Last updated on August 3rd, 2023
This article will teach you how to improve your customer experience with CRM.
Many companies use CRM. But not many companies use it to its full potential to improve customer experience.
This is especially true for small businesses.
CRM is more than just software to store contact information. It’s a single source of truth for improving your customer experience.
We wrote this article to arm CRM users with more strategies to improve their CRM experience and, in turn, their precious customer experience.
Table of contents:
- What Is CRM Experience?
- Why Your CRM Experience Matters
- How To Solve Your Customer Experience Problems With An Improved CRM Experience
- Improve Your CRM Experience With VipeCloud
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What Is CRM Experience?
Your CRM experience is how you use your CRM to impact your customer experience.
CRM (customer relationship management) is software that helps businesses manage all of their customer relationships.
This makes CRM extremely valuable for managing the entire customer journey, from the moment they become a lead — to when they’re onboarded as a paying customer.
The way you use your CRM directly affects your customer experience, which has a major impact on the rest of your business and its revenue.
Why Your CRM Experience Matters
How your customers view your business directly impacts your bottom line, which makes the following three reasons even more important.
Your Customers’ Expectations Are Increasing
Is your company ready to meet the modern customer’s needs and expectations?
Your customer experience can make or break your business. 86% of consumers admit they’re willing to end their relationship with a brand after just 2 poor experiences.
71% of customers expect reps to remember their last interactions.
Your CRM contact data automatically tells you a customer’s last interaction with a rep.
It also helps you log every need, pain, and goal of anyone that comes into your pipeline.
You Need More Relevant Marketing
Personalization and relevance in marketing are key for keeping up with the big-budget competition.
Think you can skip out on it?
80% of consumers say they’re more likely to buy from a brand after a personalized experience.
Your CRM should be your single source of truth for staying up-to-date with who your customers are and what they want.
You can and should use your CRM’s first-party data in your marketing so you can create more relevant messaging and positioning.
Marketing, Sales, And Customer Success Need To Be Connected And Using Fresh Customer Data Effectively
Marketing, sales, and customer success should all be working together in unison to deliver a single, seamless customer experience.
However, in too many organizations, is that not the case.
Customer data and interactions that are key for retaining new customers — get siloed and fail to be passed on to the next department.
This ultimately leads to customer churn and dissatisfaction.
How To Solve Your Customer Experience Problems With An Improved CRM Experience
1. Collect First-Party Data
Your CRM is a gold mine of first-party data that can be used by sales and marketing to identify common demographics from your best customers.
(In the next section, you’ll learn why this is so valuable and effective for your business.)
There are various ways to collect first-party data with your CRM, but here are some ways to get started.
One way is to use automation to start collecting data from customers and leads by using sign-up forms.
Data gathered from sign-up forms can be synced to your CRM and assigned to a contact or sales opportunity.
This is an easy way to collect customer data, but businesses should also be manually collecting qualitative data during live sales and customer interactions.
Reps can easily do this by filling in opportunity fields and adding detailed notes to opportunity cards in their CRM pipeline.
Some qualitative notes all reps should be adding are:
- Where a lead came from
- Why a lead booked a meeting
- Customer pain points
- Customer goals
- Customers’ reasons for buying from your company
- Customers’ reasons for NOT buying from your company
- Decision makers included in the sales process
Once you collect data, you can move to the next step:
2. Use First-Party Data To Identify Your Best Customers And Inform Messaging
Now, you can identify who your best customers are (in great detail), and then target your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) with your marketing.
To determine your ICP, look at customer data to define:
- Who has the shortest sales cycles
- Who has the highest customer lifetime value
- Who has low customer acquisition costs
- Where and how these leads were generated
- What content was used to nurture the customer
Note: You should also ask for feedback from sales and customer success on who they feel are the best fits.
Identify common demographics to determine who your ICP is.
Then, go through your customer notes to figure out what drives urgency in your customers to make a deal with your company.
This information should be used to create more effective messaging in your sales playbook and marketing.
The key is to target a specific type of buyer with a message that resonates with their specific pain points.
3. Segment Contacts
While you’re collecting your customer data, be sure to segment lists of different types of leads and customers based on important demographics and other data.
This will allow you to further organize your CRM and market to specific customer segments and, therefore, make more relevant marketing campaigns.
Your company might be automating email sequences and customer journeys.
But are you segmenting the leads you’re marketing to?
Segmenting your leads and customers helps you scale automated campaigns while still remaining relevant to your customer.
For example, if your business serves restaurants and hotels, you can create two different email newsletters for each customer segment. This allows you to better resonate with each type of customer while still using automation.
4. Create A Lead Scoring System For Lead Management
What common actions does your ICP take before becoming a customer?
Marketers and sales teams need to document these actions to implement lead scoring.
Lead scoring is a calculated way to manage leads based on interactions that correlate with higher closing probabilities or other business goals.
This more effective way to manage leads helps improve your customer experience by automatically qualifying leads, so a lead is less likely to be a poor fit for your product.
Which could lead to a poor customer experience.
Use your CRM to assign scores to behavior and criteria that help identify which leads will get the most value from your product or service.
For example, reps can assign higher scores to leads with pain your product solves.
5. Use Smart CRM Automation So You Can Focus On Your Customers
Everyone knows automation helps businesses be more efficient.
But if that automation only benefits the business and not the customer, you should consider not automating that action.
For example, automated outreach with zero personalization and segmentation is spammy, and most people hate receiving those types of messages.
However, automating tedious internal tasks like data entry can improve the customer experience.
How?
When you save time with tedious tasks, you have more time to focus on nurturing your customer relationships, which leads to positive business outcomes.
6. Track Lead, Prospect, And Customer Activity
Unfortunately, too many reps make the mistake of not completing action items and follow-ups.
This creates a problem with sales deals because sales cycle times will increase, which makes it more likely a lead will drop off if they don’t get what they want.
With a CRM pipeline, reps can track deals, add action items, and automate workflows, so they’re always able to satisfy a lead’s needs.
Reps can take action on an opportunity based on where a lead is in the pipeline.
For example, reps can know what type of content to send a prospect based on the pipeline stage (according to their sales playbook).
Additionally, when a prospect becomes a customer, action items can be tracked to onboard a customer.
7. Track CRM Metrics That Give Insights For Areas of Improvement
Here are some CRM metrics you should watch to measure the health of your customer experience:
- Customer churn rate
- Customer retention rate
- Customer lifetime value
- Averages sales cycle time
- Deals won:lost ratio
Improving your business is an ongoing battle.
Business leaders should take action based on their CRM metrics to improve their customer experience.
For example, sales managers can monitor a sales rep’s close rate, and when that rate starts to fall below the average, they can use it to trigger a sales coaching opportunity.
Or, if you notice your customer retention rate starts to fall during a recession, you can find ways to improve by doing things like offering discounts, interviewing more customers, or targeting a more recession-proof ICP.
Improve Your CRM Experience With VipeCloud
Every small and medium-sized business needs to prioritize their customer experience through their CRM processes.
Unfortunately, many smaller businesses believe CRM software is too complicated or too expensive.
VipeCloud is a cloud-based CRM solution made for SMBs, with a much lower price tag than the other big-name CRM companies.
The best part?
VipeCloud users don’t need to hire a CRM consultant because it’s so simple to use.
This saves budget and helps increase CRM adoption across your organization.
Want to start bettering your customer experience today? Try a FREE 14-day free trial (no credit card required).
Want to get additional advice on how to implement VipeCloud’s CRM with your business? Schedule a demo with us today. We’ll be happy to help.
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