Learn how a CRM will help you automate processes, improve customer experience, increase revenue, and more.
Managing customer relationships is essential for building a loyal customer base and achieving long-term success. The trick is to meet customers where they are on a large scale. But how do you keep track of every customer interaction and ensure that every opportunity for follow-up and repeat business is utilized? That’s where a customer relationship management (CRM) tool comes in.
In simple terms, a CRM is a software application that helps businesses manage customer interactions and data. From tracking customer purchases and preferences to organizing email campaigns and scheduling follow-up calls, a CRM tool streamlines the entire customer relationship process. You can keep track of the details of each customer, get an overview of the sales funnel, and effectively manage the workload of customer care.
For small and local businesses, a CRM can make all the difference. With limited resources and manpower, it can be challenging to provide the kind of personalized service that larger companies offer. But with the right CRM, you can level the playing field and give your customers the same level of attention and care that they would receive from a big business.
In this article, we’ll dive deeper into the specific benefits of CRMs for small and local businesses in delivering exceptional customer service and hitting record-breaking revenue.
15 Key CRM Benefits
From improving customer satisfaction and retention to boosting sales performance and profitability, there are many reasons why using a CRM in business is beneficial to building long-lasting customer relationships. Let’s get into the specifics.
1. Helps Businesses Understand Customers’ Needs and Preferences
Do you ever wish you had a crystal ball telling you everything you need to know about your customers’ needs and preferences? Look no further—a CRM is the magic solution you’ve been dreaming about. This CRM software tracks every interaction your business has with a customer, from initial contact to purchase history and beyond.
By collecting and analyzing this data, you can gain valuable insights into your customers’ interests. For example, you can identify which products or services are most popular and which ones need improvement or retirement. You can also learn about patterns and trends in customer behavior, such as common purchasing habits or the most popular time of day for website visits. Why does this matter? It determines how you communicate with your customers to get the best possible outcome for both of us. When you send marketing messages, what you include in the message, and the call to action that will lead them to the next step on the customer journey.
2. Provides a 360-degree View of Customer Interactions and History
Your customers keep you in business—knowing them deeply and personally isn’t optional; it’s a must. One of the most significant benefits of a CRM system is that it provides you with a complete view of every customer interaction—from initial contact to after-sale service—and their history with your business.
This kind of information helps you maintain a holistic overview of customer data, such as preferences, demographics, purchase history, interests, and leads. With a 360-degree view of customer data, you can personalize your customer interactions, prevent misunderstandings, and improve overall customer satisfaction. It gives you the information you need to understand who your target audience is, how to reach them, and how to keep the relationship going. A CRM is constantly updated with new data to allow you to deepen your understanding of them.
3. Improves Customer Communication and Engagement
When looking at the benefits of customer relationship management systems, you can’t forget about how they facilitate communication with customers, which is crucial to building trust and loyalty. CRM solutions provide a centralized platform that enables businesses to interact with their customers through different channels, such as email, phone, social media, or text, integrating all communication in a single place.
By centralizing all customer communication, you can better ensure that your business follows up with customers, stakeholders, and leads, increasing the likelihood of conversions and improving customer engagement all around. You can’t expect customers to interact with you if you aren’t regularly reaching out to them.
4. Enables Personalized Marketing and Sales Campaigns
Nobody likes to be sold to—that’s why personalized marketing is so effective. It allows you to reach customers in a way that feels less like a sales pitch and more like a solution they sought out themselves. That feels better to everything.
A CRM allows you to personalize your marketing automation and sales cycle by utilizing information from different customer interactions, such as interests, purchase history, and demographic data. Personalized content is more relevant (meaning happy customers) and leads to increased conversions (which makes for a happy business). A CRM takes the guesswork out of marketing and selling by providing next-step insights.
5. Streamlines Sales Processes and Increases Efficiency
Sales processes can be tedious and time-consuming, especially if you don’t have a holistic view of your customer’s data. CRM platforms enable your sales team to automate key sales processes, reduce administrative tasks, and improve sales efficiency so they can get on with having genuine conversations with customers.
And the cherry on top? The software can track a customer’s journey throughout the sales pipeline and provide metrics to help businesses identify and address bottlenecks, ultimately resulting in higher conversions and a big boost to your bottom line. Know what to do and what to improve.
6. Improves Customer Service and Support
Quit wasting time searching through messy spreadsheets and switching between 20+ tabs. A CRM system allows you to store and access all of the customer’s relevant information, from contact information to buying history, in one place—music to your ears, right? This enables you to respond to customer queries, concerns, and issues with greater speed and efficiency, resulting in improved customer satisfaction. With a few clicks, you know the history of the person you are communicating with to better tackle their query and build rapport.
Why does this matter? Remember, great customer service is what gets people hooked and keeps them coming back for more. 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. Are you going to pass up on that money-making opportunity?
7. Helps Businesses Identify Cross-Selling and Upselling Opportunities
Another major advantage of CRM software is that it offers insights into your customers’ buying patterns and preferences, allowing a salesperson in communication with a customer to identify cross-selling and upselling opportunities. It’s much easier to sell to existing customers compared to brand new customers to take advantage of that. The insights from CRM software help sales reps recommend additional products and services that complement their current purchase, resulting in increased sales and revenue.
Pro Tip: SMS marketing is one of the easiest ways to upsell to existing customers because it has crazy open and response rates. Check out this guide to learn more.
