Last updated on August 3rd, 2023
Looking to give your customers a better experience? This guide will help you do just that by using a customer relationship management system.
The customer experience (CX) is an aspect of business that should be prioritized because it determines how long you retain customers, your business’s reputation, revenue, and so much more.
Manually executing your customer experience can work, but it’s not scalable.
The solution?
Using CRM to better your customer experience will help you keep the personalization your customers desire as you grow.
So by the end of this guide, you’ll learn:
- What Is A CRM Customer Experience?
- Is CRM Able To Provide A Great Customer Experience?
- How To Improve The Customer Experience Using CRM
- CRM Best Practices To Improve The Customer Experience
- The Results Of A Great Customer Experience
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What Is A CRM Customer Experience?
Let’s first start with defining what the “customer experience” even means.
It’s how a customer’s wants and needs are taken care of while interacting with ALL parts of your business.
So it’s not just customer service that plays a role in their experience, it’s sales, marketing, service delivery, etc. This holistic experience will shape the customer’s thoughts and perceptions about your business.
In fact, The first time your customer works with you will be the strongest impression they have about your business.
Now, with the CRM customer experience, it’s simply the way you use your customer relationship management software to serve the needs of your customers:
- How are you using automation to answer questions, send documents quickly, and provide assistance?
- Are you using multiple platforms (text messaging, email, phone, and social media) to check-in and stay in touch with your customers?
- What are your data metrics telling you about the overall customer experience when people work with you? (customer retention rate, net promoter score, customer churn rate, etc.)
These are the types of questions to think about.
Think about this…
CallMiner reported that an excess of $35.3B is lost EACH year due to customer churn caused by avoidable customer experience problems (in the U.S. alone).
So odds are, your business could contribute to the dollars in this statistic if the experience isn’t airtight.
Of course, this doesn’t mean CRM will pull your customer churn rate to 0%, but it does mean that it will overall help you serve them much better.
How Is CRM Able To Provide A Better Customer Experience?
CRM is a hub where you store all the necessary customer information, behaviors, preferences, and insights so you can serve them better
You can see how well you’re following-up with them and how they’re interacting with your emails or other communication channels.
Since the customer experience relates to each aspect of your business, your CRM can contribute numerous tools for you to use.
(Again, keep in mind that the customer experience starts when someone is a prospect.)
Here are some examples of how you can use CRM tools to better your customer experience:
- Marketing – You can set up landing pages and a scheduling tool that makes booking calls with you easy to convert traffic into leads.
- Sales – Use your CRM sales pipeline to help contact and follow up with prospects at the right time, then use CPQ systems to deliver pricing quotes fast.
- Service Delivery – After delivering an outstanding service, use CRM email to follow-up with customers. Also, leverage your CRM database to upsell products that make your solution even better.
- Customer Service – Use automation to deliver whitepapers and answer questions. Set up automatic email responses for offline staff hours and send surveys to gain feedback on your service.
As you can see, CRM can fill in many customer experience gaps you may be seeing in your business.
But sometimes, we may not even know where our CX is going wrong.
So a great practice is to continually communicate with your customers to see if anything is missing.
Your team is also a reliable resource that can throw out ideas on using CRM to improve the customer experience. Listen to what they’re hearing from customers and make a note of any patterns.
How To Improve The Customer Experience Using CRM (Step-By-Step)
1. Evaluate how you currently handle customers in each step of your business. For example, look at your CRM metrics to see how long you’re retaining customers, how much lifetime value they’re adding to your company and any other customer-related metrics.
2. Speak with and send surveys to customers to gain feedback.
3. Set customer service goals and see which CRM metrics you can use as KPIs to measure effectiveness.
4. Get together with your team to discuss the importance of the customer experience and practical things you can all do to improve. It’ll likely be a combination of sharpening customer management skills and leveraging CRM tools.
5. Give it time. With changes to your procedures, it takes time for them to become second nature and sometimes more time to results. So continually apply your new approach to a better customer experience.
5 CRM Best Practices To Improve The Customer Experience
Make Personalization A Staple
An Epsilon study mentioned that 80% of consumers have a higher chance of purchasing when a company offers a personalized experience.
At the start of the customer experience, your prospect will have desires and specific pain points that need to be solved.
Your company will often have to tailor a specific solution for them, especially in the B2B space. (And even if you’ve worked with a similar client before.)
You see this in web development companies, marketing agencies, and supply chain management companies. Clients in these industries can come with various needs, and solutions can’t always be “copy and pasted” from one client to another.
