Every customer interaction counts — Up your game with CRM today

Smart business people know the value of recording every interaction with customers

By Gerty Bester, Product Specialist — CRM

“In business, communication is everything.” ← Tweet this

That’s according to Robert Kent, the former dean of Harvard’s Business School.

If a company lacks solid business communications tools, there’s a greater chance your team members will be confused about how to communicate with customers.

Customer relationship management software will help you and your sales, customer service and marketing teams improve customer communications.

In this blog post, I explain why it’s important to track every customer interactions and how you can use customer relationship management software to improve these important relationships.

5 reasons why it pays to track customer interactions

So why is it important to track key interactions with customers?

Here are five key reasons:

1. Marketing, sales, and customer service teams can avoid sending mixed messages to clients.
2. Employees in different departments can see the last thing their peers said to a customer, collaborate and carry on a conversation.
3. Employees can find and record answers to basic questions customers may have.
4. You and your team can express your company’s voice consistently to clients, regardless of the communications platform.
5. Your business can react to situations faster if your team can find key information in one central location.

The role of CRM software

Today, companies use online CRM software for marketing, sales, customer support and technical support.

Consider sales:

CRM can your sales team close deals, your team get commissions faster, and make the entire sales cycle more efficient.

Or customer service:

It makes it easier to support a customer if your customer service team know the history of a situation or, to up-sell related products by looking at their recent enquiries.

Or even daily work practices of anyone in your company:

Using online CRM software, they can

• Email customers by clicking on a link in CRM
• Tweet your customers and reply to their tweets without leaving CRM
• Review and reply to customers’ posts on Facebook
• Record incoming and outgoing emails
• Keep a record of information about prospects and customers

How to use CRM to improve customer communications

CRM enables you to gather data on what your customers want and who they are, and when their circumstances change.

If you use CRM software to track every interaction with customers, you can prevent breakdowns in communications between you, your team and customers.

For example, people may change their names, change addresses, marital statuses ETC.

If you take the time to update information about your customers in CRM, you and your team can provide a more personalised service to customers. ← Share on LinkedIn

Then, if you interact with your customers in a way that suits them, you will be able to better understand what they want and identify areas where you can help.

Making an impact on customers

“Electric communication will never be a substitute for the face.” — Charles Dickens

I couldn’t agree with Dickens more, but using CRM to manage your customer interactions will help you show customers you care and provide better customer service.

If a customer trusts you, they are less likely to leave you for one of your competitors.

All you have to do is decide which edition of CRM is right for your business.

Image remixed via Jamie McCaffrey

Originally published at www.sagecrm.com.