Customer relationship management (CRM) software is a key aspect of any business that helps it perform its basic functions. Your customers are what help your business continue to thrive, so it’s important you’re offering the best customer experience possible, and you can’t do that without good CRM software.
Choosing the right CRM software can greatly improve your company’s customer service offering, helping your employees become more efficient and more effective. However, there are many different features CRMs offer, and you’ll want to get the right package for your business.
Here are six features you should look out for in your CRM software.
Contact Management
Contact management is what you think of when you picture a traditional CRM system. It helps you organize information about your customers in an easy to digest way and allows the right people to access this information.
Good CRM software will allow employees to contact customers directly from the system and provide them with all the relevant information. It also creates an interaction history so that each department knows exactly what’s going on with each customer.
The more information that you have about your customer, the easier it is to give them the customer experience they crave. However, your employees need to be able to access this information quickly and efficiently to be able to make the best use of that information.
Lead Management
Turning leads into customers is vitally important, and you cannot do this unless you have an organized way of managing your leads. You have worked hard to create every lead, so don’t let them slip away by not following through with them.
A top CRM system can automatically send each new lead to the right salesperson and create reminders to help ensure that a person gets contacted. The CRM can also provide important information on how this prospect became a lead, giving the salesperson important insight on how best to proceed with the customer.
When people fill out lead forms, they expect you to get back to them, but if you’re getting thousands of leads every day, this isn’t always easy. You need good CRM software to help you keep on top of your leads and get the most out of them.
Opportunity Management
Just as it can be difficult to keep on top of your leads, it can be equally difficult to keep on top of your sales funnel. Customers need different support at different stages of their purchase, and when you’re dealing with lots of customers, it can be hard to make sure they’re getting the right care at the right time.
CRM software helps automize many of these processes and ensures your company is on top of its pipeline and giving amazing customer experience every step of the way.
Email Marketing
One of the primary ways businesses convert leads is through email marketing, and a good CRM system can help you do this more efficiently. Your business doesn’t want to be writing and sending emails to each individual lead; it wants to be able to automate this process but still offer personalized content.
The right CRM system will allow you to create automated email series that can convert your leads into customers. Conversions are built upon trust, and in many cases, it takes more than one interaction to build that trust with a customer.
Regular email updates allow you to continue to interact with the customer and build trust even when they have left your website.
Customer Service
A good business needs to be able to solve its customers’ problems in a timely and effective manner. To be able to do this, all departments must have quick access to the information they need.
If a customer service representative has to call sales to find out the specifications of a certain product in order to answer a customer’s question, this is highly inefficient. That service rep needs as much information at their fingertips as possible in order to give the customer the best possible service.
The same is true no matter what department the customer is communicating with; they need a seamless experience, or they might be put off from returning.
Insights/ Reporting
It’s important that your employees don’t just have access to information, but they also get actionable insights that can improve their performance. Data is just a bunch of numbers and letters if you don’t know how to interpret it, and good CRM software can help you do this.
With reporting and insights, employees can customize their own dashboard to show the reports and insights that are most relevant to their job, helping them improve their work and offer even more value to the customer.
Whereas manual reporting can take weeks to occur, CRM systems can give you actionable insights in real-time.
