Good customer relationships are one of the most crucial aspects of your daily business operations. Without them, your organization could struggle to drive business growth, build customer loyalty, and identify actionable business insights.
That's why 91% of businesses with more than 11 employees use a CRM system to improve their customer relationship management. But did you know that 43% of CRM customers use less than half the features available? This means they're missing out on valuable data, opportunities, and revenue.
The average ROI of CRM is $8.71, but when properly implemented this can increase by 211% - so, how can you make sure that you're getting the most out of your CRM tools?
Core features of CRM software
CRM tools come in all shapes and sizes and the one you choose will depend on your specific business needs. However, there are a few things that most CRM software have in common that are crucial features to help you manage customer interactions and your sales processes.
Let's explore these in more detail.
Customer data management
CRM systems are crucial for centralizing customer data. It's the core feature of every CRM system.
They ensure that your team has access to the information they need when they need it and that all data entry is accurate and up to date. In your CRM you should be logging every interaction you have with a customer, whether it's through emails, social media, phone calls, or live chats.
This shared knowledge helps you avoid any potential inaccuracies or inconsistencies across your team and allows you to personalize your customer communications and strategies.
Tracking interactions
With a CRM you can track every touchpoint that a customer has interacted with. Monitoring the customer journey and sales funnel is important when trying to understand customer behavior.
This record helps you identify potential bottlenecks within your customer journey so you can provide more personalized services and better sales pipeline management.
Workflow automation
Workflow automation is a key part of any CRM system. It helps to reduce workload, speed up processes and help keep business operations consistent across teams.
Whether you want to automate email sends and follow-ups or set triggers for certain sales reps, workflow automation frees up both time and resources. This allows you to spend more time on strategic activities like growing your business.
Reporting and analytics
There's no use storing large amounts of data if you don't know how to make sense of it. CRM solutions often include advanced analytics and reporting tools so you can reveal trends, patterns, and insights to help you make data-driven decisions based on your customer data.
You can create reports based on whatever topic you need, whether it's sales trends, customer behavior, customer preferences, or sales and marketing activity. Just be sure that you're accurately tracking this data before trying the reporting features.
Integration with other tools
Customer relationship management can't exist in isolation, it needs to integrate with other tools in your tech stack to ensure seamless integration. Whether it's email and social media tools like Transpond, or accounting software like Xero, integrations allow you to create a holistic view of your customer data.
Not only does this give you a better view of your business operations but it also helps you understand the entire customer lifecycle and levels of customer engagement.
Benefits of CRM software
Improved customer relationship management
A CRM system enhances the customer experience by offering a complete view of each customer's interactions, preferences, and needs. This detailed insight allows businesses to tailor their products, services, and communications to each customer, delivering a personalized and more satisfying experience that meets their unique expectations.
Better communication and collaboration
A CRM fosters better internal communication and collaboration by giving everyone in the organization access to the same, up-to-date customer data. This eliminates information silos, ensuring that all team members are aligned, which leads to a consistent and seamless customer experience.
Features like Comments from Capsule can help you stay in touch with your team by allowing you to add comments to specific records like calls and emails. You can notify colleagues of specific actions or updates by mentioning their names.
Streamlined sales processes
CRMs automate routine sales tasks, track customer interactions, and provide valuable insights into customer behavior, simplifying the sales process. By visualizing the entire sales pipeline, sales teams can identify potential issues, prioritize leads, and manage the sales cycle more efficiently and proactively.
Greater operational efficiency
By automating repetitive tasks and centralizing customer data, CRMs significantly boost team efficiency and productivity. With less time spent on manual tasks, teams can focus more on building customer relationships, driving growth, and strategizing for long-term success through alignment.
When sales and marketing teams are aligned they are 67% more effective at closing deals, 58% more effective at retaining customers, and drive 208% more revenue making using a CRM to help with this a no-brainer.
Better analytics
CRM systems not only gather extensive data but also analyze it to generate actionable insights. These insights help businesses recognize trends, address bottlenecks, and forecast outcomes, empowering leaders to make informed, data-driven decisions and optimize strategic planning.
15 customer relationship management examples that you should implement in your business
Customer relationship management can help with a range of common business problems, yet many users get stuck using the same features they're used to. When implemented correctly your CRM systems can help everyone in your business streamline their business processes and make the most of their time and resources.
So, let's explore how CRM software can help everyone in your organization from business owners to sales representatives, marketing managers, and customer service teams.
Customer retention
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system can be an invaluable tool for businesses seeking to enhance customer retention. By collecting and analyzing data from various customer interactions, a CRM identifies patterns and trends in customer behavior that might otherwise go unnoticed. This data entry provides deep insights into customer satisfaction levels, preferences, and potential concerns. Businesses can leverage this information to gain a clearer picture of what drives their customers, enabling them to make more informed decisions.
