How Customer Relationship Management Tools Help You Grow Better
It wasn’t long ago, the prospect of 24-hour customer service centers left a bad taste in the mouth of the market. Long wait times, boring hold music and automated recordings to sell products fell flat. It made the job of customer service awkward, even if reps had a clear incentive to cross-sell during calls.
Plenty of companies around the world still use that approach and wonder why it doesn’t work. But over the last decade, innovation and shifts in thinking turned up some bright spots. Some businesses read the writing on the wall, when customers begin to turn to competitors.
Customer relationship management (CRM) tools are meant, among other things, to augment your sales. If you think about it, a customer service rep who successfully resolves a client issue has a golden opportunity to offer extra value. But like all human interactions, there’s a sequence to follow, or else it doesn’t work.
We’re going to discuss how your CRM tool should function to spike your sales and widen your margin. With existing clients, you don’t need to do all the marketing and relationship building up front. You just need to over-deliver on service, and you’ll get your chance.
Along with CRM, we’ve created a list of all the important resources you’ll need when the time comes to scale your digital marketing agency. Click here to find out more.
WHY CRM IS SO VALUABLE TO SALES AND SERVICE
Technology has come a long way from the late 1990s and early 2000s. If you ever worked in a call center at the time, you might remember the hard parts. Sales and service departments doubled up on account changes, without communicating. It was common in those days for “the left hand to have no idea what the right hand was doing,” and vice versa.
Confusion and clutter shatter customers’ confidence in services they use. In a time like now, when the internet’s made so many options available for nearly everything, you’re unwise to take them for granted.
On the other hand, if your business presents a positive, professional and thorough customer experience, CRMs can be very useful for growth. A happy customer, with their issue resolved, is ripe for offering additional products or services.
Flooding your business with new income is much easier when your new customers … are also your old ones. You don’t need to spend money on advertising or persuading them to buy. You don’t even need to call them; they call in to talk to your team.
According to SmallBizTrends, you have a 60-70 percent probability of selling to an existing client, versus a 5-10 percent likelihood with a prospect. Read more about this and other important scaling tips in our free guide to scaling your digital marketing agency.
HOW CRM TOOLS ENHANCE CUSTOMER SERVICE AND LEAD TO SALES
You only need to imagine an ideal customer interaction on the phone to visualize how CRMs make it even better. Let’s use one of the most common examples – auto services.
It’s quite common for dealers these days to earn more profit from running a successful parts and service department as they do from new car sales. Some dealers even go to the extent of building “lounges” for customers to wait comfortably while their vehicles get serviced.
This is a golden opportunity for a service advisor to build long-term relationships with customers. By keeping detailed logs of work performed, the advisor has exactly the right information at the right time to make recommendations.
A customer in for a routine oil change might be surprised to learn they’re also due for a tire rotation or radiator flush. But, since they’ve already invested time and money to travel there, it’s a “point of least resistance” to make the case for preventative maintenance.
In the digital realm, CRMs make even more sense.
Call center environments rely on CRM to skip all kinds of time-consuming steps. When a customer calls to resolve an issue, the rep that answers “Who do I have the pleasure of speaking with today?” only asks to confirm caller identity. They don’t say it because they have no idea who’s calling in.
The CRM automatically generates account details from the moment the customer calls in. The system prompts the rep to make notes on changes and issues they resolve. It “tutors” them through the sequence, so you minimize errors and omissions from the record.
Later on down the line, when that same customer calls back and speaks to a different rep, everyone’s on the same sheet of music. The new rep can see the notes and changes made by the old one. There’s no grasping at straws to piece together the customer’s problem.
But efficiency is only the beginning. CRM tools also become highly useful data mines. By reviewing their reports, you’ll see where bottlenecks occur in your service workflows. This will tell you where it’s most useful to make appropriate changes.
Remember, in business, money flows to businesses that possess tools and processes to do the right thing, most often, at the quickest pace. If you need help with CRM or any other aspect of scaling your digital marketing agency, click here for our free guide.
