The Guiding Light to Achieving Customer-Centricity

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Due to the new challenging economic realities of the COVID-19 pandemic and the global hyper-competitive environment, many firms are desperately trying to sustain performance levels and keep customers happy. As customer expectations rise and brand loyalty declines faster than ever before, the firms that still insist upon focusing on short-term transactions and quick wins will certainly lose market share over the long haul. On the other hand, the firms that exhibit a renewed commitment to building long-term client relationships and offering a consistent, engaging, and highly relevant end-to-end customer experience will stand out from the competition. Leading companies looking to become truly customer-centric and successfully implement a voice-of-the-customer strategy are choosing to invest in and implement CRM software across all units of the enterprise.

Though many organizations aspire to be customer-centric, it is rather difficult to do so without a central CRM database!

Without CRM, Sales usually has one preferred view of the customer, while the other departments have their own separate view of the customer that is unstructured and sporadically stored in entirely different systems and locations. Needless to say, this lack of unity and shared client profile data can create major inefficiencies and many missed or delayed sales pursuits.

Luckily, the open architecture of industry-leading CRMs can integrate with other systems and help bridge the silos between departments. Serving as the centralized customer data hub, CRM provides a complete, multidimensional view of the customer to facilitate cross-departmental collaboration and knowledge sharing. Rather than reconciling spreadsheets or debating over client data discrepancies, employees can rely on the data in CRM as the unquestionable, single, and unified source.

With CRM, Executives, Marketing departments, Sales teams, Customer Service reps, and Finance personnel can easily obtain, input, and analyze customer interactions and revenue production from all the varying channels and touchpoints of the enterprise. The unified 360-degree view of the customer in CRM lets everyone know what products they own, what services they are using, the type of support they are entitled to, their billing history, and origination source.

Overall, the holistic prospect and client insights captured in CRM serve as the guiding light to the firm’s quest to becoming more customer-centric, and ultimately increasing customer satisfaction, client loyalty, and business performance.

Photo by Oliver Sjöström on Unsplash

As a result of having more accessible and reliable data everyone at the firm will become MORE efficient and have MORE time to better serve customers and fulfill the promise of their brands. The newfound confidence in the customer data really enables employees to proactively and quickly provide a differentiated and compelling end-to-end service experience that customers can come to depend on and trust.

Moreover, since CRM arms employees with a multitude of real-time actionable business intelligence and data visualization on topics, such as how to better reach, serve, and interact with existing clients and new buyers, they will find it easier to authentically reconnect with customers. By tracking the ever-changing needs and buying patterns and preferences of customers, firms can more effectively shape their offers and services. They can leverage CRM to identify target profitable segments and then optimally align and allocate limited resources to MAXIMIZE prospect conversion rates, cross-sell and up-sell wins, average deal sizes, client retention rates, and profitability.

Do you consider yourself a customer-centric enterprise?

If not, CRM can be the catalyst to enable your firm to become more customer-centric so you can reduce customer churn and instead benefit from an increase in customer lifetime value.

Kevin Wessels
KEVIN WESSELS is the Founder and Managing Director of RevSherpas LLC, a boutique customer experience strategy consulting and coaching agency for small to mid-sized businesses. He has over 10 years of revenue growth acceleration consulting experience scaling global businesses via strategic CRM and CX transformations. A multi-published author, his specialties are building client-centric company cultures, improving sales and service rep productivity, differentiating the customer experience, increasing client retention, and revitalizing underperforming marketing and lead generation strategies.

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