In the digital age, businesses are becoming more data-driven and competitive in areas like customer engagement and experience.

Incidentally, there is a tendency among businesses to correlate long-term success in acquiring a large customer base. From a financial perspective, this may hold true. But from marketing, sales and customer relations’ stand-point, a large clientele or users base necessitates efforts and practices for tracking, analyzing and engaging customers on an ongoing basis to avoid attrition.

Customer acquisition alone does not reflect on profit and revenue generation!  For businesses that held immense faith in this thought, here are some quick facts:

• About 85 percent of the customers are ready to pay extra for great customer experience, finds a survey.
• By 2020, customer experience will become one of the key considerations in affecting customers’ buying decision, leaving behind product and price, publishes a research report.
• Customers that are developed an emotional connection with the brand are twice as likely to buy a product or service and four times more likely to justify their buying decisions, confirms a Google and CEB study.

CRM is at the heart of change of every organization’s focus from profits to customer-centricity. With a myriad of CRM software developments platforms to make it versatile and indispensable to brand and business success, CRM rightfully earns its place as a business strategy and not a part of it. Apart from the soaring numbers as the adoption rate, CRM solutions have demonstrated tangible returns in terms of revenue increase up to 41 percent for every salesperson, 300 percent lead conversion and over 27 percent customer retention.

Marketers and brands have juggled with innovative ideas and methods in marketing campaigns, advertisements, creatives, appealing visual content and catchy taglines to build the strong bond with its audience and customers. But, brand awareness and loyalty would become far-fetched ambitions if businesses function blindly without metric-based insights on their existing capabilities and resources. This is where custom CRM development comes into the picture by preparing a business internally and externally based on its needs to face the demands and expectations of customers with better customer engagement.

In short, customer engagement and the ability to track down on the users/customers to provide compelling experience are the core differentiators of businesses and brands that aim to serve a large customer base. To satisfy customers/users with great customer experience, more than 89 percent of companies are willing to compete, suggests a study by Gartner.

Companies like Amazon at the altar of their success, do not ignore customers’ needs and are setting new standards by being innovative and proactive to understand and solve customers’ problems. They also backed by service teams to provide responsive support, engagement, and experience that motivate customers to remain loyal. Netflix is another example of customer-obsessed businesses that curates customer data to make personalized recommendations and allows clients to produce the content that guarantees entertainment to its users.

How Does CRM Make Customer Engagement and Tracking Easy?

One of Salesforce’ succinct description of CRM software benefits is that the platform improves customer experience by creating a 360-degree view of the customers. Customer experience affects customer retention rates, satisfaction levels and enables cross and up-selling.

By using CRM software, businesses and brands can form close liaisons with customers/ users or target audience by fully optimizing the efforts of sales and customer communication teams.

The software helps tap into siloed customer data and pulls in records of past sales, interactions, and purchases to ease the execution of outcome-based marketing and sales strategies. Besides, the easy integrations with social media platforms offered by CRM solutions help brands view current trends and opinions of customers and use those insights to better their products or services for unique and personalized experiences.

Another unique opportunity that custom CRM software platforms offer with social media integration is the direct customer and brand interactions. The social CRM development services help evolving businesses and start-ups to exploit the power of social media and leverage on customer relations to build a strong community of online customers/users.  This allows customers to voice their opinions and expectations on platforms where it matters and brands to form direct sales channels, ditching the convoluted, traditional marketing funnels.

After all, glossy review and great ratings on social media matter for building a positive online reputation.

Besides the fluff about its functionalities, Social CRM solutions have a measurable impact on businesses across industries and as its adoption rate surges, firms can discover new customers, keep them informed about new products or services and closely observe and track trends and behaviors through polls, widgets, targeted ads and marketing campaigns and mobile applications. The data gathered through these sources are useful in creating attractive loyalty plans and incentives for their followers and users.

Statistical data from a research on many North American firms found that about 91 percent of the companies with more than 10 employees were equipped with CRM tools. Findings from another survey suggest that 45 percent of the organizations use CRM to manage and store customer data.

Those firms that are still evaluating their choices to implement a full-stack of CRM software are missing out a lot in terms of:

• Automation: Think about the time earned when manual tasks and processes are replaced by CRM-enabled solutions. The time and efforts saved by automating marketing and sales processes provide executives with more opportunity to engage with customers in ways that will reflect positively on their brand perception.
• Multi-team or Tools Collaboration: The most in-demand feature of CRM platform is its collaboration capability. By integrating tools for productivity, communication and data storage like spreadsheets, CMS, mobile sites and apps, sales and marketing processes can move faster thereby reducing response and turn-around time. Collaboration with different departments and teams break down the complexity of internal communication, expediting decision making.
• Streamlined Customer Communication: Businesses interact with customers on multiple platforms making it difficult to keep tab of communication data to use in providing customer support services. CRM merges all data related to customers right from the product purchased, previous visits, etc to help businesses in profiling and prioritizing efforts to increase customer experience and satisfaction.
• Quick Problem Solving: CRM helps businesses keep track of activities and its outcomes with regular reports to identify weak points and areas that need improvements. CRM also empowers sales and customer support teams to keep an eye on the customer’s engagement levels and resolve their issues in a short time. The platform links all data related to complaints, issues raised, support tickets issued to customers and queries made on different platforms like phone calls, emails or chat windows to help customer support teams prioritize tasks and quickly resolve issues.
• Create Roadmaps: CRM platforms can be leveraged to create roadmaps for sales and customer services teams for customer retention, better customer satisfaction, upselling and sales, and revenue growth. The solution can be optimized to build customer-centric strategies and objectives that are unique to each customer and purely based on their buying personas and behaviors.