Your CRM should be part of every step in your end-to-end customer journey. What does a great CRM design look like? Find out here.
Why is it important to nail your CRM?
The first thing that may come to mind when you think about your Customer Reference Management (CRM) system is that it is a sales tool. In some ways, you are correct…. but it is so much more.
Your CRM should be part of every step in your end-to-end customer journey.
Think about the last time that you had a great customer experience where you felt that the company you were dealing with really understood what you wanted and needed. The kind of customer experience where they seemed to just get you. This was likely done through a great CRM.
To be able to deliver this, you need to start with designing your customer experience based upon a sound understanding of their needs, their challenges, their motivations and frustrations. This design should create a future experience that really adds value to them.
Whilst you can start with the onboarding experience, this journey should really be the whole life cycle. If you can track your customer behaviours over time and capture this data (in your CRM), you can start to build insights into your customers. Where the magic happens is where you can align the insights into your customer motivations and frustrations and be proactive in how you can help solve their problems.
It shouldn’t feel intrusive or overwhelming but should engage your customers with what they want and need.
What does a great design look like using your CRM?
- It’s creating an experience that feels personal to them, tailored to their needs by having the right information available at the right time
- Offering them different ways to engage with you, depending on their preference, whilst still having the same experience and capturing that information
- Being able to understand who is visiting your website, what they are looking at and why
- Capturing only the information that you need and being able to recall that at later times when you need it
- Using community forums to understand your customers’ problems and areas that they are looking for help in
- It’s ensuring that no matter how they engage with you, your customers get the information that they need and want — there are no dead ends, but instead, opportunities
- It’s being able to track their behaviour over their life with you and determine if there are changes to their usage, behaviour or engagement style that may mean they need a different product or service (and sometimes something that they didn’t know was available)
- It’s knowing when to back off and give customers the space and time that they need
Having a CRM that helps to track and manage this information is priceless (and a little bit of automation never hurt to help get those insights quickly). First, you must start with the customer journey that you want and design your CRM to meet those requirements. Having this will fundamentally change your organisation, your employee experience and how your customers experience your business.
If you want to design a brilliant CRM, start with your customer.
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