Business communities often endure too many struggles to achieve customer loyalty. Given the rate at which trends and customers’ path to purchase and preferences change, brands and businesses have a hard time figuring out insights and making qualitative research to support their marketing and other business initiatives.
Moreover, amidst the digital chaos where customers’ have the poor attention span, customer retention and loyalty seem too far-fetched for brands to achieve.
Customer relationship management or CRM software market is growing phenomenally and year by year, cloud-based and mobile-first CRM solutions seem to become more inclined towards ‘customers first’ goals of businesses. Besides the fact that CRM solutions adoption are influencing the abilities to meet sales targets in most firms, the trend has popularized a belief that investment on CRM technology is a must to retain customers.
What is Special About CRM Systems?
The most relevant point for businesses to understand about CRM technology is that it is not the same. Custom-built CRM solutions help businesses to connect the dots by providing a comprehensive view of their customer’s data and past interactions to analyse ways to earn customers’ loyalty and trust in the long run. Incidentally, CRM platforms do not necessarily lead to a major leapfrog in brand status– from having no customers to becoming a cult brand.
Users first need to understand the real value and prowess of CRM in fortifying crucial areas like marketing, sales, and customer relations before assuming that a CRM tool takes care of just about anything under the sun to garner customer’s attention and loyalty.
CRM technology help chart out loyalty-oriented practices like rewards and recognition for a particular action or behavior of customers as opposed to having some sort of market dictatorship over their customers. Moreover, it provides a decision matrix that helps clear notions about target customers, market size, product, and services quality and more to make definitive plans to engage, retain and also acquire new customers at reasonable costs.
Below are the number of ways that CRM helps businesses can boost customer loyalty and prevent losing their customers to competitors:
- Leverage AI to Understand Customer Preferences: In the past, guesses and inaccurate data was the root cause of misinterpreting customer’s choices and preferences. But, with the use of CRM solutions built with superior AI tools, businesses would be able to derive accurate insights into customers’ choices and preferences based on their past interactions and engagements with the brand. This data would be useful in the creation of strategies and loyalty programs like rewards, purchase points, discounts, etc.
- Speed-up Customer Support and Interactions with Chatbots: There are higher odds that today’s customer interacts with a bot than with a customer service executive. Chatbots are helping businesses to bid adieu to contact centers or call centers for delivering customer support services via phones and emails. Chatbots-driven interactions on CRM platforms are well-suited to serve today’s customers that are always on their mobile devices and smartphones. Moreover, chatbots help resolve customers’ issues on the go, anytime and anywhere. They can also be leveraged to increase interaction between customers and brands besides providing support services, rewards and other incentives to boost customer loyalty.
- Increase Personalization of Customer Services: CRM systems not only record and store customer data, they help brands to leverage it to enhance customer experience and drive loyalty. The CRM solutions provide timely insights into customers’ data to help brands personalize their services and content on products or offerings on web platforms. Besides, CRM platforms also help to segment customers based on their personal data, buying behaviors and past actions to direct personalized services and marketing content via emails, promotional messages, and advertisements to increase sales and customer loyalty.
- Plan Rewards, Offers, and Discounts to Acknowledge Customers: Studies reveal that most customers seldom feel appreciated by brands that fail to understand the impact of surprises and delight offers to loyal customers. A recent research by LoyaltyOne on the impact of surprise and delight also revealed that about 95 percent of the respondents had positive perceptions of brands that engaged in providing such offers. CRM platforms can be optimized to define the most ideal ways to include surprise and delight offers as their way of acknowledging long-time customers with gifts, special discounts, loyalty points and purchase bonuses.
Are you still evaluating your options to implement the right CRM software development to impact customer experience?
Reach us today to know more about CRM Technology platforms for better sales conversion and higher ROI.
