How to use a CRM system for efficient customer service?

CRM as a tool focused on customer relationship management

A CRM system is short for Customer Relationship Management. The use of a CRM system is extremely important in serving customers efficiently.

If you deal with customer service, think about how many times you’ve forgotten an important scheduled activity. CRM is designed to organize processes, patterns in dealing with buyers, so as to seal the sales process, purchasing process and their maintenance.

The whole process of customer lifetime in your company has a certain beaten path. This path may vary depending on the type of business you do, but you should find many similarities in most companies when it comes to handling contractors.

CRM in receiving requests from people interested in your product

In the standard scheme, most common in most companies, the customer contacts you by email or phone, also in person. Your main task is to contact the customer and discuss their needs and how your service or product is able to help them. The CRM system directly helps to schedule these activities, placing them on the calendar for a specific time with a specific note. You can tag such a contact who has signed up, which will allow you to additionally use such customer information in the future, for example, in remarketing campaigns. This may be the case even if the client does not ultimately establish a relationship with you. The mere fact of interest in your company is already an important piece of information that the CRM system will not let you forget.

CRM helpful in sales – customer relationship management

Depending on the complexity of the product/service, the sales process can have a different path and duration from the request to the customer’s purchasing decision. In the CRM system, we are able to create a potential customer’s purchase path, tailored to your company’s specifics. This path can consist of 2-3, and if necessary even 15 or more steps. A huge strength of the CRM system is that it gives you free rein to create customized schemes, tailored to your company’s structure. This way, salespeople know what to do step by step to close the sale. Moreover, with CRM, we are able to measure the effectiveness of the various steps in the purchase funnel and deduce where we have the biggest problem. The conclusions may surprise us. The CRM system is unforgiving and will show you on the data that, for example, 80 percent of your customers are happy to make an appointment for a product presentation, after which only 5 percent continue to talk to the salesman after the presentation. A simple conclusion that comes to mind is the idea that there is an error at the presentation stage that discourages the customer from taking the next steps.

The list of functionalities available in CRM to help sales is long. We can mention the most common functionalities such as sending sms and email from the system, the quoting module, which generates a ready-made offer from a template, also saves a lot of time for traders to prepare a customized offer. In addition, a task module that will not allow us to forget any contact, scheduled presentation, client arrangements and much more.

Mobility in customer service

The fact that with a CRM system we can work remotely, from anywhere is very important. In the building inside the company and in the field, such as at the customer’s premises, it no longer matters. A CRM system is an information system that most often allows you to work using a web browser or with a mobile application.

The above gives us a lot of leeway. Using a smartphone, we are able to handle issues such as sending an e mail message to a customer or sending a text message. Most CRM systems have an email/sms module for contacting customers. This is extremely convenient, as we have a complete conversation with the customer on one timeline. Managing customer relations in such a case is much easier.

For managers in the company, mobility is also very important. CRM in a company helps management control processes. Often, people at the highest levels are on the go, at business meetings, conferences, training sessions. It’s important that a company’s CRM helps executives have visibility into data from anywhere. This is a huge advantage of CRM software.

CRM or Customer Relationship Management in day-to-day customer service

Many companies, once they succeed in selling their product, forget about the customer. This is a huge mistake, as it is an established fact that it is much easier and cheaper to sell more services and products to a customer who has already trusted us once than to acquire a new customer.

The CRM system allows us to be in constant contact with our customers. We can use various forms, from sending text messages asking about satisfaction with a product, to a newsletter with, for example, a weekly dose of knowledge useful to our customer. We are able to plan all issues related to maintaining relationships in the CRM system, create specific tasks under them, automate and integrate them with external systems. The possibilities are wide-ranging, and it’s worth taking advantage of such an array of functionality, given that most companies still don’t appreciate having trusted customers as much as they should.

CRM software in sales and marketing

It has long been known that sales and marketing need to work directly together in one place. CRM software creates space for these departments, to serve new customers. In the end, both sides can control each other’s tasks and focus on sealing the path the customer takes, read. sales funnel.

