“The better a business can manage the relationships it has with its customers the more successful it will become.”
Info Entrepreneurs
Reaping the benefits of customer relationship management should be the goal of every company. There is simply no way to build a business without it
A customer relationship management platform is the best tool for creating tighter bonds with your target audience. If you’re selling B2B or B2C, you want the customer to think of you first when they have a need. A CRM can help you figure out that need and then match the service or product you offer to fill it.
Keeping the Customer Satisfied
The heart of managing customers these days is to understand their unique requirements and quickly and efficiently meet their needs. They are bombarded with a digital smorgasbord of services and products, so to reach them you must practice the art of getting to know them and getting them to form a relationship with your company. This art is called customer relationship management – and if you learn and practice it well, it will yield some important rewards.
1. Better client partnerships
Managing these relationships is a lot easier when companies have the right software to organize their efforts. Fortunately, CRM software solutions, like Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM, can handle much of the heavy lifting.
Global research giant Forrester points out how important it is to not only form better client partnerships but to use a CRM to develop:
…an obsession with understanding, delighting, connecting with and serving customers. This means that effectively managing your company’s relationships with those who buy your company’s products and services has never been more important.
When you think about it, that’s the reason CRMs are called customer relationship management software. These platforms can improve how we manage the all-important connection between our business and our clients. Having a single-source-of-truth in the form of a CRM allows inter-departmental communication that will make the client feel like you really know and understand their needs.
For example, if a client calls in and expresses a concern about a product or service, that information can be captured and the next person that speaks with them can understand what’s happening and respond accordingly. Something as simple as acknowledging a customer’s repeat buying pattern could turn into more sales. This efficiency is one of the benefits of customer relationship management, which will benefit you and your clients.
2. More opportunities to upsell clientsImproving your ability to cross-sell or upsell current customers is a crucial part of expanding a business. Conducting customer relationship management via a CRM allows you to create a compilation of data on each client, which will help inform your sales team as they attempt to upsell clients.
It will also help you tailor the client experience to provide them with what they need when they need it most, and the CRM will serve as the data warehouse for all these client interactions. As you get to know each client, you’ll be able to anticipate their needs by suggesting upsell opportunities that fit the clients wants, needs, and priorities. Marketing will be able to develop a very targeted approach aimed precisely at filling market needs.
If you’re using a CRM to house this data, you’ll be able to automate some of these marketing opportunities. The end result is that your bottom line will improve and clients will stay more engaged.
3. Better communication between sales, marketing, and operations
Collaboration is the hallmark of an effective team, and another benefit of customer relationship management is that you have some internal tool, in this case, a CRM that shares data between departments. Once you have this data, you can analyze it to determine which clients are most profitable – and which clients are ones that, frankly, you’d rather not engage with again.
In the case of a CRM like Dynamics 365, there is one central database that can track interactions with a client from pre-sale marketing to delivery to billing. A good CRM allows you to dump the handful of legacy platforms companies and consolidate in one place. Having that CRM in the cloud means this data will be captured and shared in real-time. Can you start to picture how valuable this could be to all your internal teams?
4. Improved efficiency in serving clients
Another benefit of customer relationship management is that every interaction will be recorded in one place. How many times have you had sales reps that over-promise just to get the deal and operations had to clean up the mess? Have you ever had a customer suggest that they were promised something – but really it was a miscommunication?
Clients today have no patience for any of these scenarios. That’s why a benefit of customer relationship management is that the software you use will capture every customer interaction, contract, conversation, and correspondence so that everything about this client is all in one place. A CRM can reduce the amount of work we spend trying to troubleshoot a client problem; the data is right there for you to see. It will speed up the interactions you have with clients and solve their problems faster. Today that is a crucial part of competitive advantage.
5. Bigger bottom lineUltimately, the biggest benefit of customer relationship management is that these techniques increase a company’s bottom line. Internal productivity will increase when using one CRM to handle all client functions, and your customers will buy more over time. Sales cycles are cut because your sales and marketing team will be faster at getting to the heart of what the client wants.
Why Choose Dynamics CRM?
Dynamics 365 is one of the most sophisticated, yet easy to learn, CRM platforms available. If you are already using Office 365, then Dynamics 365 will feel natural to your employees. It offers comprehensive reporting, a wide variety of different integrations, and is more affordable than you may think.
Want to know more? Contact IES today.
