Aside from your staff, your customers are the key to your success and are your ultimate revenue stream. With tight markets and low margins, it has become more and more important to drive an excellent- we’re talking flawless- customer experience.
A flawless customer experience is imperative if you want to be a successful, competitive business. And to provide that fantastic customer experience, a well-oiled customer relationship management platform is vital. We know they can be intimidating, with their potentially high costs, the hours needed for implementation, and the black hole of maintaining all that information. But the right CRM system combined with an excellent internal strategy can add significant value to your business and give you the edge over your competitors by intelligently managing your customers’ information, helping your team reach customers in the best manner, and supporting your sales team through lead management. Here are a few signs that your company could benefit massively from a CRM software:
1.) You’re lost in Excel sheets.
When you first started your business, money was tight and software packages were expensive. So you opted for the good ole’ Office Suite. Nothing wrong with that! However, your business and organization have grown and you are now working off of numerous (sometimes infinite) excel sheets to organize your prospects, leads and customer information. A CRM solution would allow you to manage all of your prospects in one place and prioritize them accordingly. Your team would have the capability to easily keep track of who is communicating with which customer, and see the full history of each client conversation, making for more efficient operations and a seamless customer experience.
2.) You have too many leads to handle
Capturing leads is important, but the way in which you handle those leads is more important. If you’re juggling leads, you might be running the risk of leads slipping through. A CRM System organizes your leads and offers you the opportunity to automatically reach out to certain leads, set reminders to reach out to leads periodically, and even track how they are engaging with your emails and website pages, so you know exactly what they’re interested in when you finally have that phone conversation you’ve worked so hard to schedule.
3.) Reporting is a nightmare
Logging data manually to produce reports is time consuming and often results in bad data, duplicate data sets, or worse. With a CRM in place, your team will not need to waste any time in inputting data into spreadsheets and can instead focus on their role as a salesperson. Most CRM Systems offer insightful, easy-to-use dashboards which can produce customized reports in real-time.
4.) You’re looking to scale
Your company is growing, but are your current processes able to handle the influx of new business? A successful CRM implementation can help you to scale your IT operations at the right rate to ensure your business runs at its optimum capacity. Most CRM systems have the capacity to replace other solutions, offering easy integration apps and simple data migrations. When implemented correctly, a CRM will make any business growth completely seamless.
5.) Your customer experience is lacking
As we mentioned above, it’s of utmost importance that you create an engaging customer experience so that your customers can interact with your company in the best way, make the sales and retain long-term-value customers. With a rather shoddy customer experience, it’s likely that potential customers’ will skip your offerings and go for a competitor who offers a more user-friendly experience, or your valuable existing customers move on.
All in all, a CRM will decrease operational expenses, significantly improve efficiency, and make your staff happier. We promise.