Until now, there have been many times when the marketing department, blamed the lack of sales on the sales department. He admonished salespeople for their inability to sell and the level of customer service is poor. On the other hand, salespeople blamed the marketing department, claiming that the leads they received were of low quality.

Using a CRM program should eliminate any discussion. The entire customer contact path is recreated in the system. Any employee with access, can see for themselves what steps have been taken to achieve sales success.

A high-end CRM will make the benefits of implementation greater, and the age-old discussion between sales and marketing departments will be a thing of the past.

Streamlining business processes, or better customer service

One step in the process may be responding to a customer’s request on the contact form. If a company is approached by a bunch of new customers, our job is to serve them in the best and fastest way possible. We can establish at the company’s decision-making stage that a customer who has submitted a contact form is called back by a salesman within 5 minutes of the request. The CRM system will allow us to examine this process and its effectiveness.

We can test whether contacting a customer, 5 minutes after a request will increase the effectiveness of calls more than contacting, say, 24 hours after a request. The database of the CRM system with the collected information will show us a more effective solution.

Implementing a CRM system allows you to analyze every detail, the above is just an example. This is how we can eliminate errors and improve customer relations.

CRM system, and the contact database and its operation

The steps taken to increase sales and improve customer relations are manifold. One thing that is certain is that the vast majority of CRM systems allow you to collect and export data about your customers. What does it actually give us? Unlimited possibilities for using this data. We are only limited by our creativity

Let’s consider the following example. Out of the 1,000 contacts you approached, only 50 went on to do business with your company. Does this mean that we should forget about the 950 remaining contacts. Nothing could be further from the truth. During our conversations with the aforementioned 950 clients, we certainly obtained a lot of information and noted a list of their needs, information about what kind of client it is, what activities it undertakes, what capabilities it has. The benefits of obtaining such information can be invaluable.

Namely, you may find that 15% of the contacts that have signed up are interested in your product, but only during the winter season. All you have to remember is to use this knowledge, that is, to bring the task into the customer acquisition/recovery process. To do this, you can make phone calls to these customers or run a remarketing campaign. The actions you can take are just a matter of having a good idea. However, the CRM will not let you forget to perform such a task, and most importantly, it will present you with results that will clearly tell you whether you have improved another element of the sales process and whether it was profitable for the company

Offering the customer at the highest level using a CRM system

The company’s CRM system should have a quotation module. This is a functionality that directly improves sales efficiency. The best solution is when you have a panel to create different designs of offer pages that are personalized for a specific group of your customers.

The CRM system collects information about bid openings, whether the customer checked the entire page or perhaps stopped reading at a certain point. All this information allows you to draw conclusions and increase sales opportunities. Whether by sending an e mail or contacting them by phone.

The CRM system can also have integrations with external systems. One such solution could be a one-stop electronic signature with an offer.

On the offer page, the customer has a contract in an attachment that he can automatically sign. This reduces customer service time, and shows the customer the high level and professionalism of the company they are about to do business with.

Since everything is done automatically, the CRM system determines for us the next amount of data about the customers who signed the contract. This is valuable information that a high-end CRM platform should be able to filter and assign to specific variables.

Document storage using a CRM system

When choosing a CRM system, the available workspace that the solution provider offers is very important. Namely, one of the advantages when it comes to customer relationship management is the ability to store documents with the option to assign them to a specific employee.

Implementing a CRM system should reduce our workload, not increase it. Therefore, it is important to have everything in one place. For CRM systems, each offers different workspace limits. Before choosing, let’s consider what type of files and what size we plan to enter in the system

Customer service using a CRM system

The CRM system is a tool whose use over time becomes the foundation of most company structures. This is for a simple reason, the system does not forget, controls and reminds you of all the most important things. In addition, he is our facilitator who adapts to the specifics of the organization. So, depending on your needs, a CRM system will allow you to systematize processes and improve customer service, and this should directly translate into increased profits for your company.