Is your CRM practice Business Centric or Customer Centric?

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Gone are the days when businesses had complete control over customer relationship management. Today the floor is more open and the process is a tie between both customers and businesses. In fact, it wouldn’t be wrong if we say CRM is more customer driven. CRM in fact is about keeping your customers happy by bettering their experience every time they reach you. Therefore, the next model of CRM needs to encompass two dimensions, namely the ability to track conversations related to your business faster than ever. Secondly, easy integration or ability to integrate customer information which is already stored in the database or is available on different social media platforms.

Here’s a list of implementations which need to be incorporated in the future CRM practices:
Keep customers at the center
The power of deciding the fate of a business is completely in the hands of the customers today. Your CRM approach can make or break your reputation, depending on:

  • Time taken to respond to customers.
  • Time taken to provide the resolution.
  • Measuring the experience after providing resolution.

Don’t get boggled by the elaborate presentations by CRM software companies displaying complicated dashboards and their command center abilities. The most important aspects of CRM still remains social media listening and the response dashboard. Therefore make sure that the software you are planning to implement has the ability to track messages faster than other tools and also is accompanied by a user friendly interface for faster action by agents.
An advanced CRM tool also comes with the provision to measure agent performance and keeping track of the amount of time taken to close a certain case. This helps to determine the average time taken by each agent to respond to a certain number of mentions. It also helps measure individual performances and generating elaborate reports about the pitfalls and highs in the working model of response management and developing strategies to better the same.
While measuring the performance is one way to understand the quality of CRM your company is providing customers, asking the customers is another and more effective way. A lot of CRM software have the provision to create easy surveys and circulating them among the registered customer base for feedback related to their experience with your company’s CRM quality.
Improve Customer Engagement
Your customers are everywhere and they communicate when and where they feel comfortable. They also expect you to be present wherever they are and respond to them fast.
Here’s what a CRM tool needs to be able to do to facilitate better engagement:

  • The ability to track messages from all channels. A CRM software which has access to the popular social media channels/review sites/ news and discussion forums/blogs and more should serve the purpose.
  • The next step is to automate the filtration process. This helps automating the segregation process and distributing messages into separate work-baskets which can be further designated to particular agents. This facilitates a smooth workflow, and allows faster responses and avoids confusion while multiple agents work on the same platform.
  • A unique “search” option, which can be supported by different forms of search modules allowing easy access to specific messages which require special attention, without wasting time in filtering thousands of data.

Customer Experience matters
So, how do we understand whether your customers are having a good or bad experience? Well, your CRM platform should be able to do the math for you. Most CRM technology today is accompanied by an integrated analytics platform, which allows easy access to quantitative information about various customer experience measurement scales.
Therefore before choosing a CRM software, businesses need to ask the following questions:

  • Does the software track how my customer relationship management strategy has fared in the past few months/years?
  • Does the software provide sentiment analysis based on the voice of the customer?
  • Does the software have the intelligence to provide me with feedback about message sentiment?
  • Does the software have the capability to suggest responses based on keyword identification?
  • Does the software allow easy identification and removal of duplicate messages/repetitive complainers?
  • Does the software allow an easy way forward for leads and fasten the “Sales” process?

If a software has the above mentioned capabilities, it is an obvious go ahead for businesses who wish to implement online CRM as one of their core functioning areas.
Every company needs to understand their customers to make sure they are communicating the right message to the right group of people. The marketing model for businesses has changed from a trial and error driven process to a more data driven one. Customers today are profiled into various categories based on their social media presence, activities and interests.
The question to be asked here is whether your CRM software provides you enough information about how many people in the market are interested in your product, what, where and how many people are talking about your brand in comparison to your competitor brands. This allows improve sales efforts, create better product mix, increase cross selling/up-selling and make effective marketing strategies and reduce spends while increasing profits.
The problem that businesses are facing is in finding platforms which provide all the above functionalities within a single platform. While most CRM tools are trying to incorporate as many options as possible, the fight to be the best is on.