July 22, 2015
Using CRM to Improve B2B Customer Experience in 2015
BY John Paul Narowski IN CRM Software 0 Comment
For a small business owner, having a suitable small business customer management software (CRM software) is an essential component to ensure steady and timely business growth. One of the important factors here is the steady increase in the number of customers a business generates, and to achieve this goal, you need to provide the most delightful customer experience.
Creating a positive customer experience is quickly shifting from being a top offer from industry leading companies to a standard that every company has to deliver in order to stay competitive. Customers expect companies to deliver high quality service and experience. Good products and services are great to have, but customers demand a memorable experience and it’s essential for your company to live up to their expectations.
CRM software is primarily designed to increase your sales and profits and one of the KPIs of high profit margins is customer experience. The more satisfied and happy customers you can get, the higher your margins will be. Every customer interaction is important since even a tiny increase in customer retention rate can increase your profits, particularly:
- 2% increase in customer retention rate is equal to cutting costs by 10%
- 5% reduction in customer desertion can increase profits by 25-125% depending on the industry
- An average company loses 10% of its customers each year
- Customer acquisition cost is approximately 5 times higher than the delight and retention cost of existing customers
- Customer profitability rate is directly linked to the lifecycle length of the existing customers. The longer the lifespan, the more profits you get.
Small business customer management software can help improve your customer experience through sales processes greatly. Sales teams generate a lot of data with every deal they close and if analyzed carefully, the information inside the data can give a lot of hints on how to improve your processes and deliver exactly what your customers demand.
The data can be broken down into 2 parts: Quantitative and Qualitative.
Quantitative data
Quantitative data usually includes information about pricing, numbers, estimates, etc. Sales reps update the information with the CRM software easily after each deal and this information can be used to better segment your audience.
Are there any specific actions that resonate well with some of your customers, while fail with the rest? Can that information be used to improve the effectiveness of your campaigns? What pricing strategy was used for that client? Does it work for more clients?
These types of questions of quantitative data can serve as a measurement of success for your campaigns, which essentially means the quality of your customer experience.
Qualitative data
Customer feedback is usually collected via surveys, social media engagement and email campaigns, but if you take a close look at the qualitative sales data, you can decipher tons of important and relevant information that customers tell your sales reps during a deal.
This information can help your sales team improve their approach to customers and find breaches in your marketing and sales strategy. For example you might be missing some important pain points for your customers and since part of sales team’s job is to uncover those pain points and align them with your company’s offers, qualitative data can help you understand if your company is addressing customer’s issues the best way possible.
It’s important to be constantly upgrading your customer relationships and looking for new ways to deliver high quality customer experience to your target audience. To achieve this goal, you need to follow these 3 steps:
Consistency
Delightful customer experience needs to be consistent at every stage of the buyer’s cycle and across all the touch points with the customer. If you deliver quality service at first, but fail to do the same later on, you will just lose your customers. Small business customer management software lets all of your employees have equal access to customer information and better prepare to answer questions, suggest solutions and do everything in a timely manner.
Exploit every channel
After closing your leads into customers, it’s important to be utilizing every channel of communication available, since different people have different preferences when it comes to communication. Phone, email, face to face meetings, social media, postal service: make sure to include everything from A to Z.
Personalization
Your every other customer interaction has to be more personalized than the previous one. Your customers have to feel that you really care about them and their problems, and that your company pays attention to every small detail concerning them. This will help you build a great reputation among consumers and enjoy higher level of customer satisfaction.
Improving customer experience requires a lot of dedicated hard work, but it’s also the most important factor to drive profits and sales, cut costs and reduce annual customer desertion rate. This is why it’s so important to make delivering exceptional customer experience your top priority, and small business customer management software is the perfect tool to help you achieve your goal.