8. Provides Real-Time Data and Analytics
Stop making decisions that aren’t backed by data—it’s a waste of time and resources. A CRM collects and analyzes customer data in real time, allowing you to make informed decisions that are backed by data, rather than just guesswork. With the right CRM, you can track KPIs, understand customer trends, and identify areas for improvement across your sales process and marketing campaigns. If you need to know what is going on in your business at any given moment, check out your CRM dashboard.
9. Automates Various Business Processes
Running a business is hard work—do you ever wish you could automate some of those repetitive tasks? Good news: A CRM can help you out. CRMs can automate your sales process by streamlining lead generation, nurturing, and conversion. They can help you automate the review collection process and boost your online presence, automate your customer support processes free up more of your team’s valuable time, and so much more.
We get it: You need to move fast. The competition is fierce. Resources are limited. You need the capacity to meet increasing customer demand without sacrificing customer experience. Automation is the key to coming out on top.
10. Helps Businesses Track and Manage Customer Feedback
50% of consumers will switch to a competitor after one bad experience—are you willing to take that risk? We’re guessing you’re not, which means you need to be on top of customer feedback so you can take action to win back a customer before it’s too late.
With a CRM in your toolkit, you can easily collect and organize feedback from your customers in one place, making it easy to track issues as they arise and take steps to address them as quickly as possible. This can help to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, as customers are more likely to stick with a business that addresses their concerns in a timely and professional manner. Furthermore, a CRM can help you identify patterns in customer feedback, allowing you to address underlying issues that may be causing dissatisfaction.
11. Increases Customer Retention and Loyalty
When it comes to customer retention and loyalty, a CRM can be a game-changer for your business. By providing a personalized and consistent experience across all channels, a CRM can help you build relationships with your customers and keep them coming back time and time again. By taking advantage of features like automated text campaigns and loyalty programs, you can create a sense of community and connection with your customers, ultimately leading to increased customer loyalty and repeat business.
Moreover, a CRM allows you to identify customers who are at risk of leaving and take proactive measures to keep them engaged. Give customers what they need from you wherever they are in the customer journey to maintain the relationship. By tracking customer behavior and engagement across multiple channels, you can provide relevant and timely content and offers that keep customers hooked.
12. Enables Remote Access to Customer Data and Interactions
A CRM can be a lifeline for businesses that operate remotely or have teams in multiple locations. By enabling remote access to customer data and interactions, a CRM allows team members to work collaboratively no matter where they are.
Additionally, a CRM can facilitate communication with customers across multiple channels, allowing businesses to stay connected with their customers by effectively managing multiple communication channels to fulfill different preferences. Whether it’s via text, social media, or a phone call, a CRM makes it easy to stay on top of customer interactions and ensures that every customer receives exceptional service.
13. Provides Unified, Customized Reporting of Customer Data
Continued growth requires a strong and well-informed strategy. As well as using customer data to support individual customers to make the most of your products and services, you can use it to gain a wider view of your success and forecast what is to come. The analytics CRM platforms provide are very insightful for getting a handle on what to expect, where you have exceeded expectations, and where you haven’t been meeting expectations.
You can get headline metrics such as your average monthly revenue or year-on-year growth to benchmark your progress. You can also look at where your success is (or isn’t) coming from. For you, what is a good number of new customers to gain each month? What about repeat sales? The different departments and service teams in your business can also benefit from unified and customized reporting. The insights your marketing team is looking for will probably be different from that of your sales reps. Dive into the segments of customers within your CRM to make informed decisions about how to direct your organization.
14. Serves as a Central Database of Customer Information
With data analysis being a determining factor of industry-leading businesses, what you do with your data matters. Whether a salesperson is researching a customer before making a follow-up call or the head of marketing has requested a report on the effectiveness of email campaigns in winning repeat business, customer information should be available and easy to sort through. A good CRM software provides this functionality.
It’s not just about keeping the data of current customers but utilizing the data of all leads who have interacted with the business over time, whether they purchased from the business once, never, or 10 times 3 years ago. The larger your dataset, the more accurately you can plot trends. Trends show you what’s working, what isn’t, and the impact of changes so you can optimize processes and effectively respond to customer demands.
15. Protects Customer Data
We can’t talk about CRM advantages without talking about data protection. Data protection is a priority, in some places a requirement, of businesses big and small. As you collect data about your customers to learn more about them so you can better serve them, you need to make sure that data is safe. Keeping it in a random spreadsheet isn’t the best approach.
Many CRM platforms have built-in data protection to comply with data privacy laws such as GDPR. This includes collecting customer consent for their data to be stored, notifying customers about your privacy policy, and including opt-out functions as is required with email marketing. Cloud-based CRMs have some of the best encryption and data protection policies so it’s a key CRM feature to look out for.
There are plenty of benefits of CRM software which is why it has been a staple of growing and leading businesses for so long. Now all you have to do is choose the best CRM for your business and get started.
Podium: A CRM Built for Small Businesses
If you are going to leverage the potential of CRMs for business growth, you need a CRM that was built for small businesses. That’s where Podium comes in.
Podium allows for a single view of every customer interaction and conversation history from every channel, making it easy to deliver the kind of personalized customer experience that drives loyalty and boosts sales. Furthermore, with Podium, you can search for, organize, and manage conversations with customers, initiate payments, take phone calls, text your customers, and more—all from one convenient platform. We offer over 150 CRM integrations on our platform, giving you the power to build a workflow that works for you.
