Businesses like Amazon, Apple, Netflix depend on CRM systems to deliver the best customer experience. In fact, business adoption of CRM increased from56% in 2018 to 74% in 2019.
Companies use CRM software to anticipate customers’ demands, manage leads, and to as well gather reliable and applicable data.
With the market expected to reach more than$80 billion in revenues by 2025, the percentage of companies adopting this system is on the rise.
And your company is the only one being left out. Because CRM software is the largest software market in the world.
Customer Relationship Management – Explained
Simply put, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the process of managing your business relationships and interactions with new and existing customers.
The primary aim of CRM is to strengthen your relationship with your customers without leaving anyone behind, in order to drive business growth.
However, with advanced technology, the purpose of CRM has transcended into customer acquisition, monitoring, and even ‘customer petting’.
Experts Views on Customer Relationship Management
Christopher Garrity, McDonald’s’ own Senior Director of Customer Satisfaction, says:
“CRM [is a] critically important function for any large company. It’s clear that Astute understands the important role it plays and meets the ever-changing needs of our prime customers through continued innovation.”
Christopher Garrity
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Brian Vellmure, a consultant and speaker on CRM,defines CRMas:
“A holistic encompassing of strategy, process, and technology aimed at improving the mutual value of a customer and a company’s relationship.”
Brian Vellmure
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Business consultant and IT specialist David Dozer, explained that:
“CRM systems have grown and evolved so much over the last decade that in some cases they now mimic ERP systems in some areas. This is great on the surface, but for a salesperson who’s on the road and needs to focus on selling, or a customer service rep who’s trying to find the right information quickly, the systems have become somewhat cumbersome.”
David Dozer
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5 Most Important Statistics in CRM
As CRM evolves, here are the most important statistics you should know about innovation CRM.
- CRM can boostconversion rates by 300%.
- Companies with an effective CRM system increase customerrelationships by 74%.
- 87% improvement in sales, 74% increase in customer satisfaction, 73% growth in business efficiency. (Source)
- 78% of customers now expect a connection with brands and consistent interactions across departments.
- The ROI of a CRM software system, when properly implemented, canexceed 245%.
Examples ofCRM Software
With73% of customerspointing to customer experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions, using the right CRM software can boost your business’ growth.
Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM is a low-cost CRM option for Small and Medium businesses.
With an integrated project management module, the product has several useful integrations with other products. Including Google Apps, Shopify, Social Media platforms, MailChimp and SurveyMonkey.
Pricing:$0 for free plan (standard pricing is $12 with a 15-day free trial)
Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a customer relationship management (CRM) software built to help small teams to drive sales.
The platform helps you focus on the actions that get you results. When you schedule calls, emails, and lunches Pipedrive shows you what to prioritize.
Pricing:$12.5with a 14-day free trial (users can pay more for add-ons)
Microsoft Dynamic 365
Microsoft Dynamics 365 a product line of enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management intelligent business applications.
It provides sales, marketing, and several service functionality. It is offered as SaaS and on-premise.
Dynamics 365 is part of the larger Dynamics suite of business intelligence and ERP products.
Pricings: $20 with more options based on functionalities and marketing categories.
Salesforce
Salesforce provides customer relationship management service. And a complementary suite of enterprise applications focused on customer service, marketing automation, analytics, and application development.
It is a web-based CRM application that enables users to forecast revenues and track leads.
Pricing:$25 per user and monthly (with a 30-day free trial)
Hubspot CRM
HubSpot CRM is an inbound marketing, sales, and customer service.
It enables users to organize, track and build better relationships with leads and customers.
Users can manage contacts in a customizable database while running sales, marketing, customer service, and content management.
Pricing:$0 (it’s completely free)
Customer Relationship Management – Case Studies
Here are some case studies your business and marketing team can draw inspiration from.
Uber CRM Case Study
Uber runs an incentivizing model that allows customers to earn points each time they eat or ride with Uber. In turn, they can redeem them across other services its renders.
Also, Salesforce is Uber’s CRM software provider. What Salesforce does is helps extract data from its customers’ engagement with its brand on social media, then Uber can track and respond to customers’ concerns swiftly.
Amazon CRM Case Study
Yes, Amazon. Your favorite e-commerce platform depends heavily on CRM technology for its growth.
Amazon uses CRM software to tailored offers, recommendations, and promotions to customers based on past purchases.
Also, Amazon asks its customers to register for an account to ensure consistent contact with their customers.
