CRM software, customer relationship management software, is an important tool for any organization or business that wants to keep track of important customer contacts and communications. CRM's can streamline your business's customer database and track all of the communications, emails, sales, and marketing campaigns you engage in as a company.
This helps inform your further communications, as you will have a unique database of just how well your specific audience responds to different types of campaigns. Analyzing your customer interactions can lead to a significant uptick in your audience engagement and can better your overall relationship with your customers, which improves your reputation as a business. CRM has many uses, and if you are hungry for more ways your business could be utilizing it, keep reading.
1. Staying organized and unified
A great way that many businesses use CRM software is to stay organized and unified across every employee who works for them. Having just one database of business contacts and marketing campaigns and interactions makes it much easier for new employees to get the hang of customer relationship management. Before CRM software became popular, many businesses were using Excel spreadsheets to keep track of all their customer contacts and interactions. This proved to be difficult as spreadsheets are not as easy across devices and users, and there are not as many automated features in Excel as there are in CRM software platforms. While Excel can be nice for some activities, a true CRM platform is much more robust and has the ability to keep everything you need in one place, not in multiple files.
2. Tracking customer interactions across different media
Another benefit of using CRM is that these management systems automatically track interactions across all different media. It can be used in coordination with a call center software, such as the solutions offered by Bright Pattern, to track customer service and marketing interactions from phone calls, automated texts, emails, and live chats. An omnichannel, streamlined customer service and communication platform like Bright Pattern already makes it easy to bring your customer interactions from one communication platform to the next, but by tracking all of this data in CRM, your business can stay organized and have a clear picture of how your customers like to communicate with you. You can also see how well your customer service agents are doing, so that you can evaluate their performances. Another benefit of integrating call center software with CRM is that your customer service agents will see pre-populated fields with your customer's data, so there is no need for the customer to repeat him or herself over and over.
3. Personalize your marketing strategies
Having a CRM software platform and strategy is like having a data collector that helps you get to know your customers better. If you analyze the data of how often each type of customer opens an email or answers a marketing phone call, you can better understand their habits and behaviors as well as their likes and dislikes. For instance, you may find out that your audience only opens emails from your business if the subject line is fewer than five words long, or if it contains a buzzy keyword that captures their attention. These are important things to realize to help formulate further marketing strategies that are targeted at specific segments of your customer base. It is not unheard of for a company to utilize different types of campaigns to deliver a specific sales message, just because data has shown that to be the easiest way to reach different parts of an audience.
