How CRM Improves Customer Experience

Customer experience is the impression left with your customer or prospect after an interaction, driving how they think about your brand, across multiple touchpoints, and at every stage of the customer journey. 

People and products are the main elements that influence the customer experience. The performance and the quality of your product and the level of attention customers receive from support reps helping to solve their problems are some of the top factors at play when creating an exceptional customer experience.

With a CRM tool, you can store information about your customers and their interactions with your brand. Having this information at your fingertips goes a long way toward providing your customers with fast, seamless, and personalised experiences, leading to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and sales.

The Importance of Customer Experience

Customer experience is a critical driver of the sustained growth of a brand. It helps to build brand loyalty and affinity with customers, turn them into evangelists for your product or service, recommending it to their friends and colleagues, and leaving you positive reviews that lead to increased revenue.

According to Gartner, customer experience is one of the top three areas of marketing investment. So, if you don’t already have a customer experience strategy in place, your competitors could be poised to leave you behind. 

Thanks to the power of the internet, customers have more options than ever before. Brands can no longer rest on their laurels or compete by price or unique selling points alone. In fact, more than two-thirds of companies surveyed say they now compete primarily on the basis of customer experience.

The Relationship Between CRM and CX

CRM provides a technology-based foundation for exceptional customer service, which significantly affects the customer experience. CRM can help you create consistency across every customer touchpoint, leveraging the data it holds to inform interactions with your customer via the web, on social, in-app, on the phone or in person.  

When applied correctly, CRM empowers brands to take a more holistic approach to the customer experience by harnessing the emotional affinity between customers and your brand. With the data that your CRM technology holds, you get to study and understand your customers and adequately meet (or even pre-empt) their needs and demands across channels, creating a seamless customer experience.

5 Ways CRM Can Improve Customer Experience

Nurturing lasting relationships with customers and offering them enjoyable buying experiences is key. A CRM tool can help you to:

1. Interact with your customers

A way to keep healthy interactions with your customers is via automated, relevant and timely communications enabled through your CRM and Marketing Automation. Remembering them on their special days by sending them discounts and promotions would engage higher personal connectivity. 

2. Personalise Customer Communication

A report from Accenture found 41% of consumers churn due to a lack of trust and poor personalisation, costing brands £576 billion per year. CRMs enable your marketing automation strategy, allowing for better personalisation, segmentation, and tailored customer journeys. 

3. Better Understand Your Customer 

CRMs are flooded with data coming from customers, making it a goldmine where you can learn their buying habits, products they are into, emails that they usually engage with, and other information that you can use to understand them better. This way, you can formulate personalised marketing offers based on their preferences and purchase history. You can identify your most profitable customers, pay them more attention and build from your success.

4. Respond Quickly

Built with automated responses, CRM could provide immediate answers to frequently asked questions, could respond to queries, complaints, and requests with ample time providing them with relief that their concerns are to be addressed. This way, your customers will feel that they are a priority, and they are valuable to your brand. A true multi-channel support that provides for example self-services capabilities via a portal can support the process too so that customers are serviced the way they want to be serviced.

5. Increase Revenue

Customers have a strong desire for a better customer experience. So much so that they’re willing to pay for it. A PwC study reveals that many buyers are willing to pay more for a better brand experience. CRM software is a critical component of your company’s ability to meet customer demand.

Conclusion

To fully maximise the potential of your business, you must understand your market and customers, analyse trends, buying habits, and purchase history. Then, use that data to inform your customers’ interactions with your brand across the entire customer journey. It is about being relevant, timely and personal.

While automation plays an important role here, it’s also critical to empower your customer service representatives who handle client concerns with a CRM tool that contains a wealth of insight about your customers.

Ultimately, properly leveraging your CRM to enhance CX gives your brand a competitive advantage, leading to increases in customer satisfaction and sales, while resulting in a decrease in customer churn.