Customer relationship management (CRM) solutions store data about customers – their contact and personal details, the times they’ve contacted you, the products and services they’ve purchased. Integrating this data with other systems paves the way to supercharging your customer experience.
Pairing CRM systems with marketing automation tools such as Marketo or Eloqua can help transform leads to sales. Journey mapping in the context of customer contact, using tools such as eGain, helps businesses use omnichannel contact centre data to enhance customer experience.
Here are three ways to electrify your customer experience:
1. Make it personal
Analysts at McKinsey predict that by 2025, CRM will meet a new standard called the ‘care of one’: an approach that focuses on serving individual customers.
Cloud-based CRM systems help businesses respond to the needs of individual customers. Sales teams and service staff can access the latest customer information – at head office, in the field, working from home or at customer premises.
If customers feel you know about them and understand them, they’ll have more confidence that you can support them. Cloud systems let you add more salespeople to the team in minutes so there are enough people to spend time helping individual customers.
Cloud CRM systems are not one-size-fits-all, as you can set them up to match your specific business needs. Customisable CRM and contact centre dashboards help businesses prioritise aspects of the customer experience, using data on agent performance, upselling, service levels and customer satisfaction.
2. Make it proactive
While organisations need to move from a reactive to proactive customer service approach, a Gartner survey of more than 6,000 customers revealed that less than one in eight reported receiving any type of proactive customer service.
That same research showed that proactive customer service results in an increase in Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Customer Effort Score (CES) and Value Enhancement Score (VES).
Integrated technology helps with this. When contact centres are integrated with CRM, agents can proactively call or message a customer directly from the application when they see an issue or an opportunity.
3. Make it collaborative
The most effective customer experience solution provides a complete view of all your clients – with every interaction recorded in one place.
Automation helps here. Once an interaction has ended, systems can automatically create a record to maintain a complete history of contacts.
When a CRM system is integrated with a contact centre and its internal digital collaboration system, everyone can see relevant customer information. This allows employees to collaborate beyond the walls of their usual departments. If a contact centre agent can communicate quickly with someone in finance or with a field operative, a customer issue can be converted to an opportunity.
Old is gold
Winning new customers is an expensive business. Some estimates say it costs five times as much to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one. What’s more, the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60–70%, compared with the 5–20% probability of selling to a new customer.
Existing customers are a golden opportunity. Integrating CRM with contact centres to give a single view of each customer reveals golden nuggets of insight into your engaged customers.
The next generation of integrated CRM shines a dazzling light on opportunities, helping you identify your best prospects and keeps existing clients coming back.
