Customer relationship management (CRM) is the technology and processes a business uses to manage its customers. The solutions are targeted at the relationship with existing customers, finding potential customers, and winning back previous customers. Customer relationship is vital for any business growth, so it needs to have adequate management.
Formerly, CRM was presumed to be beneficial only for large organizations, but now it has proven to be suitable for small and medium-sized business-to-consumer (B2C) businesses. CRM is one of the powerful management tools designed to keep track of and stream your business processes in many ways:
- Help your business to acquire a solid customer database
- Help you gain valuable business insights and make informed decisions
- Build sustainable relationships with your customers
- Increase productivity of your employees and overall business.
- Optimize your marketing effort
- Improve customer retention and revenue
CRM can boost the performance of your B2C business through the following ways.
1. Help your business to acquire a solid customer database
CRM solutions help you have a well-detailed database of your customers; they give the detailed history and current status of the customers, thereby helping your business better understand its customers. The solutions help create factual information about each customer and are accessible for a consistent interface, irrespective of your location. Some CRM solutions have connectivity to external data sources (accounting system and website) to pick up customer interaction across every touchpoint for a clear and complete picture. The CRM solution can also help you create a solid database for your potential customer, so you know how to reach out to them. Connecting your marketing tools (email, social, and marketing automation) to a CRM solution will give your business a 360-view (complete) of customers and prospects, so you can engage in communication to convert prospects to customers.
Read here to understand why every small business need data.
2. Gain valuable business insights and make informed decision
When you have enough data on your customers, you’ll have valuable business insight through CRM to achieve the following:
- Communicate with customers about relevant subjects for the desired period.
- Develop valuable offers and plans for your customers and prospects.
- Identify opportunities to cross-sell or up-sell.
- Figure out customer’s needs.
- Build a relationship with each customer.
- Personalize customer’s purchase journey.
- Boost the engagement level of your customers.
Modern CRM solutions have embedded artificial intelligence (AI) that provide further insight and drives informed decisions. The AI task can include analysis from social media posts, the highlight of customer’s questions in tracked emails, sensor alert from installed customer software, and revelation of trend on customer’s relationship based on the frequency of contact.
3. Build sustainable relationships
A sustainable customer relationship is a key to having a long-lasting B2C business. CRM solution exposes your business to customer’s information so that you can use it to develop a relationship with them. To build a sustainable relationship, you need to do a complete business review from its history to its vision, mission, values, and services. CRM solutions help you find out your business challenges, what matters to your customers, and how you can help. Take note of these customers’ challenges in your CRM system so that you can do a review and develop your strategy.
Once you’ve identified your customer’s challenges, you can recommend appropriate products, services, or information to help them. With CRM solution, you can monitor their purchase and how they use different products or services. It will help you provide them with relevant information. A CRM solution also has a host email template, task reminders and can enable phone calls to help you quickly and easily connect with your customers. This way, each of your customers feels appreciated, and it will boost your business performance.
4. Increase productivity of your employees and overall business
The use of CRM solutions relieves your employees from burdensome tasks (like manual search for customers’ information). It gives them time to connect better with customers and strengthen the business relationship with them. CRM solutions help streamline many business processes, so you have enough time to identify and seize different business opportunities to boost your overall business performance.
CRM can help improve your overall business performance by improving sales efficiency. It allows your sales team to prioritize customers that have a high chance of patronizing the business. CRM boosts sales team effectiveness by helping them know the highly engaged customers and the right time to reach out for a response. It helps your employee determine the next step to close a deal through a complete customer view.
5. Offer better and personalised customer services
A target marketing study showed that 48% of customers patronize brands that take a personalized marketing effort. A complete database of the customer provided by CRM helps your business know when to reach out to customers. It also determines how to offer the best customer service to individual customers. CRM provides you with customer’s touchpoints, demographics, behavior, and browsing history. You can use CRM to keep track of important dates of your customers, their experiences, and offers that elates them. With your customer’s complete history, your employees can create personalized messages and solutions with the right resources for your customers.
6. Optimise your marketing efforts
Using CRM for your B2C business allows your business to track marketing campaigns. CRM helps you get feedback on your launched campaigns, how customers responded to them and if they are interested. Some CRM tools have features for evaluating the marketing campaigns your customers are viewing. These features will help you develop a marketing strategy in that line.
CRM also enables you to have a well-targeted and cost-effective marketing strategy through email marketing. Using the marketing automation offer of CRM, you can create personalized emails for product promotions. Optimizing marketing using CRM helps improve your business sales and revenue.
7. Improve customer retention and revenue
According to Harvard Business School, if your customer defection rate decreases by 5%, you can experience 25 to 85% increase in your sales or profit. Using CRM solutions enable your business to improve the retention rate of your customers, and it often translates to increased revenue. Your business can use CRM to address at-risk accounts and encourage satisfied customers to purchase again at the right time.
Read here to learn about effective ways to retain your customers.