This proactive approach allows companies to address issues before they escalate, meaning sales teams can adjust their offerings to better meet customer demands, and deliver a more personalized experience. By fostering stronger relationships through targeted engagement and responsiveness, a CRM not only helps in retaining customers but also builds long-term loyalty and trust.
Marketing automation
CRM systems aren't just for sales reps, they can be useful tools that help align your sales and marketing teams. With Capsule you can do more than just automate your sales efforts by integrating workflow automation with project management features you can automate workflow for candidate management, client onboarding, and marketing activity, reducing bottlenecks and ensuring that tasks are sent to the right people.
Workflow automation shouldn't be limited to internal tasks. By integrating with Transpond for example, you can create segments, triggers, and sequences based on your Capsule data. This allows you to manage every interaction, from lead generation campaigns to onboarding new customers or even sending personalized messages for birthdays and holidays, enhancing both engagement and customer experience.
Automate repetitive tasks
32% of sales representatives spend more than an hour each day on manual data entry. This process takes valuable time and resources away from bigger projects but they also are at risk of manual error and cut into the productivity of your sales, marketing, and customer service teams.
A CRM system lets you automate repetitive jobs like routine email marketing, lead assignment, tracking metrics, and logging phone calls. Capsule's integration with Wati ensures that you never miss a message again as every interaction is automatically logged and assigned to the relevant contact in your CRM.
Other integrations allow you to store and manage email templates and set triggers that ensure that every new lead automatically gets sent a welcome email. Once the recipient opens or responds to the email, the CRM system can schedule a follow-up call from an assigned sales rep. Some more advanced tools even include an AI tool that does the writing for you making it even easier to keep on top of your customer communications.
Building an omnichannel customer experience
Customers often engage with a business through multiple channels. They might make a purchase online before returning a product in-store or reach out to your customer service team via social media. A CRM system helps create a unified customer experience by enabling companies to track the support they offer across various channels - whether through email, text, social media, live chat, or face-to-face.
To ensure a positive experience, these interactions must be tracked consistently across all channels. Without careful integration, customers may receive inconsistent information depending on the platform they use, or they might be asked to repeat the same details multiple times. This type of experience can be frustrating and lead to lower levels of customer satisfaction. A well-designed CRM avoids these pitfalls by ensuring that all teams have access to the same, up-to-date information, allowing for smooth and consistent interactions across every channel.
Personalize customer experience
73% of consumers expect companies to understand their individual needs and expectations making it one of the biggest consumer trends in recent years. Personalized communications make your customers feel more valued increasing the chances of them engaging with your company in the future.
You can use your CRM to gather information from customer records and use relevant details to improve customer engagement and communications. For example, sending out additional discount codes on a customer's birthday or suggesting products related to previous purchases.
Prioritize leads
Your sales team needs to do more than just track leads, they should be thinking about lead management. This is the process of ranking leads based on their potential value to the company. A good CRM helps you assign this value based on your own predetermined rules. This helps your sales team focus on the most valuable opportunities so they can hit their goals and improve your sales forecasting.
In its most simple form, lead scoring assigns points based on things like a prospect's job title, or industry. Scoring is most effective when it is dynamically driven by the interactions between a lead and your company. For instance, if your company launches a promotional email campaign, leads who open the email will receive points, while those who click a link within the email to visit your website would earn additional points. This approach ensures that lead scores are updated based on real-time engagement, providing a more accurate reflection of their interest.
Analyze sales cycle
With a CRM system, you can thoroughly analyze customer interactions by consistently documenting and tracking the full sales cycle. Doing so allows you to identify bottlenecks and implement solutions to remove them.
These insights are particularly helpful for businesses with long sales cycles like those in B2B industries. For instance, you may notice that delays in proposals can lead prospects to choose competitors. By identifying this problem you can implement changes to fix this.
Onboard new clients
An efficient onboarding process is crucial for building positive, long-term customer relationships and encouraging customers to actively engage with your product. By ensuring a smooth start, customers are more likely to feel confident and satisfied, building trust in you and your company. A customer experience automation platform can streamline onboarding workflows, reducing the time spent on administrative tasks and making the process more efficient.
For example, information stored in your CRM can be used to automatically populate forms needed to open a customer account, minimizing manual input. Additionally, the automation platform can help verify customer details, ensuring accuracy while speeding up the onboarding process.
Analyze customer behavior
A deep understanding of customer behavior is essential for retaining existing clients and attracting new ones. CRMs store valuable data that can be used to enhance customer engagement, promote additional products, and personalize services. Businesses can gauge a client's commitment level by analyzing how you acquire customers, through extensive website browsing or detailed conversations with sales reps. Those who made quick purchases with minimal interaction with sales representatives may need further nurturing to build long-term loyalty.
