For every business, customers are at the core of its existence. Primarily, most of the activities in a business revolve around the customer because they are kings.
You must have come across the term CRM quite often. So, what exactly is CRM?
CRM or customer relationship management system is the business’s effort to build customer relationships and maintain them throughout the customer journey. CRM is a strategy that brings handsome profits to the company.
When you hear the term CRM, it usually refers to CRM software which is a tool that helps in bringing the sales, marketing and customer support activities on one page. It enables businesses to store and manage customer data and interact with customers. A CRM for small business enables easy contact list updates with detailed insights and a customizable view of leads and customers. CRM tools help sales teams by offering them features like:
- Lead management
- Sales forecasting
- Customer opportunity management
CRM tools have a massive market in the sales world, and you can consider them to be one of the best investments for companies. Using CRM systems, you can increase returns from sales and marketing and bring down the costs involved.
It is possible to customize CRM systems to meet the requirements of a small business crm based on its type and size. CRM software is used across industries to help companies do better. An example is the gym CRM by Pushpress, which is a top gym management software created for businesses in the health and fitness industry. It has been customized to provide all the benefits of a CRM, and includes other features which helps in such as lead generation, marketing, branding, and online billing and payments.
According to a survey conducted, CRM can fetch you
- 300% better lead conversion rates
- 41% increase in revenue per sales rep.
- 27% better customer retention
- 24% decrease in sales cycles
- 23% reduction in sales and marketing costs
CRM for customer service
Though there is software exclusively for customer service and support (CSS), when you use CRM, the service and support functions get integrated holistically. Instead of taking care of customer service and support at the end, CRM makes it a part of every stage of customer experience.
With better customer interaction, you will get a higher count of returning customers. They won’t come to you when you offer them sloppy service. Some businesses do that, much to the annoyance of customers. Consider this, you are the customer and upon contacting customer support, you first get yourself verified and explain the problem you face with the product or service you are using. But the support representative puts you on hold or transfers your call, making you repeat the whole story once again.
When you use a service CRM tool, it will give the customer support representatives access to relevant information to resolve issues faster. It would help avoid making the whole experience frustrating for the customer.
Customer service CRM – How does it work?
Here is how service CRM works,
First, the CRM ecosystem captures all the information about the customer to make it accessible to the support reps.
Customers can get in touch with support through different channels, namely – email, phone, online forms, social media and instant messaging.
When a customer reaches out, a ticket gets created. It has the customers’ details, the nature of the complaint, and which department the ticket belongs to. It can have details of the SLA or service level agreement that makes both the customer and the support rep understand how long it can take to fix the underlying issue.
There is a workflow that organizes and automates tasks to resolve the problem.
In the final stage, the service CRM gathers customer feedback that helps boost the quality of customer support for future tickets.
How does CRM benefit customer service?
There are several advantages of using CRM for customer service. Make sure that the service CRM tool you use offers you the following benefits,
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It helps resolve customer queries faster.
Using a CRM, you can get your work done more efficiently. Increasing communication channels makes it possible for customers to gain access to support any time, anywhere. When reps have access to all the information about customers, they will not take much time to resolve customer’s issues. There will be reusable solutions for repeated problems, and the CRM automates everyday tasks. It would help save more time.
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It enables sharing customer’s queries with the whole support team.
There may be different roles and skills of marketing, sales and service departments, but ultimately, they engage with the same contacts and customers. Based on how they interact with customers, every department gathers unique data. It can add up to the data already present in the customer profiles and is beneficial to other departments.
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It helps you look at the customer’s conversation history.
A CRM displays the detailed history of the interaction with the client, including the past purchases they made and the issues they have had previously. It is helpful to service reps as they needn’t waste time knowing the backstory. It becomes simpler to identify problems and prevent old issues from surfacing again.
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It lets you look at the analytics of customer support queries.
CRMs gather and store data that helps in improving customer experience. The data that the CSS department collects helps resolve issues and is also helpful to other departments like sales and marketing. For great results, a service CRM must have analytical and reporting features.
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It works as a knowledge base for customers.
With a dedicated CRM, you don’t just enable reps to address the issues of more people in a shorter time span but also to let customers help themselves swiftly and with minimal effort. With the previously gathered CRM data, you can set up FAQs and knowledge bases. You can get them updated periodically. The biggest benefit is to the reps as they don’t have to handle tickets for basic issues and customers can resolve common problems they face on their own without having to contact the customer service.
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It helps build long-lasting relationships with customers.
Customer experience has a vital role to play in building strong bonds with customers. Though it is easy to leave a good impression on a customer by making a great sale, it takes a lot of effort to keep customers happy afterwards. You would need a strong customer service team and software to achieve great results with service CRM that is possible.
In this scenario, it is also worth mentioning that a shared inbox software can be quite useful for organizations. The generic support email addresses get plenty of emails in a day and there is always the fear of duplicate replies and a collision between team members. With a shared inbox tool you can avoid that. It also helps in assigning incoming emails to team members in a streamlined manner. SharedInbox is one such tool that will be quite helpful.
The Final Word
There are plenty of advantages of using servicethough you have standalone software for customer service and support. The fact that service CRM has a holistic approach makes it a winner. Several customer service CRM tools are available that can suit your needs. Choose a tool that gives you most of the benefits discussed above.
