In today’s hypercompetitive business landscape, customer retention is essential for your company’s growth. Engaged and loyal customers are your brand’s most ardent advocates.
They will review your products, recommend them to peers, and refer new customers to your company. Above all, they will come back and spend more than new customers.
Your customer relationship management (CRM) system is at the heart of your customer retention strategy. Let’s see how CRM software can help you build meaningful relationships with customers and retain them.
Providing Personalized User Experiences
While artificial intelligence tools can automate many repetitive tasks and make your teams more agile, they cannot replace humans and not enough to improve customer retention.
Customers want to talk to someone compassionate who listens to them, understands their problems, and provides constructive solutions. Studies found that 75% of customers believe that companies have lost human touch in customer experience.
One of the most effective ways to retain them is to personalize user experiences. Research says that 84% of customers want to be treated like a person, not a number. That is where your CRM system and CRM tools can help.
Namely, your customers contact you through a wide range of channels, including your email, phone, live chat, and website. They also communicate with different departments, such as customer support, marketing, and sales. our CRM system captures each touchpoint with your brand and keeps customer data in a central location.
That way, it helps you create detailed profiles for each customer and provide each department with access to the same customer data.
For your teams, that is a lot of useful information. Your sales and marketing teams can use this data to map out customer journeys. They can segment audiences into narrower segments and provide highly targeted marketing campaigns.
Unsurprisingly, people will be more interested in marketing campaigns that are tailored to their needs.
Strengthening Customer Support
Customer support is the backbone of your customer retention strategy. Today’s customers are tech-savvy and highly demanding. They expect your brand to provide fast and relevant customer support, how and when they need it. And, with the right CRM system, you can handle customer complaints more efficiently.
Namely, your CRM system unifies your customer support channels, such as your email, call center, live chat, and social networks. Instead of using multiple customer support channels simultaneously, you will centralize customer service tickets in a single location to improve customer retention.
Once a customer sends in a request, irrespective of the channel they use, you can assign their inquiry to the right customer support agent and handle it faster.
You can also start sending automated emails to inform a customer about the status of their service inquiry.
When a customer sends in a request, you can set up your system to automatically let them know that you have received their email. You can also link to other relevant customer support channels, such as your business phone number or knowledge base articles.
Most importantly, your CRM software lets you personalize customer support. With its help, you can create detailed customer profiles and provide all members of your customer service team with access to the same customer data, such as their previous service inquiries, purchases, demographic data, preferences, etc. This will help you to improve customer retention.
Now, let’s take the example of your call center. Over the past few years, many companies decided to switch from analog phone systems to VoIP to power their customer support departments. Apart from the money-saving benefits of VoIP services, this type of telephony service also integrates with your CRM.
That can benefit your customer service team in multiple ways. First, call recordings, transcriptions, and customer data are directly logged into your CRM system. Second, your customer support agents do not need to search through a lengthy customer base to find the information while talking to a customer.
A VoIP tool will pull the caller’s data from your CRM system and send it to your agent. That way, they can answer the phone call more confidently and provide each customer with highly personalized support.
Listening to Customers
To retain customers and transform them into your brand advocates, you first need to understand their needs, expectations, and preferences. That is why you need to communicate with your target audiences and seek feedback. You can get help from social media tools to collect feedback from social networks.
To listen to your customers, you need to start asking the right questions. Fortunately, modern customers are more talkative and collaborative. They are eager to share their data with you to get more personalized brand experiences.
Many SaaS tools can help you by letting you create relevant surveys, polls, and quizzes. With the help of your CRM tool, you can take your customer satisfaction surveys to the next level.
For example, many CRM solutions let you narrow down your contacts into smaller segments, based on their demographic, psychographic, and behavioral data.
The HubSpot Active Lists tool automatically classifies leads based on the criteria you have previously set. That way, you can tailor survey questions to each customer group and learn more about their expectations, needs, and pain points.
Above all, all customer data you collect via customer feedback tools will be automatically sent to your CRM and stored there.
Over to You
In today’s hyperconnected world, customers’ demands have changed. With the rise of cloud apps for instant messaging, social networks, and chat tools, they now expect a whole new level of customer service.
Customers do not want to be treated like a number anymore. Instead, they want you to communicate with them regularly, listen to their needs, personalize their experiences across all digital marketing channels, and offer fast and relevant customer service.
Your CRM system will help you do all of this and even more. With it, you can finally centralize customer data in one location. Instead of using a plethora of tools, you can handle customer interactions via a single channel.
Above all, your sales, marketing, and customer service teams will have access to the same data. That will help them provide consistent and targeted customer experiences. That way, you will build and nurture strong relationships with customers, improve customer retention and turn them into your brand’s advocates.
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