How CRM Increases Customer Satisfaction & Customer Experience
More and more companies are putting a stronger focus on customer satisfaction and customer experience. Customer satisfaction is the measurement of how happy customers are with your products, services, and capabilities. Customer experience involves each point of contact a company has with a customer and the interactions with their products or services.
Tiffani Bova, Global Customer Growth and Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce, was quoted as saying,
“Last year, the customer experience was on its way to becoming the number one sales metric. Just 12 months later, the top spot has been claimed by customer satisfaction. [In the future], Closing a deal may mean far less to a rep [than it does now] — enabling the client to use the product could be much more significant.”
To gain and keep more customers, you have to make them happy. A customer who has a good experience is more likely to become a loyal, long-term customer who positively promotes your business. A recent study found 64% of customers feel their experience with a brand is more important than price when deciding to make a purchase, and 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a better experience. Providing a good customer experience is guaranteed to increase customer satisfaction.
“How can implementing a CRM increase customer experience?”
“CRM is just a sales tool. It will only impact sales, not the full customer experience, no reason to add our customer service and marketing teams to this platform.”
Does any of that sound familiar? A customer is more than just a sales opportunity and, a CRM is more than just a sales tool. A CRM helps you start and develop strong relationships with customers while improving their experience and satisfaction in several ways.
Get to know your customers better
A CRM allows you to learn more about your customers, think of it as a cheat sheet, granting easy access to key customer data. Storing things like products your customers have purchased, browsed on your website, or inquired about on your social media channels as well as all of the interactions with your team. Tracking this will help you to learn what they want, not what you think they want. Social listening is becoming more of a focus and it's now vital to keep up with customers’ social media posts related to your company. The more information you have about your customer, the better you can tailor marketing offerings to suit them. A personalized service will improve customer satisfaction and increase their loyalty.
Provide personalized service
62% of customers will open an email due to a personalized subject line. A CRM allows you to collect and store this information to make this type of personalization possible. Customers are likely to contact you through channels such as; email, phone, and website; to reach multiple departments, such as sales, marketing, and customer service. A CRM will consolidate all of this communication in one place allowing customers to receive a consistent message, regardless of who they are working with. You can use all of this information for a more personalized and impactful message and segment contacts into targeted audiences for a more personalized experience.
Respond quickly with attentive support
According to this Customer Service Benchmark Report - 62% of companies didn't respond to support emails at all! For those that did, the average response time is 12 hours! Being quick and attentive automatically puts you in the top 50%. When an inquiry comes in, the automation built in a CRM can trigger alerts and send out pre-created email templates, doing this speeds up and consolidates the whole process. Not making your customers wait by quickly replying to their requests is a sign of professionalism and with a CRM you can offer support to your customers how and when they need it.
These are just a few ways a CRM will increase your customer experience, which will increase their overall satisfaction but there are many other ways you can utilize a CRM to improve customer experience. If you’re one of the 89% of companies who are determined to compete on the basis of customer experience, we would love to help implement a new system or optimize your existing one. Click the button below to contact us today!
“Every contact we have with a customer influences their decision as to whether or not they’ll come back. We have to be great every time or we’ll lose them.” - Kevin Stirtz