A Guide to Transforming Customer Experiences with a CRM

Did you know 97% of global consumers say that customer service is very important or somewhat important in their choice of and loyalty to a brand? High quality products and services can attract a customer but exceptional customer service will keep them coming back for more. Exceptional customer service requires a deep understanding of your customer and the coordination of engagement across various communication channels. One bad customer experience can cause the most loyal of customers to look elsewhere, and effect your bottom line – quick. A CRM (customer relationship management) can ease this process and help you deliver excellent customer experiences at each and every touchpoint.

Here’s how customer experiences can be transformed with a CRM:

Customer Service Analytics
Customer Service Analytics can help you understand your sales funnel and conversion metrics by producing insights into customer attributes, characteristics and demographics. These types of insights aid in recognizing and quantifying customer sentiment, and feedback, to effectively plan how to reduce churn and improve the lifetime value of each customer. CRM offers real-time dashboards with a single-view of the entire workload. Having these dashboards aggregate customer service data, empowers increased flexibility to choose the order of case resolution depending on the severity and priority. The interactive charts also provide a visual representation of work items and gives notifications on priority items that need to be quickly resolved.

Multi-channel Support
Interacting with customers across multiple channels, such as phone, email, chat, online, offline, social media and more is extremely important. According to Forrester, 45% of US consumers will abandon an online transaction if their questions or concerns are not addressed quickly. Give your customers more options to reach you and let them choose their preferred channel utilizing the device of their choice. CRM will give you access to basic information, history and service level agreements when they reach out to your organization. With a CRM that enables multi-channel support, you can reduce time to resolution, increase customer satisfaction and strengthen customer loyalty.

Customer Portal
Help customers help themselves at any time – user communities should have the information needed to build relationships and generate value. Customer portals help answer the demands of customers, allowing deeper access to information and solutions with enhanced functionality. Customers can easily complete a transaction, submit a support ticket and manage their personal account within a customer portal. Also, it is important to retain relationships or rebuild them when things go wrong. Process automation, data-driven-AI-based predictions and VOC capture is critical to this effort. CRM can use knowledge across the enterprise to generate offers and resolve issues, or better yet prevent issues.

Predictive Analytics
Understanding your customers is key because creating a genuine relationship with them is the ultimate goal. Using predictive analytics to perform advanced analytics with statistical analysis for predictive modeling, data mining, text and entity analytics, optimization, real time scoring and machine learning is beneficial. With the data collected and the combination of business intelligence and analytics tools and dashboards, this can help create timely, relevant, and targeted promotional and customer care campaigns. Predictive analytics can provide future insights on buying habits and other triggers that can help maximize customer satisfaction.

Social Engagement & Retention
Use social CRM to boost customer engagement. Social engagement will enable customer service, sales and marketing teams to build positive relationships with customers. Connect with customers to gain insights into products, services and brand or simply drive social activities such as publishing posts and sharing feeds. Also, social media monitoring capabilities can assist with more personalized interactions, sales and customer retention.

Final Thoughts
A CRM is a powerful platform that can be used to manage customer relationships and data. As customers become more and more demanding, a CRM is the perfect solution for configuring and customizing the needs for each customer. CRM includes customer service features such as multi-channel support, a customer portal, knowledge base, interactive dashboards and chat integration that will help manage your customer service more efficiently. Empower your customer service team with a tool, that not only creates a more personalized experience but also helps prevent common service issues, so they can understand and service customers better.