CRM Trend Watch:
CRM Is Expanding Beyond Customer Service and Sales
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is considered one of the must-have business tools for companies of every type and size. A CRM is one of the very first software investments that a small company will usually make to help spur and support growth by setting up an easily accessible customer and client database. From there, companies can fine-tune their most important initiatives involving external client and customer relationships, from managing and converting leads to providing top-notch customer support.
As such, CRM systems and features are some of the most heavily relied upon software tools for customer service and sales teams within organizations, small and large.
CRM software was initially designed to give companies a more organized and streamlined approach to storing customer and client contact details, a modern-day Rolodex. However, while CRM software is an invaluable tool for improving customer and client relationships with easy-to-access information and real-time updates, the use of CRM is once again evolving to have positive impacts company-wide, for teams that aren’t necessarily customer or client-facing.
Here’s a closer look at some of the ways that CRM software is expanding beyond customer service and sales, to be a company-wide source of insight and use.
Marketing and New Product Launches
Modern CRM solutions can provide a lot of valuable data insights for the marketing team (and even offer some great automation) for engaging your target audience or prospective clients with marketing campaigns and messages that are highly personalized and tailored to the exact type of people who are already looking for your products or would benefit greatly from your services.
CRM solutions store much more than just contact details. These powerful systems can gather an array of different details, from customer demographics, client and customer feedback, social media interactions, buying and sales patterns, and more. Using this information, your marketing team and get a deeper insight into customer motivations, patterns, and details that will help fine-tune marketing efforts to truly speak to and reach your ideal audience. You can use CRM data to create customer personas, and customer journey maps, and even test and automate marketing efforts.
You can also use this data to plan product launches with more detailed information on who your key customers are and what they’re looking for from you in terms of new and improved products. You don’t have to rely on guesswork, as all the data you need to shape product launches can be accessed and analyzed in your CRM system.
Business Strategy, Company Planning, and Decision-Making
Modern CRM systems have an analytics feature that allows you to take all the valuable customer and client data you’re gathering and storing in your CRM and analyze it to draw meaningful conclusions about who your customers and clients are, how they’re interacting with your company, and how you can improve or overcome issues to drive your business forward in the future. Understanding what’s motivating your customers and the processes that take a lead to a client can be key in identifying how to improve lead conversions, increase customer retention, and build out a strategy for your company that is incredibly personalized to your customers and clients.
CRM analytics is being embraced more and more by companies at the executive level, particularly as customer experience moves to the forefront of business. Business owners and executives can use CRM analytics to make decisions on current trends or circumstances and also plan for the future based on the story the data is telling about customers and clients.
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