How the CRM Experience Can Grow Your Business

Customer experience is everything in the Internet age.

It’s impossible to hide a negative interaction between a business and a customer. Thanks to online forums, reviews, and social media, if you treat your customer poorly, people will know. All it takes is a quick search in Google, and your company’s reputation is there for all the world to view.

On the other hand, if you deliver a positive customer experience, you’ll reap the rewards of widespread internet publicity.

One of the best ways to provide a better customer experience is with a great CRM experience.

In Salesforce’s recent State of the Connected Customer Report, two-thirds of customers admitted they expect businesses to understand their needs and expectations.

It’s a given nowadays that you'll need a CRM to help you build relationships, manage communications, and gain insights into your customers' needs and wants. But, if you want to better understand your target audience to create meaningful interactions with your brand, you need to do more than simply set up a CRM tool. You need to master the CRM experience.

In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about optimizing the CRM experience so you can better serve your customers, drive revenue, and grow your business.

What is CRM experience?

Before we dive into the definition of CRM experience, let’s back up a bit and look at the definition of the term “CRM”.

CRM defined

CRM stands for customer relationship management. It’s a digital tool you can use to manage all of your company’s relationships and communication with customers and leads.

A CRM is an essential part of any modern business. Whether you run an online (ecommerce) or offline (brick and mortar) retailer, own a software business, manage a sales team, or lead a customer success team‌ — ‌a CRM can and should be used to better manage your customers and your communications to improve the buyer’s journey.

A CRM platform like TigerLRM can also help businesses improve the customer experience by storing key customer data and using predictive analysis for business growth.

CRM experience defined

This leads us to the meaning of CRM experience.

CRM experience is the process of leveraging customer relationship management (CRM) software to offer the best possible customer experience and gain a competitive market advantage.

Simply put, CRM experience is the unique way you optimize the customer experience with your CRM tool. Just because you use CRM software doesn’t mean you’re giving your customers a great experience. You need to understand how to get the most out of CRM software, then come up with a CRM strategy to get a competitive edge and stand out in your industry.

Why is CRM experience important?

When leveraged correctly, a CRM can be an extremely beneficial tool, especially for your bottom line. However, you have to understand that not everyone who uses a CRM will be successful. That’s why you need to focus on the CRM experience‌ — ‌which is how you leverage a CRM to take advantage of its wide array of benefits.

A great CRM experience can help you and your sales team identify potential customers (allowing you to develop an ICP or Ideal Customer Profile), convert more sales leads, and improve customer loyalty to keep people coming back for years to come.

Here are two reasons why CRM experience is crucial for modern businesses:

1. Increased Revenue: When you take advantage of everything your CRM has to offer, the most rewarding benefit for business growth is increased revenue. Rather than relying on gut feelings, CRM experience can be used to make data-driven decisions to drive sales. Business owners typically get a positive return on investment (ROI) quickly from the purchase of a CRM because of the boost in sales.

2. Improved Productivity: A salesperson’s mission is to sell more. However, salespeople spend 41% of their workday on non-revenue-generating activities. CRM experience can help you automate repetitive tasks and keep all your customer data organized neatly in one place so you can get more time back to focus on generating sales.

7 ways a CRM can improve customer experience

Now that we’ve covered what CRM experience is and why it’s important, let’s dive into a few ways you can use a CRM to improve customer satisfaction and the overall customer experience.

Here are seven ways you can improve customer experience with a CRM to convert more customers, improve retention, and drive business growth.

1. Build relationships with customers

The most impactful way a CRM can improve the customer experience is simple: it helps you build deeper relationships with customers if you use it properly.

For example, one of the first things you can do when you adopt a CRM like TigerLRM is to send a message out to all of your customers to let them know you have a new system, and want to make sure their data is accurate. This way, not only do you emphasize to your customers that you’re working on customer experience, but you’re also reaching out to them.

This can be a great exercise for new sales staff, as well. They can go through the CRM, see the list of customers and notes, and look for any entries that lack data. If someone forgot to add the company website to a users account, they can take care of it quickly, or even do it automatically via email. This doubles as a great way for new employees to familiarize themselves with the customer base while making connections at the same time.

Building relationships with prospects and leads is fundamental to selling more. And, while the exact strategies to develop relationships with customers may look different from business to business, there are a few ways a CRM can help any business achieve this. A powerful CRM like TigerLRM can give you a one-stop shop to store customer data, improve communication speed, and create personalized customer interactions.

In the past, salespeople would use a digital day planner to keep track of their contacts, customers, meetings, and notes of customer specifications. Now, you can use a CRM to increase by 10x the number of relationships you can build through CRM-led contact management to positively impact your bottom line.

For further reading on improving relationships with your customers, check out our blog post: 8 Ways CRM For Small Business Helps Improve the Customer Journey.

2. Provide attentive support to your customers

If you want to close the right deal at the right time, then you need to be quick on your feet. Closing in-person and over-the-phone used to be the only way to sign a new client. Thanks to email, text messaging, and social media, customers expect faster replies to their inquiries than ever before.

With an effective CRM, you can leverage the power of automation and personalize software to provide great customer service to your customers.