It also makes it easy for customers to re-order so that customers can pay with a click, and have their goods at their doorstep within 24 hours.
Netflix CRM Case Study
This is probably the most obvious one.
Netflix uses a personalized recommendation system to suggest content for its users based on their interests. And in fact, 80% of users stream content suggested by it.
Also, Netflix makes use of customers’ past viewed data to predict bandwidth usage. This helps the service decide when it should cache regional servers to ensure prompt load times during high demand.
Innovation in Customers Relationship Management
Whether you’re a B2B, B2C, SMBs, or a large enterprise, understanding the innovations in CRM can chart a new course for your business. This isn’t a facade.
Actually, technology often is the easy part. It is the 15% or 20% on the bottom that enables everything to happen.
But, understanding its essence and need for adoption is even more important.
Here is how these 7 innovations in Customer Relationship Management can impact your business.
Intelligent Chat Nurturing
Intelligence chat nurturing is an AI-Based chatbot that allows your customer support team to communicate in real-time with your customers. This could either be a bot or real human interaction.
Chat nurturing helps to provide human interaction during an online purchase, giving your customers a sense of reassurance.
It also helps you gather reliable and unaltered primary data from your customers without interference.
A Case on Intelligent Chat Nurturing
During the pandemicAmerican Family Carefaced a lot of increase in people canceling subscriptions.
Then, they trained Botco.ai bots on their website to prevent cancellations by putting us on the landing page for cancellation. Asking the users why they were canceling and informing them that they could pause rather than canceling and that will be better for them financially.
In a very short time, they were able to actually prevent subscription cancellations by using the bot.
Third-Party Data Integration
Managing a CRM system means you will be dealing with a very large amount of data across several platforms due to third-party integrations.
Already, CRM technologies have integrated with Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), file integration, and billing systems that retrieve transactional data.
Today, we are witnessing the emergence of third-party systems and the Internet of Things (IoT).
These IoT devices such as refrigerators, automobiles, medical devices, can send data about product issues, maintenance needs, improper usage, to an organization’s CRM platform.
In fact, a report by Cisco predicts that by 2021 there may be nearly27.1 billion connected networksand devices in the world.
Customer Self Service
According to data from Salesforce, 65% of customers would rather use self-service to solve simple issues.
Hence, CRM software are growing fast. Allowing for a knowledge base with a collection of FAQs, DYI tips, and more Password reset capabilities.
Similarly, the ability to log a service request collaborative spaces, like community forums for customers to share information and provide helpful tips are fast becoming a must-have for businesses.
Dozer opines that:
“From a business perspective, CRM is starting to evolve and that means less about just capturing interactions and customer touches, or logging support calls. More and more customers want to be able to find the things they need without the assistance of an actual person. This means that companies are investing more in self-service customer portals and systems that give clients the tools they need to do things like look up and pay outstanding invoices, find documentation about products and log support issues.”
David Dozer
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How CRM Innovations Impact Your Business
Understanding these innovations is an impact because whether you offer a product or service your end goal is to deliver customer satisfaction.
And this is achievable by building a sustainable relationship with your customers in ways that deliver the best experience.
Impacts of CRM on your business include:
Efficient Data Management
With third-party data integration, CRM software allows you to manage data distinctively across channels and enables data-driven decision-making.
Informed decisions are the result of verifying and understanding the information you have.
CRM lets you access data points in ways that are easy to interpret.
Identify and manage leads
With intelligent chat nurturing, CRM can greatly affect the efficiency of your sales process.
You can create new leads and even use customized follow-up suitable for individual sales lead data. This allows you to manage relationships sustainably.
Anticipate customer needs
With product communities and forums you get instant access to data such as contact information, customers’ concerns, purchase history, and more.
This gives you leverage because you can use Voice of the Customer data into your CRM to enhance your understanding of your customers. That way, you can predict customers' needs and expectations.
Conclusion
Change is the essence of existence. The saying that change is the only constant thing used to be only for humans, until humans found innovation.
New business ideas are conceived due to change in human needs and wants.
Similarly, changes in customer behavior, orientation, and technology have caused a paradigm shift in the ways Customer Relationship Management is perceived within an organization.
These innovations should guide business owners on the loopholes in their CRM adoption. So, if you are looking to upgrade your CRM processes, you have one less thing to worry about. Here is a good way to start.
When innovation diffuses, those who are quick to adapt to the rules always win. This is also true about businesses.
Tomori Uriel is a Product Marketing & Growth Specialist on a mission to drive businesses forward. I do content that rank high on Google.
