What are the Benefits of CRM Solutions?
By having a single customer view, your business can collaborate, share customer knowledge and maximize sales, marketing and service efficiencies.
Easily adapted and customized to your business requirements, role and industry, CRM can efficiently meet business needs.
How can businesses benefit from CRM?
The use of a CRM puts the customer at front and center of an organization’s strategy. It helps a company to better understand their customers from the information they hold so that they can anticipate client need and shape personalized offerings.
The best CRM systems offer organizations the ability to make smart, reliable and strategic decisions across different departments in the business.
Key benefits of using CRM software
Single customer view for cross-functional reporting and collaboration
One of the greatest challenges faced by a business before adopting CRM is the data generated by multiple legacy applications in use by sales, marketing and service teams. For example, traditionally a business may have selected a specific customer service system that would have been considered best-in-class, but it didn’t connect with sales or marketing tools that were speaking to the same customer.
Add to this that these single apps would be disconnected from finance, inventory and procurement apps, the customer lifecycle becomes disjointed and disrupted. Now however, CRM systems meet that need because they are functionally rich, able to compete with and beat these legacy apps. And of course, they integrate that customer data and bring in information from other areas too. The result is better collaborative work practices, a better customer experience with your brand and more holistic reporting and insights for business management.
Discover the features to look for in customer insights applications and customer data platforms to help you build on your CRM software implementation and realize these benefits.
Dashboards in CRM systems often come with pre-set views, lists and graphs that are out-of-the-box for each functional area and even role seniority. Senior management can use the CRM to track business performance from common KPIs across the organization, or team members and supervisors in sales, marketing, customer service and maintenance can easily configure their own workspace to track leads, campaigns, service cases, work orders etc.
Increase sales productivity
- Better collaboration with marketing colleagues for leads qualification and nurturing, making the leads handoff process more streamlined and visible
- Sales leads qualification is simplified and understood with automatic sales stage workflows, scoring and criteria
- Sales cycles are decreased, admin is reduced and resources freed up to add value for the customer
- Sales success is improved with more visibility on sales leads and opportunities pipeline and KPIs with automated forecasting
- The sales team is empowered with tools that match the way they want to work with streamlined user interfaces focusing on their essential data, and removing the fields they don’t need to use
- Win rate percentages of leads are increased because sales reps know where they are more likely to close deals when they use their CRM
- Customers feel more valued with consistent and relevant contact
- Customer understanding improved from the enriched information surfaced, leaving those customers better informed
- Maximize up and cross sell opportunities with automatic suggestions of relevant or favorite products and services during the quote process
- Increase customer revenue yield with the help of sales analytics and insights on relevant offers and pricing
- Sales automation keeps the leads and opportunity pipeline flowing, tracking prospect activity and reminding sales reps to follow up, qualify leads and nurture an account
- Mobile CRM software enables those sales team members who work on the go, to stay connected, arrive prepared to appointments, update notes, tasks, leads and they are able to access key data regardless of where they are
Discover the features to look for in Sales CRM software to help you realize these benefits.
Impactful marketing communications
- Planning and execution of marketing campaigns becomes easier with marketing automation and pre-set campaign templates to bring in leads faster
- Marketing design is made easy with drag and drop features within templates for email and web pages
- The marketing mix becomes enhanced and defined as the marketing team can introduce additional and relevant channels easily and analyze what is working
- Marketing success is maximized through the use of simplified AB testing to help your team determine more quickly the right message, offer, channel and creative for a particular audience
- Customer loyalty is increased through tailored communications
- Automated business performance monitoring is made more accurate and in real time to determine marketing spend priorities and KPI success
- Segmentation and filtering is simplified with the ability to serve better personalized experiences and communications
- Personalization at scale is possible with automation – dynamic content including design and messaging is automated depending on the contact information you hold and build up
Discover the features to look for in Marketing CRM software to help you realize these benefits.
Improved customer service
- Increase customer loyalty and improve retention rates
- Customer service agents can get to your customers’ issues quicker, with relevant information to hand in their dashboards and cases, offering your customers a reduced time to resolution and a positive feeling about your brand with proactive and knowledgeable customer service agents
- 24×7 customer self-service via Knowledge Base portals, meeting the needs of the modern customer, freeing up agents’ time to focus on more complex requests and delivering customer resolutions through FAQ and better access to their own data
- Multi-channel and omni-channel service and real time social insight via live chat, social media engagement and sentiment analysis
- SLAs and KPIs are monitored through the use of agent and supervisor dashboards
Agent retention rates in your customer service team are improved by providing them the tools they expect to help customers
Discover the features to look for in Customer Service CRM software to help you realize these benefits.
Proactive field service management
- Optimized field service operations means your business can fit in more appointments per day, reduce manual intervention, prioritize highest value customers and minimize driving time
- First time fix rate percentages are improved to increase revenue yield
- Cost to serve overheads are reduced with less service calls made (more controls in place reduce wasted fuel and schedule overlaps)
- Resource management is made easier and faster with scheduling tools that match customer needs, inventory availability and engineer skills and location
- Quote to cash processes are speeded up, with faster billing from completed work orders and resolution queries reduced
- The ability to create and comply with Service Agreements with your customer base, results in increased customer satisfaction through improved visibility, trust and communication. Your business can do this with a Field Service CRM that improves the speed and accuracy of invoicing and supports a predictive service delivery model
- Empowering your field service engineers with a mobile CRM that syncs directly to the finance team and the scheduling team back at HQ means less errors and delays in work orders
- Step by step checklists creates better consistency in work carried out plus the management team can track and learn actual appointment lengths to help with scheduling and productivity management.
- With the help of maps on their mobile CRM application, technicians can use these to meet appointment windows with turn-by-turn driving directions
- Online and offline syncing for mobile CRM allows engineers to increase efficiency and fit more service calls into their schedule
- Inventory management is optimized by linking your technicians and schedulers with the warehouse. Engineers improve first-time fix rates with accurate allocation of parts they need due to this instant visibility, write-offs are reduced by accurately tracking service stock and your business can effectively forecast material requirements
- Implementing CRM software is the first step to a Connected Field Service approach, which allows you to adopt a remote monitoring model. This helps to decrease the number of repair appointments, identify and fix problems before customers are aware, solve issues before failure, identify underperforming products and perform “just-in-time” preventative maintenance
Discover the features to look for in Field Service CRM software to help you realize these benefits.
