5 Ways CRM Improves Customer Experience
Do you remember any time you had a pleasant experience as a customer? How did it make you feel? Did you patronize the business afterwards?
Flip that and think of the worst experience you’ve had as a customer. Chances are, you remember details of each of these two experiences, and it has influenced your perception and relationship with the two brands. The same applies to your business, and how your customers feel about your brand.
96% of customers will leave you for your competitors if they have a bad experience with your brand. If you’re wondering why some customers don’t come back, this might just be why. Their customer experience journey starts from their first interaction with your brand till they eventually pay for a product or service; and even afterwards. Every detail at every point matters.
These seemingly small but significant factors are why a CRM is crucial to every business that prioritizes customer experience i.e. businesses that want to succeed.
Understanding CRM & Customer Experience
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It is software that helps business owners and leaders track communications, nurture relationships with leads, and retain customers. A good CRM platform is a powerful tool that enables seamless communication across multiple channels and generates incredibly vital customer data such as the personal information, preferences, recent orders, or the status of those orders. In strategic hands, this data is insight.
A robust CRM software such as NotchCX collects insightful customer data and provides an omnichannel customer service system where you can have personalized interactions with all your customers, across all your channels, all in one place.
Talking about omnichannel, customers and prospects today want to move across different touchpoints, and have the same experience. For instance, a prospect who contacted you once via Instagram DM, may want to continue the conversation on WhatsApp without having to repeat themself. The seamlessness of experiences like these nurture leads into sales, and retains existing customers.
However, there is still the aspect of business strategy and intentional decisions to guarantee the best experience for your customers. For instance, while a CRM gives you an omnichannel customer service platform, the decision on what messages to send and when to send should be made by people, lead by the business leader. Also, you want to ensure that your website is easy to navigate, mobile-friendly, loads fast and so on. More of this in subsequent articles.
Why should you care about Customer Experience?
The term “experience” is such an emotional one. Customer experience is the internal, subjective, or sentimental response customers have to any direct or indirect contact with a company. It is the feeling, and opinion that customers form of your brand each time they interact with it, directly or indirectly.
As we explained in an earlier article about why businesses need a CRM, humans are highly emotional beings. The best way to get them to act is to connect to them on an emotional level. You could have the best product in the world but still be perceived as poor, just because your customer service is poor.
Remember the good old saying “the customer is always right”? As a business owner, your customers need to be at the forefront of what you do. Why? Because customers are the fuel that keeps the engine of your business going.
There are numerous benefits of a fantastic customer experience, but one that stands out, is that it turns customers into brand advocates. This can only happen after you’ve left customers with that ‘Wow’ feeling.
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How CRM Improves Customer Experience
1. The Omnichannel Effect: Consistent Experience Across Board
Your customers want to reach you… wherever, whenever, and however they want.
A major way CRM improves customer experience is that it gives customers the freedom to interact with your business on whichever communication platform they prefer. Be it email, Facebook chat, phone call, website chatbot, or even WhatsApp message. The fun part is that they also get the same quality experience regardless the platform they choose.
We all love consistency, both in the quality of the product and in customer service. A CRMs Omnichannel customer service creates a system that interconnects every individual touchpoint with the rest, and provides the same level of service and communication across all the channels. Consistent quality across multiple communication channels increases customer retention, conversion rate, positive product reviews, happy social media sharing, and creates loyal brand ambassadors.
2. Timely response to complaints and enquiries
When it comes to conversion, there’s a need for speed.
We are in the era of instant gratification. Hungry? Place an order and have your food delivered in minutes. In the mood to see a movie? Open your Netflix or Disney Plus app and binge away. Pondering about a question? Google it and get an answer in a second. There are so many other examples. The point is that today’s customers are used to getting their needs met quickly, and they expect the same level of speed whenever they reach out to your business.
Responding to enquiries within the first-minute increases lead conversions by up to 391%. Five minutes is the average max time customers are willing to wait for a response from a company. Your churn rate (Number of customers that leave for a competitor) could also go up 15% with a slow response time.
A CRM software like NotchCX speeds up your response time to customer enquiries and complaints from all your channels or funnels, enabling you to convert more sales and reduce churn rate. Also, a CRM allows you to design templates for answering questions or complaints that come up frequently.
3. Get Quality Feedback from Customers
Customers are no longer passive; they are more active than ever. They have opinions and suggestions, and they are not afraid to share them. But guess what? These opinions are a goldmine of resources that can improve your business.
Another twist to this is that while some customers may leave these opinions in your DM or via email, others would rather share them as a post on any social media of choice. You, therefore, need to go the extra mile to do social media listening to catch all that feedback.
Doing this manually is incredibly hard and almost impossible to truly execute. But a comprehensive CRM tool like NotchCX has a social media Listening feature that notifies you whenever your brand is being talked about.
4. Personalized communication with customers
Gone are the days when communications with customers were just about sending out general messages to everyone and hoping that some of them will relate to it or find it useful. Try that now and watch your customer base dwindle over time.
The customers have evolved. Take a WhatsApp chat for example. How do you react when a friend sends you a message? Compare this to how you react when you get those broadcast messages, even when it is the same topic? You probably have two different responses. It’s just how we’re wired as humans — we love to be given special treatment.
Similarly, your customers want that special treatment too. They want to feel like they are your only customer, and there is no better way to do this than by sending personalized messages that speak directly to them.
A simple hack? Mention their name in the messages you send to them. Don’t just say “Hello”, say “Hello Ben”. An email with the recipient’s name in the subject line gets an 18.30% open rate, while those without have a 15.70% open rate. A good CRM solution will help you pull this off.
5. Know Your Customer
To be honest, this is the foundation upon which every other point here is built, and that’s why we saved it for last. Like a marriage, you can’t have a great relationship with someone you don’t know.
Using in-depth reports from your CRM, you can determine patterns and insights that enable you to know what products and content your customers are interested in. A user who clicked a link in an email referring to a certain product is likely considering whether or not to purchase. As a result, you can track that and create an offer that matches their needs, improving their experience and generating more revenue for your business!
Get to know your customers better; respond to them with the speed of light; manage them all in one place; and grow your business with NotchCX.
