In today’s world, customers expect personalised service and resolutions in minutes - which presents a consistent challenge for client service teams. In this blog, we unpack how having a strong Customer Relationship Management tool is key to centralising both your customer acquisition and retention efforts so you can deliver the best, most personalised, customer service possible with minimum effort.
Everyone has heard the phrase “the customer is king”, and in today’s technology-savvy world, this couldn’t be more true as companies are held accountable through social media channels, review sites and most powerful of all, word-of-mouth marketing. Your customers have the power to make or break your business; An unhappy customer review could turn away business for months and a happy customer has the potential to become a true brand ambassador (the cheapest form of marketing around!).
Let’s think of a typical scenario: a customer is dissatisfied with a certain service they are receiving from your business. Your client service team steps in and offers a value-add on top of what they already budgeted for. This could be in the form of extra hours on a project, an extra design, or if all else fails, just a friendly phone call to remind them that everything is on track. In this case, the customer is quickly turned from a frustrated customer into a happy one. A little time and effort really go a long way, and this is how customers are retained in the long run.
However, with so many growing demands on a day-to-day basis, we understand it can be increasingly difficult to please all your clients, especially those with last-minute requests. People want to do business with companies that deliver on their promises, and that deliver them effectively and efficiently.
So, how do businesses scale up on their client service processes to ensure smooth sailing?
Enhancing Customer Services:
A CRM is a powerful database that stores all the relevant information about your customers, along with their records of transactions and conversations, in order to assist the marketing, sales and service teams to deliver them the best experience possible.
A lot of businesses today still make use of the old ways of storing their customer’s information; such as spreadsheets, files, or old-school data capturing systems. These methods may make some companies feel comfortable in the short term, but as you scale and grow, these methods become unmanageable. These old ways of storing customer data are also not useful when it comes to customer insights and behaviour. After all, the customer should always be at the heart of all business operations.
At Huble Digital, we use Hubspot - a powerful CRM platform that has supported and grown with us since we started as a small 30-person company in 2012, to a now 90+ person international business.
HubSpot’s all-in-one platform is built with CRM at its core, so you can achieve a single customer view across your entire business. With a single customer view, your team gains a comprehensive record of your customer and prospect activities stored in one central location. With the help of Hubspot, you can view all of the marketing and sales activity that is related to that contact’s activity with your business
There are many ways in which a powerful CRM platform can help increase your client service efforts, but for now, we’ll touch on the top 5:
1. Sending automated emails
Consistency is the key to winning happy customers. A strong CRM should, amongst its many other capabilities, provide strong automation. Manually sending emails may be effective (at times) but it is time-consuming and leaves much room for human error. Sending automated emails through sequences or using them in workflows enables customers to remain top of mind, knowing that they are still being considered through streamlined communication.
With automated tools like sequences, you can send your customers a series of targeted and well-timed emails to nurture them over time. Once the contacts engage with your emails, they will then automatically unenroll from the sequence, allowing you to focus on the next series of contacts to communicate with. Automated email responses provide links to request forms, knowledge base articles, help desks and training, and other relevant documents such as surveys for customer feedback, and these touchpoints can be seen within the CRM.
2. Personalised communication
Interacting with customers doesn’t have to be boring. Personalising your communication is a value that creates a bond between you and your customers, and in order to increase engagement, content needs to speak to each and every contact on an individual basis.
By pulling key information from the CRM (contact, company, location or subscription type), marketers can add personalisation tokens in their messaging to ensure that the content remains relevant to the audience they are trying to target. With a powerful CRM, content can be personalised on emails, landing pages or web pages.
3. Live chat functionality
Live chats provide instant and automated customer service. Live chats or chatbots can launch on company web pages and provide fast customer support and service. A sequence of well-timed messages enables the customer to get feedback on their requests instantaneously. This is an easy way to handle requests in a matter of minutes. Chatbots are also a great way of capturing and storing contacts information in your CRM.
4. Pulling reports
Reports are a key indicator of what is going on behind the scenes. They allow you to identify certain patterns and therefore provide the client services teams with data and analytics as to what is working and what needs to be accelerated.
A well-tuned CRM should enable companies to report on a wide array of business activities such as:
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Contacts and lead generation
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Sales and revenue attribution
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Deals created from each member of the sales team
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Interactions from first and last touchpoints
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Assets and how well your content is performing
5. Ticketing
One way that customer service can be improved upon, is the use of an internal ticketing system. This allows the internal teams to prioritise certain customer queries or support issues, and managers can then assign different tasks to different team members. This can also be made easier with automation; instead of manual allocation.
Your CRM should allow you to assign these tickets automatically to keep the status of the tickets up to date. Utilising the CRM lets the ticket owner know what the next action to take is, depending on when the ticket was first created or when the ticket needs to be closed. This in turn enhances the rate at which customers issues are resolved.
Delighting customers with excellent customer service
A well-tuned CRM can help businesses, both small, medium and large, to better understand the needs and concerns of their customers. This in turn enables businesses to be more precise and deliberate in nurturing customer relationships and personalising those experiences in order to increase loyalty and maximise brand reputation.
At Huble Digital, we ensure that everything we do for our clients has their customers in mind. The customer experience is at the core of everything we do because, at the end of the day, the customer is king! Check out our eBook, CRM is a mindset: Making integrated CRM Decisions, to find out how shifting your mindset around the concept of CRM can transform your business in today’s world.
