Your customers are the lifeline that keeps your business afloat, making the relationship you develop and sustain with them the most important one. In a world oversaturated with marketing, mass messaging and advertising, it’s becoming ever harder to cut through the noise and build meaningful connections with your customers and prospects.
With digital transformation being a top priority for approximately 91% of global organisations according to Gartner, businesses are increasingly recognising the importance of adopting a digital-first approach to customer service and engagement. Greater brand visibility through digitalisation is no doubt important - but alone it’s not enough.
Visibility is not enough to win more customers and greater market share. Relevancy and personalisation are what tips the scale when it comes to sales and customer conversions.
Using the efficiency gains that come from digital transformation to invest in your customer relationships will help you create lasting, more impactful engagements with customers that will build trust, nurture loyalty and drive greater revenue.
A CRM tool is the ideal solution for this, bridging the capabilities of digitalisation with the granular attention to detail necessary to build stronger customer relationships.
What is a CRM Tool?
CRM stands for customer relationship management. In short, it’s how you manage your communications, interactions, engagements and sales with your customers. A CRM tool is any software or technology that businesses use to build, manage, support and improve their customer relationships.
CRM tools help businesses nurture, develop and sustain relationships across the customer lifecycle, from awareness to consideration, to decision-making and conversion and, lastly, retention. It’s implemented across all departments within an organisation including sales and marketing, support and service and IT and commerce.
How Does CRM Improve Customer Relationships?
Integrating the capabilities of a CRM tool into your customer relationship management can improve and enhance the relationships you build with customers. A CRM system for your customer engagement provides easy access to vast sets of customer data from a single location as opposed to manually collecting and retrieving information sets from various disconnected spreadsheets and disengaged systems that create data silos.
Using a CRM tool enables you to track, collect, store and analyse prospective and existing customer data that can be used to create comprehensive profiles. Using this data, organisations can identify ideal sales opportunities for customer targeting, easily access information for support and resolution and build tailored marketing campaigns based on historical data.
By centralising all essential data within CRM software, businesses can establish a single source of truth, accessible to everyone in the organisation.
The Benefits of Using a CRM Tool
Centralise your customer interactions
Customers are inundated with marketing and communications. As a result, they’re more easily distracted, making it harder to win customer attention in order to build trust and loyalty. Putting your brand in front of a customer requires more than just clever messaging - it requires a deep understanding of the customer’s needs, preferences, demographics and engagements.
In other words, you need the complete history of their interactions with your business to use as the foundation for tailoring your communications to build strong, meaningful connections that foster trust.
A CRM tool can help you achieve this by extracting data that will help you identify customer goals, challenges and preferences and automate the communication process. The more you know your customer, the more relevant and personal the product and service recommendations you can share that cater to their location in the sales funnel.
Improve your quality of customer service
No matter how brilliant or innovative your products may be, the quality of service that you deliver will determine whether or not customers decide to engage with your brand or not.
There’s no doubt that 2020 upended and changed customer expectations. With most companies pivoting towards primarily digital services, this action had a ripple effect that trickled down, affecting the way customers expect to engage with their favourite brands. Your customers are looking for seamless digital experiences that are personalised and consistent - no matter what channel or platform they’re operating from.
Through a CRM platform, departments and teams across organisations can collaborate and work together to provide an exceptional omnichannel customer experience that tailors messages, product recommendations and communications according to their unique metrics and their platform of choice.
Improve your employee engagement and productivity
Centralising your customer data to streamline engagement and communications doesn’t only benefit customers - it can have a great impact on your team’s productivity and workplace engagement. Using a CRM tool to automate manual repetitive processes frees up their time from mundane tasks like hunting for customer information or data insertion and updates.
Automating your operations across different departments like support, sales and marketing will allow employees to spend more time on nurturing customer relationships, closing sales and providing support to prospective and current customers, reinforcing customer loyalty and improving your retention rate.
Customers enjoy a better customer service experience and employees are more engaged and productive because they’re no longer bogged down by uninspiring, manual tasks.
Salesforce Customer 360 - Reimagining Your Customer Relationships
While a CRM tool is an invaluable asset to power your customer relationships, not all CRM platforms offer the same intuitive features and capabilities. Salesforce, for instance, offers Customer 360 - a comprehensive, end-to-end CRM platform that connects your organisational departments across service, sales, marketing, IT and support and commerce through a single shared, customer view.
By connecting teams with the customer data they need, Customer 360 breaks down data silos, allowing teams to collaborate to build consistent, meaningful customer engagements at every stage of the customer lifecycle - all from a single, unified platform.
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