Customer experience has always been the cornerstone for businesses. Marketing, sales, service, and support teams tune their activities and interactions to improve CX and better nurture customers.
However, customer experience has taken on a more pivotal role over the last few years. It has become the primary focus for companies (especially with MarTech services). While campaigns that increase brand visibility and draw traffic (new prospects) to the brand and its products are important, customer experience finally seals the deal and generates revenue. CX also plays a vital role in retaining customers and enforcing brand loyalty, and retaining customers is always more valuable (and cheaper) than acquiring new ones. In fact, a report by Forbes stated that loyal customers are five times more likely to repurchase a product/service and four times more likely to refer a friend to the company.
Delivering quality customer experience often boils down to response time and personalization - how quickly your sales, service, or support team responds to a customer (a prospect or paid customer) query and how relevant and personal their response is to the customer.
The most common errors in CX also happen to be with response time and personalization. Teams are sometimes overwhelmed with leads and customer queries, resulting in delayed responses or missed interactions. They do not have enough data to personalize their interactions with the customer, resulting in missed sales.
Fine-tuning CX is going to be the number one priority as businesses move into 2022. A report by Qualtrics showed that a moderate increase in customer experience brings about an average revenue increase of $823 million over three years for a company with $1 billion in annual revenue. A moderate increase in CX has the power to nearly double revenue in three years.
CRM for Improved Customer Experience
A CRM, or Customer Relationship Management system, is a solution that digitizes the process of customer data collection (from multiple sources) and management. It becomes a central location for all teams - marketing, sales, service, and support, to get customer data, information, and activities.
A CRM streamlines all customer-related activities and improves the efficiency of response time and the quality of personalization, both important factors in CX. It allows teams to automate tasks like sending notifications and emails so members can use their time to nurture customers.
A CRM can segment customers based on collected information so teams can approach them with more information and create personalized conversations. It also maintains customer data in real-time - where customers stand in the pipeline, what conversations they have had, their level of interest, etc. All of this data helps teams make better decisions and serve customers better, improving CX.
Integrating Your CRM and Website
The importance of implementing a CRM for your business is evident, and you probably already have a CRM solution in place (we highly recommend you reach out to a CRM agency and get one if you don't). Where most businesses seem to lag is in the integration of their website and their CRM solution. They continue to follow the inefficient process of either exporting data from their website and importing it into the CRM or manually feeding data from the website to the CRM.
This creates a disparate system between your website, which is the primary source for collecting customer information, and your CRM, which is the central repository for customer information. These two systems can obviously work in tandem, optimize each other, and remain in disconnected silos.
You end up spending time and resources on manual data movement, and it also creates room for data loss, both of which affect your team's ability to serve customers efficiently. Integrating your website and your CRM will open up room for automation and introduce a host of benefits that we list in this article. If integrating the two is a challenge, we recommend reaching out to website development agencies so you can make the most of your CRM.
Benefits of Integrating Your Website and CRM
- 1.
Leverage automated information processing
A CRM can be configured to automatically accept requests (customer information submitted via forms, chatbots, email, etc.), label and segregate them based on the information collected (location, gender, priority, age, interest, etc.), and assign them to the right team or team member. The entire data collection process across multiple channels, processing, and assigning can be automated, removing the need for any manual intervention.
Search engines will be the largest contributors of traffic to your brand, making your website the largest driver of user information. By integrating your website and CRM, you remove the need for manual addition of this data to the CRM, manual labeling, segregation, assignment, etc., and you can rely on the CRM to process all data automatically. It creates a closed ecosystem where all your teams - marketing, sales, service, and support, focus on data presented within the CRM without worrying about any of the channels, including your website, because it is integrated with the CRM.
- 2.
Creates a more holistic view of your customers
Your website will be able to collect more information than any other channel. It's not just the information that is voluntarily given up through forms or a chatbot, but also indirect information like pages interacted with, cart abandonment (shows product interest), geo-location, etc., that will greatly help profile and segment the customer better.
When added to the CRM, this information will help both marketing and sales teams better serve customers. They will get a more holistic view of your customers and their interests and be able to personalize content to help customers find it more relevant and relatable, improving customer experience.
- 3.
Create a central repository for all data
Customers today expect businesses to be omnipresent. Your customers will reach out to you from various channels - your website, Facebook chat, Twitter, Instagram direct messages, etc. Providing omnichannel service does not just mean being available on all channels, but also having real-time sync between these channels so your teams can continue a conversation with the customer no matter which channels they have previously used.
A CRM makes this possible by collecting all user information and storing it in a central repository. If your website is not connected to your CRM, you are creating two separate data silos, and your teams will have to dedicate time and effort to both in order to serve customers. This is inefficient and not aligned to being omnipresent. Connecting your website and CRM creates a closed chain, and your CRM becomes the one central repository for all data. Your teams can then focus solely on the CRM and rely on the information it presents.
- 4.
Advanced reporting and consistent information
Integrating your website and CRM enables you to standardize data across the organization. All teams rely on one solution for customer information, and this one solution (the CRM) stays updated by collecting user interactions across all your channels.
This makes the CRM more reliable and the data consistent. Reports generated via the CRM will be more accurate and lead to better insights. Marketing teams will be able to create more targeted and personalized campaigns, sales teams will be able to nurture leads better, and the service and support teams will be able to keep existing customers happy.
- 5.
Organized team collaboration
Your website is a portal for different types of customer interactions - prospective customers (leads) looking for a product or service, existing customers looking to connect to the support team, users (new or existing) looking for more information about a product or service, etc.
Which team interacts with each user depends on what the user is looking for. The sales team communicates with leads, the support team handles issues and queries, etc.
When you connect your website and CRM, all customer interaction data gets collected into the CRM, and based on user behavior, they get automatically assigned to the right team. This saves you time and effort, which would otherwise be wasted on manual segregation and assignment. This user information is also visible to other teams who can use it to improve their respective activities. The marketing team, for example, can use information collected by the sales team to make their advertising content more relevant. The CRM unifies your teams, and your website gives them the information needed to be more efficient.
- 6.
Automation for less admin work
A CRM provides automation tools for repetitive processes like sending welcome emails, support notifications, sales invoices, cleaning duplicate entries, updating user information, etc.
It also analyzes customer responses and interactions to segregate customers - emails unopened/opened/interacted, invoices paid/unpaid, support ticket urgency, etc.
This allows teams across your organization to automate activities and reduce admin work so they can spend their time and effort on servicing customers while the CRM handles repetitive tasks.
By connecting your website and CRM, you are able to leverage the power of automation provided by your CRM to better serve customers interacting with your business through the website and improve the overall customer experience.
Integrate Your Website and CRM Today
The benefits you stand to gain by integrating your website and CRM will greatly improve efficiency across all teams in your organization - marketing, sales, support, and service. Processes will be streamlined, and teams will be better equipped to serve customers and improve customer experience, which will help your business increase sales and revenue. You can always reach out to website development agencies to help you correctly integrate your website and CRM.
If you're looking for a well-designed website that is cross-device compatible, optimized for SEO, and integrated with a CRM, you should talk to the experts at Amura Marketing Technologies. Contact us to start your digital journey on the right foot.
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