Great products alone are no longer adequate to satisfy online buyers who are spoiled with multiple choices nowadays. Online shoppers not only want good quality products but also wish for personalized customer experiences that cater to their specific needs. According to a study by Epsilon1, 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a business that provides personalized experiences. If meeting such expectations has become a challenge for you, the CRM process may be your answer to deepening your relationship with customers or service users.
For any business CRM refers to strategies, tactics, tools, and technologies for attracting, maintaining, and acquiring customers. Today, most companies use CRM software platforms to store customers' details such as contact information and social media profiles, their recent interactions with the business, and any customer service issues. This application supports a business in better understanding its relationships with individual customers over a period of time. Additionally, the CRM process is a strategic approach that connects utilizing the data and functionality provided by a CRM system to keep every customer interaction personalized and meaningful and to eventually convert leads into successful sales.
In this post, we’ll discuss what the CRM process is before diving into the five major steps in the CRM process. We’ll then highlight why the CRM process is important to your business growth.
What is the CRM process?
Before discussing the CRM process, you must first understand the “life cycle of a customer”. Life cycle refers to a process in which a potential customer becomes aware of a brand, purchases the brand, and ideally becomes a long-term customer of your brand. The CRM process consists of five stages as reach, lead acquisition, lead conversion, customer retention, and customer loyalty - which requires the joint effort of a company’s marketing team, sales team, and customer support team.
The company can leverage the five steps of the CRM process to drive consumers through the customer journey from awareness to advocacy. The purpose of these five processes is to develop long-term relationships that go beyond a single purchase. Alike the customer life cycle, marketing, sales, and customer services are the three primary players in the implementation of the CRM process. A CRM system is also significant because it streamlines operations and customer interactions, making them more powerful and effective. Below, we’ll elaborate on what the five steps of the CRM process are and how to execute them using a CRM tool.
5 steps of the CRM process
Every stage of the customer life cycle resembles a step in the CRM process. For example, as the first step in the customer life cycle is to reach, so the first step in the CRM process would be to increase reach by creating awareness of the brand via targeted marketing campaigns. Now, we'll discuss how each step works in practice and which company department is responsible for it.
#Create Brand Awareness
Introducing potential customers to your business is the first step in building brand awareness. To impress your customers when making your first appearance, your marketing team should first understand them and should have a clear perspective on their likes and requirements. There are several measures they can take to start:
To complete the above steps a high-quality CRM tool can help your marketers collect data. To get a clear picture of their target audience, a CRM system can reveal patterns in previous leads and customers. In the CRM tool marketers can also check the sales notes to see what led to conversions in the past, in addition to identifying similarities in demographics. Understanding what resonated with leads helps marketers build effective campaigns to attract the targeted audience.
#Acquire Leads
After creating awareness of your brand to potential customers, it’s time to encourage them to know more about your business brand and engage with it. The process of this lead acquisition may fall within the responsibility of either sales or marketing teams, or both depending on your company's structure. And the team responsible for this activity shall engage with your target customers through available communication channels. For example, your marketing team can attract and encourage visitors to the website of your company to subscribe to newsletters by using a sign-up prompt or running a giveaway on Facebook. and on the other hand, the sales team leverages the function of their CRM’s live chat to contact potential customers and respond to inquiries.
Whether your company is acquiring leads through website traffic, ads on social media, or referrals from earlier customers, capturing leads using your CRM tool across all channels and centralizing all relevant data will set you up for more effective workflows throughout the sales process.
#Leads Nurturing
Once you have impressed and got the attention of your potential customers, now you have to convert them into actual paying customers. Sales reps can use their CRM tool to store the contact information of the prospects they have learned about their leads.
For example, consider your company sells electronic appliances and a fresh lead gets saved as a contact in your CRM because they signed up for a free guide on your website titled “Five Ways To Use A Microwave Oven”, your CRM can log their contact record as someone who may be interested in new electronic home appliances as opposed to being interested in new pots and pans. Through personalized outreach, your reps can then make use of these records.
