How to Make Sure CRM is Working For You, Not the Other Way Around

The reality of today’s business is this: customer engagement is critical. Fully engaged customers are valued at a 23 percent premium over your average customer because of how beneficial they can be to your business. Engagement is one of the many reasons to opt for a CRM, but there is a struggle to make it work for you.

Having an impactful customer engagement strategy depends on connecting with the customer and getting a 360-degree view of their behavior. For this, you need a CRM that seamlessly unites your marketing, sales and service processes to provide you with maximum customer data.

Here’s how to make sure CRM is working for you.

Work Mobility

With your marketing team and sales reps working around the clock—sometimes even when on-the-go—it is imperative that your CRM provides work mobility. That doesn’t mean the entire CRM needs to be accessible on your phone, but that processes and tasks important to your business are. It should allow sales reps in the field to have access to contact emails and numbers, invoices, tasks/events alerts, etc. If your mobile app adoption is not based on business use cases, then it might fail to achieve the sustained user adoption and a definite ROI.

Organized Contact Data

As your business grows, so does your customer database. Your CRM’s top priority should be to keep data organized and filtered. Don’t overwhelm your marketing, sales and service teams. The contact management area of your CRM should be maintained in such a way that you have categorized tabs for various action items or workflows. It should also allow you to filter data based on tags (pre-defined or customized) as well as offer data duplication detection.

Communication History = Better Sales Calls

Your sales team needs to understand the customer in and out. You need to have a contact’s complete communication history stored in the CRM. Let’s say you’ve been running campaigns for a prospect who was nurtured in, but during the buying cycle of the sales funnel, he’s a no-show. To understand what went wrong or when the last communication was made, examine the history on the contact’s page.

This is also useful when you’re trying to cross-sell or upsell to your existing customers. With a full contact history, you can analyze their buying pattern and determine whether an upgrade/feature would be useful for the customer, then pitch accordingly.

Listening to Customers

If your CRM isn’t helping you evaluate your customer’s needs and their views of your product, how will you deliver exceptional customer engagement? Your CRM should offer tools that help you hear the voice of the customer. For you to have a 360-degree view of the customer’s communication, you also need 360-degree view into the customer’s activities.

Your CRM should allow you to monitor the customer’s social and web activities as well as offer a customer feedback feature. Tools like this will help you analyze and understand your customer better, which allows you to develop strategies. Agile CRM is one such software suite that provides the voice of the customer with its UserVoice feature.

Automate Emails & Follow-ups

Sending emails and following up with customers is the crux of any sales and service process, and automating and customizing emails is a must for any CRM. Your software should also alert you when to send follow-up emails depending on the email campaign, or automate follow-ups depending on the campaign criteria.

Regular Tasks Alerts

There’s no need to manually make a list of to-do tasks when you have a capable CRM, one that sends you automated alerts whenever you have a tasks or event scheduled by you or your team members. Need to have a follow-up call with a lead? Add a note on the contact page. Have a meeting with a service rep to discuss an issue? Have them block out a time on your calendar and get an alert five minutes before the meeting.

Your customer engagement success depends on staying on top of tasks and the timeliness of your communications with those customers. You can achieve this when your CRM is working for you.