Salespeople usually have a short window of opportunity to close a deal when their customer is in a buying mood. A CRM can help you strike when the iron’s hot with a quick response allowing you to improve your revenue. For example, TigerLRM can send electronic invoices in seconds, and will soon have a docusign feature, making client agreements happen even faster.

For further reading on optimizing customer support to improve sales, check out our blog post: The Service Side of Sales Enablement.

3. Convert leads into buyers on their terms

Consumers have more choices today than ever before. And, since every positive and negative interaction is on full display nowadays thanks to the internet, buyers can be pickier when it comes to handing over their hard-earned cash.

A CRM can help you maintain a conversation with your customers that’s on their terms. Thanks to inbound marketing tactics, you can optimize your sales cycle with a CRM to ensure that you’re not spamming clients, but instead, you’re reaching out exactly when they need help.

The best CRMs can give you key customer data and insights, but it’s important to remember the phrase: “garbage in, garbage out.” Ensure your data is accurate and up-to-date, and a CRM can help you better understand when to reach out, when to send a follow-up email, and when to offer a helping hand. It can not be stressed enough that this is the key to a successful relationship with your customers. If there is one take-a-way, this is it. You have to maintain the data in your CRM, keep it up to date and accurate.

Simply put when you can provide a relevant experience for your prospects and leads, you’ll be able to convert more of them into buyers.

For further reading on converting leads into buyers on their terms, check out our blog post: 5 Reasons You Aren’t Closing Leads and How To Fix Them.

4. Gain new insights into your customers

A CRM isn’t just about collecting as much information on your customers as possible. It’s about gathering ‌customer data that matters so you can make informed decisions to serve them better.

You shouldn’t just think of a CRM as a place to interact with customers, but as a place where you can assemble data, so you can learn more about your customers’ needs, wants, and thoughts about your products or services.

A powerful CRM will automatically collect crucial customer data to help you optimize your sales process and improve your bottom line. TigerLRM is a great example of a CRM and sales enablement combination tool that gives you actionable insights and easy-to-understand reports to improve your performance.

Learn more about how TigerLRM can help you grow your revenue to meet your business goals.

5. Personalize your communication

Signing new deals can be challenging when you’re interacting with a wide range of prospects and customers. Trying to remember crucial and specific details about customers can get confusing after a while. There’s nothing worse than forgetting who a customer is, where they came from, and what their needs are.

A CRM solves this for you. Information from past interactions with clients can be stored in your CRM. With a great CRM, this data will be stored automatically when using integrated communication apps.

For instance, if a salesperson has to make a follow-up call with a lead, they could use data from their CRM to ask relevant questions based on past conversations and data points. Ultimately, by leveraging CRM data, you can provide a more personalized experience, which will drive more sales. For example, using TigerLRM’s email or phone system will automatically store those communications, and connect them with that client’s account.

For further reading on personalizing your communication, check out our blog post: 30 Game-Changing Sales Discovery Questions Your Sales Reps Should Ask.

6. Segment your customers for relevant marketing

As you begin recording more data in your CRM, you’ll start to see patterns emerge among your customers. For instance, a CRM will typically allow you to segment different customers based on a combination of factors like:

• Demographics like age, sex, and location

• Industry, workplace, position

• Company activity

• Complimentary or competitor solutions

• Pipeline stages

• Purchase or download history

• Behavioral segmentation

By splitting customers into segments, you can offer more targeted, relevant experiences and marketing campaigns, which will improve the value each customer receives so you can drive more revenue. These are called ICPs, or Ideal Customer Profiles.

For further reading on improving your customer segmentation, check out our blog post: Creating Auto Follow Ups in TigerLRM.

7. Offer consistency with every touchpoint

One unique benefit of leveraging a CRM is your ability to maintain a consistent brand and customer experience for your customers. When a customer is riding along the sales funnel, they’ll likely interact with a variety of different people or teams before reaching their end destination by purchasing your products or services.

A CRM allows you to maintain a consistent message, communicate consistently by accessing relevant customer data, and respond consistently with tech-empowered communication channels.

For instance, your CRM may be able to utilize drip campaigns, which can allow you to automatically send a follow-up email based on a specific behavioral trigger.

If a customer responds to it, your customer service team may be notified and may have templated responses in the CRM. And finally, a sales rep could have access to the customer’s information to close a sale with relevant messaging based on their unique needs. TigerLRM calls it ‌auto-follow-up, and can do it with email or SMS or a combination of both.

For further reading on improving your consistency in communication and unifying your team, check out our blog post: Tiger LRM Playbook.

Summary

As your business faces greater competition every year, going above and beyond with customer experience is a key differentiating factor. With the right CRM and the ability to leverage that CRM to the fullest, you can provide that experience.

When leveraged as a single source of truth for your sales, service, and marketing teams, you can gain deeper insights into your customers to optimize their journey with your brand. The result is that you’ll build deeper customer relationships, convert more leads into buyers, and improve your bottom line.

If you want to optimize your business today with a powerful CRM and sales enablement tool, then check out TigerLRM today.

TigerLRM is a CRM built by salespeople for salespeople. TigerLRM’s robust CRM and holistic approach to sales enablement makes it a powerful choice for businesses looking to increase their close rate, get more done in less time, and improve their bottom line. Get a free demo of TigerLRM today (no credit card required)!