Through content marketing, your marketing team can also get in on the action and nurture leads. Your marketers can make a product demo video, write blog posts about your key product features, and send newsletters, guide articles, or e-books on topics that might interest your target audience. These all activities through content marketing help build further trust with your prospects until they decide to make a purchase. Also, your marketing team should consider using a marketing automation solution to automate their daily marketing tasks, such as sending marketing emails and keeping track of all the social media engagement. Marketing managers can focus on strategic marketing initiatives more by automating time-consuming marketing duties, which will help the company grow.
In the process of lead nurturing, the lead scoring function in your CRM is also beneficial that allows your sales reps to add or edit points based on any features, such as region, salary, or activity related to email. This enables sales reps to quickly identify opportunities that are likely to result in a purchase. In addition, a study has shown that most consumers need to hear a company’s claims three to five times before they trust it,’ so your salespeople should make use of their CRM system to set reminders or create tasks for themselves to follow up with promising leads.
#Provide Great Customer Service
In the journey of the customer life cycle as customer retention is one of the critical stages, the CRM process does not just end once a customer makes a purchase. Your organization needs to keep customers coming back in order to thrive. The answer to that goal is to provide great service from your customer support team.
As per Customer Communications Group’s 2020 Retail Customer Loyalty Study3, customer service plays an important role in determining a consumer’s loyalty to a brand. Another study shows that around 49 per cent of customers get happy when their issues are being resolved quickly as the most important aspect of a good customer service experience. With the help of CRM’s help desk and service system, your support staffs have the data and resources they need to resolve a customer’s issues efficiently and effortlessly. Support agents without having to ask customers can simply look up the historical customer information stored in a CRM, to provide their order details. This helps an agent to resolve an issue quickly and ensures a smooth customer service experience and makes the customer happy.
It is also observed that customers prefer a choice of channels when contacting customer support. A CRM tool equips your agents with communication tools like cloud telephone, live chat, and email, that they can use to immediately respond to customer complaints as soon as they pop up. Additionally, you can also contact your customer automatically with the help of a CRM platform and ask about their experience after they have received their purchases or services. From customers getting honest feedback is important to understand the changes that your business needs to make to enhance customer satisfaction.
#Upsell
Upselling is a part of the sales technique where you convince current customers to buy more products or upgrade their original purchase. An example is offering a warranty in addition to a device, as is informing a buyer that another product has more features than the one they selected. How do you attract customers and convince them to buy more products or go for a higher value option? Start by sending personalized recommendations via email to present customers.
Your sales team or marketers can leverage the CRM tools to organize customers into smart lists according to purchase history and send a personalized email about relevant product releases for each list. In this manner, you can make sure that the promotional offers or releases you send are reaching the audience most likely to use them.
If you are running a service-based business, your sales team can create follow-up tasks or set reminders in their CRM system to find upselling opportunities via regular check-in calls with repeat customers. You can use this as an opportunity to ask for feedback on your service, as well as suggestions for improving the customer experience. It might be possible that the need of your customers may have changed since the last time they spoke to your sales reps and that they are ready for upselling.
Benefits of the CRM process to various business
While the CRM platform has typically been seen as a marketing and sales tool, some of its most compelling advantages manifest in customer service as well. Here are few ways CRM can help various business processes:
The sales department can use a CRM system to better understand their sales pipeline. For example, sales managers can access reliable information on how well is the performance of individual sales reps or teams, products, and campaigns. Sales reps benefit from minimized admin tasks, a clear understanding of their customers, and the opportunity to spend more time selling and less on data entry and other admin tasks.
Marketing teams can leverage CRM to make detailed and correct forecasting easily. For every lead they can get a clearer picture, as well as map out the entire customer journey from inquiry to sale, giving them a better grasp of the sales pipeline or incoming workload. They may also get relevant insights from customers' public social media activity, such as their likes and dislikes, as well as their feelings about certain companies and brands.
Reps in the customer support service can effectively keep track of conversations across channels. Consider an issue raised by a customer on social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook. They may be seamlessly transferred to email, phone, or live chat and be resolved privately. Without CRM support and acting as a centralized platform for customer interactions, communications might be overlooked or lost in a stream of information, resulting in an unsatisfactory response to a valued customer, which results in poor service.
A big thanks to the CRM process, and with it, the customer life cycle no longer feels abstract. You can use your CRM platform to build a thoughtful, tailored experience that naturally guides prospects through your sales funnel.