With a personalized solution, the buying decision becomes easier for interested buyers — making the experience worthwhile.
When they become your customer, personalization should still remain at the forefront, here are some ideas:
- Segmenting your customers by industry to deliver tailored email marketing content (Use their name, company name for further personalization.)
- Recommend relevant products. An example could be an eCommerce brand like Amazon, where they show customers product recommendations based on what they’ve viewed, added to cart, or purchased.
Make Sales Streamlined
A streamlined sales team uses:
- Sales automation to take out the monotonous tasks (ex., data entry) that leads to poor time management .
- Lead scoring so that they get in contact with their prime potential customers. (It helps them connect with leads that are the best fit.)
- A lead distribution system so that the right leads go to the right salespeople.
- Sales enablement materials (scripts, email templates, CPQ, CRM sales pipelines, etc.) to help reps deliver precise information and meet sales ETAs.
- On-going training that keeps sales teams sharp.
Automate Where You Can
Even with a team, there will always be different things that, when automated, will do a better job than if it were done manually.
Here are some examples of customer experience automation you can implement:
- Automated email responses that answer customer questions
- Drip campaigns that can nurture customers, deliver documents or even remind them of tasks
- Appointment reminders that ensure your leads attend demo, discovery or update calls.
Automation not only helps provide a great customer experience, but it’s scalable.
This means as you rev up your marketing efforts, your automation will help you in the long run as you take on more business (remember that automation should still be checked from time to time).
Track Your Customer Service Data
It’s ideal to track these numbers month to month to get an idea of how your organization is performing.
Here are some customer service-based metrics to keep an eye on in your CRM:
- Customer retention rate – How long you’re keeping customers on average
- Customer churn rate – The rate at which customers are leaving your business
- Customer satisfaction score – The average satisfaction score customers are giving your business via surveys
- Net promoter score – How likely customers are to promote your brand or business
- Number of customer support tickets – The number of support tickets you’re opening
- Average support ticket resolution – How many customer support tickets you’re resolving
Give Customers Multiple Options
This best practice can be accomplished even outside of your CRM.
Giving your customers multiple options helps you cater to their preferences.
An example would be packaging your product or service offering into different tier packages and giving your customers freedom of choice.
(If you’re going this route, the ideal number of tiers is proven to be 3, any more may cause customer confusion.)
Another example of giving options can be as simple communication preferences. Sometimes customers strongly prefer phone communication over email along with a specific time of the day.
The more your business can give customers leeway without slowing down your process, the better.
The Results Of A Great Customer Experience: 7 Benefits
So what can you expect after applying all of this information?
The benefits can make a lasting change to your business, so let’s look at 7 of them.
1. Positive feedback – An excellent customer experience will bring happy reviews and a lot of “thank you’s.”
2. More referrals – Happy customers are more likely to refer your business to people they know. On top of that, customers acquired through referrals have a 37% higher retention rate. This means these referrals will have longer-term value to your company!
3. Higher average order value – Happy customers are more likely to spend more money with your business because of the experience, great results and superior product. This allows you to upsell and cross-sell your other offers. (Forbes mentioned that the likelihood of selling to an existing customer is 60 to 70%, but the possibility of selling to a new prospect is only 5 to 20%.)
4. Customer loyalty and retention – Customers with a fantastic experience are more likely to stick with your business long-term.
5. Reduction in marketing costs – Referrals and customer retention will allow you to spend less on marketing if you choose. This can allow you to allocate your budget elsewhere in your business.
6. You can spend more to acquire future customers than competitors – With more referrals, and longer customer retention, your business may have even more capital to invest in acquiring new business (depending on profit margins). This gives you a marketing advantage, especially if you’re media buying with Facebook ads or running PPC campaigns on Google.
7. More social proof (a positive feedback loop) – Your business will develop a positive reputation reflected in online reviews. This can set the stage for a positive feedback loop where new customers are working with you because of the reputation and then they leave positive reviews.
Final Takeaways On The CRM Customer Experience
In summary, the customer experience should be at the forefront of your business’s mission. The experience that people have will bleed into your metrics like revenue, retention rates, and so on.
A great customer experience can even give you an edge in your industry and position you to have options like deciding whether you want to spend less or more to attain a customer.
It’s a win-win for both sides:
Your business and your customers.
But in the middle?
It’s a CRM that keeps things streamlined, fast, and simple.
Nowadays, you need a flexible CRM for not only your needs, but also the needs of the modern customer.
Want a CRM that fits this bill?
VipeCloud is your ticket to the ideal customer experience your business needs to provide to stay competitive.
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