Top 7 Ways CRM Technology Advancements Can Help Improve Your Business

For a business to become successful, acquiring and retaining customers is extremely important. Unless you are able to woo new customers, retain your old ones, and provide both with a high level of customer service consistently, you won’t be able to expand. Thanks to advancements in CRM (customer relationship management) technology, you can now serve your customers better, which in turn would improve your business processes. If you aren’t sure how your business can benefit from the advancements in CRM technology, here are the top seven ways:

1. Offer efficient customer self-service: Thanks to CRM technology advancements, we’ve come a long way from ‘live human’ customer service to comprehensive self-service. By using social customer service offerings such as Lithium and dedicated support applications like Zendesk, you can help customers get a majority of their concerns and questions addressed online quickly.
2. Give customers what they need: You can integrate applications such as GetSatisfaction and UserVoice with your CRM to let software developers enhance the end-user experience depending not only on what they think customers require but also based on what customers say they really want. Since these applications come with customer self-service functionality, you may even leverage the feature to make your customers happy by bringing answers to their questions at their fingertips.
3. Learn your customers better: By analyzing data collected from your customers via CRM, you can know them better in terms of what their needs or preferences are. Such insights can help you in executing more effective target marketing. So, when you have a new product/service ready to be launched, you can select the right group of customers for promotional offers rather than sending the offers to all of them. By targeting the customers who’re most likely to be interested in the new products/services and are hot leads that can be easily converted into sales, you can improve your chances of success.
4. Educate your customers: Sometimes, you may need to educate your customers, especially if you’re bringing something novel to the market for the first time. By using Join.me or GoToMeeting applications (for web conferencing) right from your CRM, your customer support representatives and sales personnel will get an easy and quick way to visually communicate with your prospective and existing customers. This way, you can educate your customers and even show the human face behind the company by letting some customer/sales reps communicate directly with a handful of participants. You may even use these and similar apps to spread your content via a community-based approach.
5. Mobilize the workforce via mobile technology: By leveraging mobile apps, your employees can make and receive phone calls, view/edit/update shared documents, participate in web conferences, and handle a wide range of other tasks from virtually any location. This means the employees would no longer need to wait to reach their office desks to respond to customers, edit/read important documents etc. By having full office functionality via their mobile/smart devices even on-the-go, the employees would be able to get more tasks done. This, in turn, would give a boost to the bottom-line and the level of customer service on offer.
6. Encourage the use of cloud CRM: Delivering customers what they need, when they need is a crucial key to business success. As advancements in CRM technology has made cloud CRM possible, you can use cloud solutions to facilitate anywhere, anytime access to the same services and applications from multiple locations and devices. This will not only make your customers happy but even encourage effective collaboration in your employees as they would be able to work well as a team even when they are located across diverse geographical locations.
7. Better organization and security: CRM facilitates better organization of your business data and automates several aspects to make life easier for your in-house personnel. Thanks to CRM, you can access automatically stored communication to check calendar, emails, and phone calls – all in one place. This helps the employees to work together seamlessly to improve their sales. Thanks to CRM that integrates processes like inventory, accounting, and sales, you can even streamline your business processes. With CRM’s security settings, you can also control access to your important business and customer information. Compared to locally stored data, CRM’s level of protection is significantly higher.

Customers can make or break a business. With a robust CRM in place, you can keep them happy. But a CRM isn’t just about your customers. You can even use a CRM to organize your data better, recognize the best leads, and spot the location and demography that a majority of your customers belong to, among others. Thus, a CRM would also help your sales team to set more realistic targets and help you to make data-driven business decisions. If you haven’t yet used a CRM, now is the time to start using one.