CRMs also provide insights into how customers use products and interact with the company. For example, a customer actively exploring advanced features or purchasing add-ons may be more likely to become a loyal user. Some systems can generate engagement scores, helping businesses reward dedicated customers or re-engage less-involved ones with targeted promotions or educational content. Tracking customer interactions, like website visits or the consumption of marketing materials, also allows for more precise and effective sales strategies.
Track your churn rate
While every company aspires to retain all its customers, achieving a zero-percent churn rate is typically unrealistic. Customer churn, often measured as the percentage of clients lost over a specific time frame, is an important metric for businesses to monitor. Different formulas can be used to calculate churn, but the core idea remains the same: understanding how many customers are leaving and why. A CRM system can automate the process of measuring and analyzing churn, giving companies valuable insights into customer trends and behavior.
By leveraging CRM data, businesses can investigate the root causes of churn and implement strategies to reduce it. A rising churn rate is often a red flag, signaling deeper issues like product dissatisfaction or service problems that need immediate attention. With these insights, companies can take proactive steps to address customer concerns, improve retention strategies, and minimize the risk of losing more clients.
Monitor your competition
Consistent CRM use plays a crucial role in tracking your performance against key competitors and helping you win back customers that have moved to your competition. Recording details about lost deals enables you to identify patterns and common factors that contribute to these losses. The analysis provides valuable insights into your business failings and where competitors might have an edge helping you to address these gaps more strategically.
Once you’ve identified the reasons behind lost deals, you can create targeted marketing campaigns aimed at winning back those prospects. These campaigns can emphasize newly developed features or improvements that differentiate your product from competitors, offering a compelling reason for potential customers to reconsider your offering. By proactively addressing the reasons for previous losses and showcasing your unique strengths, your CRM can help turn lost opportunities into future wins.
Develop prospects
At its core, sales is a numbers game. A good product and skilled sales managers are of course a huge part of your sales process, but the more prospects you start with the better chances you have of hitting those conversion targets.
Generating a large number of prospects can take a lot of time and sales outreach, but a customer relationship management system can speed up the process by automating the time-consuming parts. Capsule makes data entry simple. You can import contacts into your CRM via a spreadsheet or CSV file or with our latest Import2 feature you can transfer contacts from your old CRM straight into Capsule.
Manage sales staff
A CRM system can significantly enhance the management of your sales teams by providing insights into their performance and streamlining their workflow. With a mobile CRM, sales staff can update information from anywhere, boosting their productivity by up to 50%. This flexibility allows your team to stay connected and organized, regardless of location, ensuring that customer data is always up-to-date.
The system also allows you to track and analyze the performance of individual salespeople. By providing insight into how long each team member takes to complete specific stages of the sales process, you can identify and address performance gaps. This data-driven approach enables you to provide targeted support, optimize efficiency, and improve overall team effectiveness.
Improve data security
Customer information is one of the most valuable assets your organization possesses, and compromising that data can harm both your bottom line and reputation. When customer data is spread across multiple spreadsheets and documents rather than centralized in a secure CRM system, it becomes more susceptible to hacking and theft.
A well-designed CRM typically offers advanced security features like access controls, ensuring that only authorized personnel can view or modify data, with restrictions based on user roles. Additionally, companies can monitor for suspicious activity and establish rules to limit access during certain times, further protecting sensitive information.
Increase profits
A CRM system ultimately enhances profitability by driving revenue growth and improving productivity across sales, marketing, and customer service. Automating tasks in these areas reduces overall costs and allows teams to focus on more strategic activities, making them more efficient and productive.
Additionally, CRM systems improve lead-to-sales conversion rates by enabling more targeted marketing and a deeper understanding of customer needs. They also support cross-selling opportunities by tracking customer purchases and identifying complementary products, while fostering long-lasting relationships through enhanced customer experiences throughout the entire sales journey.
How to choose the right CRM
Choosing the right CRM solution for your business doesn't have to be overwhelming. Our step-by-step guide simplifies the process by helping you identify your most crucial business operations and how a CRM can support them.
We walk you through assessing your current workflows, determining what features you need, and exploring different CRM solutions. By following these steps, you'll find the perfect CRM to streamline operations and enhance customer relationships.
Wrapping up
A CRM system is essential for managing customer relationships, streamlining workflows, and boosting productivity. By centralizing customer data, automating repetitive tasks, and providing advanced analytics, CRMs help businesses enhance customer retention, improve marketing efforts, and make data-driven decisions. Integration with other tools allows for a seamless customer experience across multiple channels.
Capsule CRM helps you optimize sales processes and manage sales staff performance by tracking key metrics and providing insights. With proper implementation, businesses can significantly increase their ROI and drive long-term growth helping them to build a better performing business.
