge part.
CRM software helps organize sales opportunities and pipelines and automates some of the processes. Creating and sending quotes becomes easy, making it easier to spot future trends by viewing analytics and past sales data.
Managing Leads
On the marketing side of things, CRM software plays a big part in lead generation and helping to turn those leads into customers. Like sales pipelines, lead management can become extremely complex, and it’s important to be able to organize those leads and stay on top of them.
If you’re using outdated methods to keep track of leads, then it’s easy for some to slip through the cracks, or for it to take a long time for anyone to contact those leads. With a CRM system, though, leads can be automatically divided among your salespeople, and reminders created for the customer to be contacted.
A good CRM system will be able to show you exactly how a prospect came to be a lead, what item they clicked on or downloaded, what lead form they filled out, and allow for the salesperson to be automatically connected with them.
This allows your salespeople to spend less time searching for information and more time turning leads into customers.
Email Marketing
Your first point of contact with a customer might not even be through a salesperson. Email marketing is a huge weapon in the marketer’s arsenal, and a good CRM system will be able to make it even more effective.
Conversions don’t necessarily happen the first time someone visits your website or fills out a contact form. It takes multiple interactions with a prospective customer to build trust and turn them into a lead. One of the best ways to do this is through email marketing, where you control the message.
Good CRM software will help you automate this process so that as soon as someone fills out your contact form, you have a series of emails ready to be sent out at certain intervals. These emails allow you to target specific customers with different messages, and once they’re set up, they will all be sent out automatically.
Customer Service
Whether you’re selling a product or a service, your business needs to be able to provide support to its customers. Today’s customers expect to be able to contact your business in many ways, including telephone, email, and live chat, and managing all these support lines can be tricky.
A CRM system allows you to organize the information you collect through these different methods and gives the right people access to it. With this information, your support team can offer the customer more qualified and accurate advice to help solve their problem.
Reporting
Data is only useful if you can interpret it and use it to your advantage. You might be collecting all this data on your sales and everything else, but if you don’t turn it into actionable insights, then it’s not useful.
The right CRM software can automatically turn the information you log into reports and analytical tools that help improve your business performance. When you’ve got this information at your fingertips, you can spot trends, eliminate outdated methods, and focus on cost-effective practices.
CRM allows you to do this in real-time. You don’t have to wait for monthly figures to come out, you set up a dashboard with all the insights you need to keep improving your business performance.
This is true whatever area of the company you work in, from sales to customer support and everything in between.