Every company struggles to get the most of their CRMs and deliver the expected and deserved experience to customers. Setting up the appropriate workflow rules is a way to meet the client needs and save you a lot of agony down the road. Today’s CRM best practices include far more than data collected from multiple channels and interaction history; they also include tips on building long-lasting relationships with customers.
But beyond the sweet promise of useful information, raises a question: Are these best practices pave the way to success in developing strong and long-term connections with clients?
Well, let’s expose the concept and make it clear: each department - sales, marketing or support - should apply actions and initiatives that are focused on a customer. Moreover, you should pay attention to innovations, channels of communication, and the expectation of clients who are tech-savvy, appreciate personalization and wait for timely offers.
Problem: Your sales and marketing teams keep to follow-up or invite to subscribe to a blog customers that have already bought from you or are just driven through the sales pipeline.
Solution: Perhaps, one of the key (multiply repeated) CRM best practices: you should ensure and constantly check the accuracy of records entered into your platform. With relevant data, your teams will easy go along with leads and customers and provide them with expected information or services.
Problem: Sales and support departments have no access or don’t enter the history of customer purchases or issues. Such an unprofessional manner of work may end in loss of your potential, as well as loyal customers.
Solution: Introduce the rules to enter all vital information on clients interactions, so your CRM can provide the complete summary of the history of relationship with each customer. True, it may take extra time to enter data into CRM; thus, in the future, your sales or support manager will deliver personalized service that includes specific requirements of this very customer.
Problem: Omnichannel interactions with clients drive lower results than was expected. Plus, your customers are looking forward to getting the answer via a channel they’ve reached you out and it supposed to be almost immediately.
Solution: The tricky point is the number of these channels. As a rule, companies support the quick and valuable connection only via a single connection mode, while clients may get in touch with you via email, phone, chat, or social media. Besides, if your potential customers are millennials, get ready for the switch of the channels.
So, the CRM best practice here is dead-simply: provide a wider way to reach out and be reached out, and try to engage with your clients via as many channels as possible.
Problem: Even with advanced CRM, marketing and sales teams face the challenge in qualifying the leads and, therefore, more than half of their efforts are coming to nothing.
Solution: Create additional phases in your sales funnel to track the stage more definitely, yet stay moderate in the number of these extra addings. The data organisation and analysis are critical here, so use all possibilities offered by your CRM vendor.
Problem: Offers sent by your sales reps or content provided by marketing team come out to useless due to the late or inappropriate delivery.
Solution: There is no secret - email or offer delivered in time provides the high engagement rates and creates more opportunities to close the deal successfully. No wonder that the next CRM best practice suggests you add tags to the customer profile, analyze the interests (via social media monitoring) and make sure the messages your teams send are personalized.
Problem: Let’s face the truth: our service and teams have a certain amount of pain points on which customers keep complaining. It’s time to put your efforts and CRM capabilities to full scale.
Solution: First of all, make sure the histories of complaints and not-so-good service experience are maintained in your CRM. Then, identify the list of top frustrating problems and develop a plan with two parts:
a) to upgrade main causes of issues (tune-up or upgrade the software, or run some extra training for the team), and
b) to deal with these nasty situations quickly and efficiently.
Problem: Some of the business owners place too much value on the digital communication and deprive their clients of human interactions. That boils down to low customer satisfaction and, therefore, loyalty rates.
Solution: Don’t overestimate the value of digital communication. Pay attention to the fact that in this technology-filled world, more and more customers prefer to get advice and solve the issues with the help of human being.
Problem: Every department goes on their own; the teams lack company vision and crave for timely updates on customer profiles across the organization.
Solution: An “old”, but still relevant CRM best practice is to grant the access to the required data and set up the notification to the related employees about the updates of contacts (if your CRM platform support this option).
Another critical aspect is to explain clearly for teams the strategy and final goal, so all the departments not simply buy in, but understood how vital their role in achieving business objectives.
To succeed with CRM, you first of all need to develop a shared mindset within your entire company by defining the strategy vision, rules to data management, and then tuning up your platform. The number of CRM best practices and pillars of prolific performance may vary, however, there stays an inevitable aspect - you should value and respect your customers.
P.S. Sometimes, the CRM platform itself constrains you from driving desired results. In such situations, businesses decide to switch their solutions. If you are looking for an automated and secure way to transfer data to a new CRM, feel free to test Trujay and run a free Demo Migration.
That explains the migration process
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