Although CRM software development is undertaken by companies that are looking to build bespoke CRM solutions, it is still an area of software development that attracts much attention. Owing to SaaS CRM solutions also requiring customisation, vendors and software development teams that belong to businesses have much to keep themselves occupied in terms of building a final product that truly meets an organisation’s unique needs.
Likewise, CRM services in Sri Lanka are no exception, as technology outsourcing companies get busy delivering applications that can enhance CX for their clients both local and international. With businesses now concerned as they operate in a fiercely competitive marketplace, every application (be it customer-facing or on the back-end) needs to be oriented towards customer-focused business goals. Losing precious customers is the only alternative – something which nobody wants to risk, especially as the masses are bombarded with limitless options and brand abandonment can happen at the blink of an eye.
As a result, CRM solutions are indispensable towards maintaining excellent customer service, while also ensuring sales teams have all the resources they need in order to do their best work. However, today’s CRMs go above and beyond simply delivering customer information on a real-time basis; it can be one of the hubs for establishing a Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) platform within your entire organisation. By integrating a VoIP and video conferencing solution, your UCaas can serve as a powerhouse for all things CX, especially as CRM capabilities fuel how your teams interact with customers.
EFutures has been committed towards building bespoke technology products that are not only geared towards clients’ end objectives, but are also scalable enough to adapt to shifting requirements. Here, we discuss the biggest benefits of CRMs, and how your organisation can maximise the potential that these customer-centric enterprise applications can offer your business.
By and large, this is the greatest advantage of using a cloud-based CRM – and especially one that is powered with real-time alerting functionalities. By enabling your sales teams to identify customer intent as well as context through previous interactions, behaviour mapping and sentiment analysis, every conversation with a customer can be strategically positioned to offer optimum value, so that customers will be encouraged to eventually convert via a purchase.
Customer data from a CRM can also help your teams offer a more personalised experience to prospects, especially where outbound sales activities are concerned. Be it cold calling or to announce a special discount, interaction history and past purchases can be centralised over a single customer profile to determine niche customer segments for different products. This way, only the right prospects are approached, which leads to higher rates of conversion and even retention (in the case of existing customers).
Top CRMs today go beyond the sales and marketing department, as they benefit the entire organisation as a whole. By offering access to customer data, managers heading other departments can steer their duties to serve pressing customer needs, thereby encouraging every business unit to become customer-centric. This can improve the overall quality of service that a customer receives, while reducing wait times.
Whether it is through a companywide CRM console or via APIs within existing department-specific applications, staff that are in job roles which otherwise aren’t customer-facing are now able to understand how their deliverables are impacting areas such as customer satisfaction, brand loyalty and even revenue. As a result, every employee can keep adapting their niche duties to serve overall business KPIs – many of which may already be inclined towards customer service.
Workflow automation is a top benefit of modern CRM platforms. If your CRM features inbuilt AI and ML capabilities, big data from customer interactions and employee activities alike can be processed to identify patterns and predict outcomes. In turn, these insights can be used to offer intelligent recommendations, which can include (but aren’t limited to) chatbot responses, task management and dynamic product offers across omnichannel networks.
Even if your CRM isn’t AI-enabled, easy drag-and-drop interfaces can enable employees to build custom workflows. Through rules and triggers, tasks, payments and even messaging can be automated to ensure timely execution, while eliminating the chance of error. Automated ticket routing is a popular use case of workflow automation in CRM systems, so that tickets are assigned to the right agents depending on workloads, skill levels, time of day and even mood.
Top CRM solutions now come with marketing automation and campaign management functionalities which can enable your sales teams to launch campaigns with greater precision and speed. With combined marketing and campaign automation, forgo the need to toggle between multiple applications to configure, launch and monitor campaigns, as your CRM can now serve as the central source of access for everything pertaining to customers as well as the campaigns that target them.
As customer insights automatically group prospects into niche audience segments, customisable templates, canned snippets and drag-and-drop builders can be used to configure a bespoke yet dynamic campaign. Manage the entire lifecycle of the campaign by filtering, distributing and qualifying leads from campaigns, so your marketing efforts are managed on an end-to-end basis all from one central CRM system.
The best cloud CRMs ensure that your business can scale depending on seasonal demand and customer preferences. Through SaaS solutions and incremental pricing, hosted CRM solutions are a great fit for smaller organisations that are experiencing a growth phase, as they can quickly yet effectively scale to meet peaks in demand. However, larger organisations also stand to benefit as teams across the organisation expect customer insights and data on a real-time basis to fuel their own operations.
Together with sister capabilities such as lead management, profiling and even event management, a CRM system can offer all the features that today’s businesses need in order to stay in lockstep with what their customers like, dislike as well as offer what they’re looking for – before competitors do.
Upon regular use over a prolonged period of time, your CRM will be a treasure trove of valuable insights that can empower owners and managers alike to make profitable business decisions. While top CRM vendors offer inbuilt reporting capabilities, integrating a Business Intelligence (BI) solution can enable your business teams to dig deeper for revealing niche insights that may be specific towards your industry or a geographical region. Leading CRMs that offer AI-based capabilities can also offer predictive analytics, so that teams can realign their efforts based on forecasts and subsequent recommendations provided.
Existing data repositories that are integrated when implementing a new CRM aren’t just useful for data migration purposes; they are also highly valuable for identifying patterns in your existing data that you may not have noticed before. Be they past insights or forecasts, all this data shall enable your business teams to tailor products, campaigns as well as KPIs to suit better revenue growth, so your organisation is always focused towards remaining lucrative while driving immense value towards customers.
The benefits of a CRM may be many, but adopting the right solution shall go a long way in determining whether your business gets to reap those benefits or not. By understanding your business’s unique requirements, reaching out to multiple CRM vendors and shortlisting the right assortment of capabilities that are required to build a suitable CRM, your business will be able to meet ROI with minimal downtime, while customer satisfaction rates improve. However, thoroughly knowing what a CRM can do for you is imperative during the business assessment stage. As teams gather to share the challenges and bottlenecks they face, business owners and managers can only decide which CRM features they require by connecting the dots between the latest CRM capabilities and the problems that currently plague their many business teams.
By adopting the right CRM solution, your business will be equipped to do more than just basic customer profiling or push notifications; your teams will now have the resources to meet customer requirements with contextual insights that can help them tailor messages which will truly resonate with prospects. However, top cloud CRMs can also offer functionalities such as marketing automation and campaign management, so that sales and marketing teams need only depend on one flagship enterprise application to run omnichannel campaigns and handle customer requirements.
AI-enabled CRMs shall help to further enhance CX, as they deliver predictive analytics and offer intelligent recommendations on automating specific tasks, or identifying potential customers who may be interested in a specific product. By automating tasks that may otherwise be administrative or menial, team members are now free to focus on matters that demand more of their undivided attention. With cloud-based CRMs continuing to be a sought-after application in the world of enterprise software, businesses remain keen (and confident) about enhancing CX and establishing brand loyalty – so they can stay one step ahead of their competitors.