Importance of CRM and Its Advantages to Business Owners

Business owners love two words the most. “Customer” and “Loyalty”. If you have loyal customers, they will definitely prefer to do business with you and spread the word about your business helping you to grow. But in order to create customer loyalty, you need to do something substantial.

A study by ClickFox revealed that the best way to build customer loyalty is by providing exceptional customer service. But it is difficult to respond to maintain superior quality services when you have to send emails through Outlook, keep a record of sent emails in excel sheets and keep updates of customer feedbacks. And this is where CRM comes into the picture. A Customer Relationship Management Software enables you and your customers to organize, manage and respond to customer requests at the right time.

There are one-click reports that offer you with insights about unanswered emails, response times and enables you to send instant replies to important customers.

So how does a Customer Relationship Software work? What are the advantages of using it? Let us take a look.

1. Respond proactively to customer requests

Not all customers expect you to come up with the solutions to their problems immediately. But they do expect acknowledgement of you having received their queries. A certain Customer Service Benchmark report had revealed that only 10% companies make use of automated responses. A SugarCRM software can help you to send automated responses for every customer request and let them know that you have received their ticket and that you will be providing them with the solution at the earliest.

The best part is that an automated response as such can be customized according to your needs. You can add include customer ticket number, customer support availability and a link to Frequently Asked Questions. Sometimes these help links also lead your customers to resolving issues independently resulting into lesser number of tickets to be resolved.

2. Send customer requests to the right person at the right time

Sometimes when the customer request is received, it passes through several staff members. Everyone guides the customers and provides them information about the person responsible for resolving a particular issue. Sometimes, it also gets too late for the problem to be resolved. These issues can create a bad impression of your company.

A SuiteCRM software is created in such a way that you can route the request to a particular person at the right time. These requests are further directed to team members and they get to see the entire customer profile along with the problems defined by them; leading them to resolve the issues immediately.

Emails to different departments can be directed to their respective addresses. For eg. There can be an email address created specifically for the accounting team – account.support@xyz.com and it can be configured in such a way that the emails with the word “bills” “billing” and “payment” gets sent to your accounting team.

3. Keep track of your customer service efforts

The days of using outdated excel spreadsheets are a passé. If the CEO of your company asks you to provide reports about how the customer service team is working, you possibly can’t show the spreadsheets. A CRM software helps you to keep all the customer requests and responses provided in one place. As these queries and responses are well-arranged and managed, you can easily create customer reports providing the details about the performance of your sales team.

All you need to do is just click on report creation and you will be able to see customer service reports displaying trends of performance along with the areas of improvement.

4. Offer 24/7 Customer Support

You possibly can’t be proactively available for your customers 24/7. And you also might not have financial capacity to invest in a customer support team that works round the clock. Through a CRM, you can provide your customers with a self-service customer portal. It enables your customers to resolve minor issues on their own.

All you need to create a customer center so that your customers can log in, look at the request history, write down their queries and search for FAQ’s anytime they want. This facility makes your customers feel that they are being heard and can receive support whenever they want.

5. Keep customer information centralized

Customers do not have the patience to wait until you try to fetch out all the information about them from your humongous records. A 2013 Survey conducted by Accenture had proved that being “Kept on hold” was one of the biggest frustrations faced by the customers. It ranked above “dealing with rude customer executives.”

One of the biggest reasons why a customer is kept on hold is – the customer support executive is trying to find out customer details including account information, profile communication history and complains. In case this information is available, what follows is a parade of questions.

A superior quality CRM keeps a check on all your interactions provides with a detailed profile of customers and gives a complete access to the sales and support team. Even if the responsible sales team member is unavailable, You can also get sales, marketing and service information in the absence of a particular sales manager so that you can provide customer service in their absence.

6. Prioritize customer requests

If you want to handle customer request in the right way, prioritizing them is very important. Be it a small business or a huge one, you must know how to bifurcate between new customers and old ones by prioritizing their requirements. You need to know who is a regular customer, who is a huge spender and who is an acquaintance.

Thereafter, you can prioritize customer requests and create notification alerts. This way, if you do not create notification alerts, it will jump the queue and prioritize tasks for the important customers.

7. Stitch in time

Accomplishing tasks swiftly and smoothly is very important if you want to provide good quality customer service. With the help of a CRM, you can use readymade email support templates and upload them. This saves a lot of time making you respond to your customers at the right time.

There is no need for you to type the terms and conditions and upload documents each time while responding to general inquiries. You can make the most out of the templates within the CRM and take care of the fact that your responses are apt, informative and written using the right tone.

CRM is a centralized hub of all your customer data and provides you with automated processes enabling you to deal with your customers in a better way. No need to spend hours after fetching customer data or sending emails! With the help of CRM, you can focus more on generating leads and retaining them. Awesome customer service and lesser efforts. If you like this combination, it’s time to invest into a CRM system right away!