How Modern CRM Solutions Are Changing Customer Engagement?
The biggest challenge today for any business is retaining the customers in long run. The interplay of marketing, sales and operations which is needed to ensure that new customers are rolling while the old ones are kept engaged is seldom managed efficiently in organisations. Failing to address this challenge will go unnoticed and will be a direct impact on the revenue.
The bottlenecks are usually the lack of proper understanding of customer journey and the execution of a proper customer relationship management.
Many companies choosing to implement a modern CRM, see it as a tool to increase their sales revenue without getting into the depth of what a CRM is designed to achieve. The CRM can centralize your customer data and enable a standard process for your sales team to follow. However, to use the CRM to ignite the salesforce needs more than just data and flow. This requires imagination and more attention to detail like tracking the customer conversation at every stage of the sales lifecycle.
The proliferation of digital channels such as social media, mobile devices, and online marketplaces has created new opportunities for businesses to engage with their customers. Modern CRM solutions are designed to integrate these channels and provide an omnichannel customer experience across all touchpoints which is both seamless and consistent.
A fruitful use of CRM is when you use the customer data to really personalize the customer experience and keep the momentum on with the objective of lifelong relationship. One good example of how that may apply can be seen in field services-based industry.
Modern CRM solutions should help remember the customer preferences such as what kind of service requirements they have, how frequently they need the services, which day and time they are usually available and accordingly schedule appointment without the customer having to feed in those inputs every time they need to raise a service request.
Purchase decisions are not easy to influence, especially in this world of choice overload. If it’s a low engagement product, then people try to stick to a routine purchase without much deviation in the product preferences. However, if it’s a complex and high-cost product or a service, customers spend more time looking into the features and options and comparing prices before making a decision.
Good CRM solutions have the potential to make such purchase decisions easier by leveraging the insights from customer behavior and buying patterns. This can save businesses a lot of effort in sales and even costs for product development.
Another aspect of purchase decisions is that customer loyalty cannot be ensured without consistent improvement in the products and services. In most likely case, the competition is already doing that. To gain more mindshare, businesses need to build better offerings and customer experience for customers.
Modern CRM solutions are not just tools, they should be seen as strategic initiatives. Think of it as a power to be able to understand customers better and build lasting relationships with them on a large scale. By incorporating data analytics and AI tools, modern CRM solutions can provide insights into customer behavior, preferences, and needs. It can be used to identify areas where products or services can be improved.
This is an era where customers co-create the product with the business. The customer wants to be involved in the very process of product development and design. Modern CRM solutions provide a platform for businesses to collaborate with their customers and co-create products and services that meet their specific needs.
Modern CRM solutions provide a single source of truth for engaging with customers. By integrating data from multiple sources, businesses can get a complete view of their customers’ interactions and preferences. This enables them to provide a seamless and consistent customer experience across target segments, geographies, and product categories. By having a single source of truth, businesses can also avoid duplication of effort and ensure that their customer data is accurate and up-to-date.
We need to inculcate the fundamental understanding that CRM is not just a platform to maintain customer data but to improve customer experience which will over time build credibility and trust. It can be said that while modern CRM solutions have emerged as powerful tools to manage consistent interactions with customer and within organization, as result improving customer engagement, when it comes to actionable results, the implementation matters as much as the mindset. In effect, CRM won’t change anything unless you change the way you look at it.
