One of the most important tools in the toolbox of every business out there is its CRM software. But, most companies still aren’t getting the most out of their CRM apps.
The good news, however, is that CRM adoption rate is growing steadily with 47% of global businesses planning to increase their budget for customer service software. That’s just the tip of the iceberg; CRM software market is projected to reach revenue of over $80 billion by 2025, which effectively makes it the fastest growing software market out there.
But, even though everyone realizes the importance of CRM, using its full potential still eludes most enterprises. You see, even though most CRM tools are powerful enough to manage just about every aspect of your customer relationships, they end up being used as nothing more than a very expensive phone directory. This is a shame because they are capable of so much more.
In order to help you improve your customer relationship management, and utilize the full power of your CRM software of choice, let’s take a look at some of the most effective CRM tricks every entrepreneur should use.
1. Choose the Right Social CRM Tool
Social media is huge when it comes to customer relationship management. It’s a place where your customers can talk about your brand and its products with others, which can either help or hurt your reputation. This is why it’s so important to choose the right social CRM tool for your enterprise so that it can stay on top of its customers, engage with them in a proactive manner, and learn more about their pain points and needs.
Now, whether your company is selling sports apparel or dissertation help doesn’t really matter, because you need a social CRM platform in any case. First, you will need to use it as a social media analytics tool that is able to capture all the relevant KPIs. Second, you will also have to use it as a tool to partially automate and schedule your social media presence. Using a tool like Nimble can help turn things around for your CRM strategy.
2. Take Notice of Your Customers’ Life Events
One of the best CRM tricks you can use to your advantage is remembering your customers’ important life events. This doesn’t really cost you anything and requires almost no effort on your part, but it is something that can resonate with your customers on a personal level and which can significantly improve your relationship.
For example, you can contact them when it’s their birthday or any other time when they have an important personal or professional anniversary. Again, this requires very little effort, so you don’t have to belong to professional essay writers in order to show them that you care and that you value them as human beings, not just as customers.
Now, you won’t even have to dig through their social media profiles, provided that they have any, because you can gather all the relevant personal information during the onboarding procedure. When creating a new customer record on your CRM platform, make sure to treat them like human beings and ask them for information relating to their life events if possible. After that, it is up to you to send them a simple reminder or a gift. It will help you forge a more emotional connection with your customers.
3. Identify Customers About to Jump Ship
Although everyone is obsessed about generating new leads and customers, research shows that customer retention is more important, and more profitable, because you can increase profits by as much as 95% by increasing your customer retention rate by only 5%. With CRM software, you can track the engagement of your customers, and identify early on those who want to leave. Then, you can take the necessary steps in order to prevent them from leaving, whether you are a thesis writer or a multinational corporation.
For example, imagine a situation where your customer service receives regular calls from a client about a persistent technical issue. Without CRM, these repeated calls might go unnoticed, especially if you have different operators handling the same client at different times. However, if you were to track those issues inside CRM, you would be able to take on a more proactive approach and contact the said client and solve the issue before it gets out of hand. Using your CRM platform, you can even set up flags, alarms, and triggers, which can then alert your sales team to take action.
4. Train All Employees to Use CRM Software
Now, providing CRM training for absolutely every employee might not be possible in your organization, but you should at least focus on teaching those which come into contact with your customers in one way or another.
That includes teaching your customer support staff to identify and log repeating calls and issues, as well as training your sales and marketing people. You could also provide training for those employees who are not in direct contact with your customers, but who are tech-oriented or willing to learn. That way, you can have them jump in in case one of your employees from a particular department is on leave.
Also, according to collegepaper.org reviews, if they turn out to be really good at it, you can simply transfer them to a different department, instead of recruiting and interviewing and then training a new employee, which takes more time and money than looking among your existing staff for a solution.
5. Sync Your CRM with Your Calendar
Yes, pretty much all CRM tools come with their own calendar feature, but if you have just bought a CRM platform, it will require a lot of time and effort for you to transfer all the important calendar dates and client-related meetings to your CRM manually. This is why you should always opt for a CRM platform that enables you to automatically sync all of your relevant dates.
In fact, you should change your CRM in case it’s not able to transfer data from the most popular applications such as Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, or the calendar you are using on your smartphone. The same goes for making invites, taking notes, and logging every client-related activity.
6. Make Sure Your Data Is Accurate and Up to Date
You may have the most expensive and powerful CRM tool out there, but it’s only going to be as good as the data inside it. This means that the data stored and used by your CRM should not only be accurate but up to date as well. Now, it’s not easy keeping track of all that data and updating it every single time there is a change, which is why you should set up a process through which you will be able to add new data, remove obsolete emails and information, as well as flag those which are invalid or erroneous.
Apart from coming up with your own system, you should, if possible, opt for a CRM tool which allows you to add, edit, or remove all the necessary information in a few simple clicks, without having to go through half a dozen menus. That way, you can make sure that your sales reps will have an easier time making these changes every single time, keeping the data fresh and relevant.
7. Go Mobile
You might also want to consider getting a cloud-based CRM that works well with mobile devices. This would enable you to access the data from any device, regardless of time and location. If your sales reps are especially dynamic and they spend most of their working hours outside of the office, this can work really well, as it will improve their productivity and enable them to access and enter customer information on the go. In fact, they would be able to manage entire projects using their smartphone or tablet and spend much more time interacting with customers out of the office.
The Final Word
CRM software has become so powerful and complex that it can pretty much do anything you ask of it. The only real problem is learning all of its true capabilities, and then figuring out how to make them work for your business. We hope that these tips and tricks will help you improve your CRM strategy and make the most out of your CRM platform of choice. Good luck!
