It’s no secret that great customer experiences make or break a business in 2023. However, delivering those unique experiences can be more complex than most companies realise. As customer expectations continue to evolve, the only way to stay ahead of the curve is with a deeper understanding of your target audience and existing clients.
CRM technology could be the ideal tool for strengthening your approach to sensational customer service, providing users instant access to all the information they might need about their clients.
With so many CRM solutions now available on the market, how do you know which service you should invest in?
Here’s your guide to comparing CRM tech in 2023.
Step 1: Set Goals for your CRM Technology
The first step in choosing the right CRM technology is deciding what to accomplish with this new software. A good CRM solution can help you achieve several fantastic goals, from aligning your sales and marketing teams – to increasing customer satisfaction and retention.
Deciding your primary goals from day one will help you determine what features are most important for your CRM technology. For instance, some examples of goals might be:
- Increase lifetime value and retention: If you want to improve your chances of retaining customers and earning more purchases from them long-term, you’ll want a CRM that can help you manage your contacts effectively. Building profiles to personalise your sales and service strategies over time.
- Improve lead acquisition and conversion: If you are hoping your CRM will help you make more sales, you will need tools for lead management, scoring, and even sales pipeline tracking. You might also want to investigate tools like AI recommendations to help guide your salespeople on the best way to convert customers.
- Better sales and marketing alignment: Aligning your sales and marketing teams is an excellent way to improve your sales pipelines and position your business for more significant growth. A CRM capable of achieving this goal will help you to track and manage sales and marketing activity in the same place.
Step 2: Make a List of Must-Have Features
Today’s CRM solutions can come with different features and capabilities to suit diverse teams. Some highly advanced tools come with cutting-edge tools, like AI analytics, predictive insights, and the ability to build automated workflows. Other tools might be more budget-friendly but more straightforward, focusing on email tracking and reporting.
While the exact features you will need for your CRM will depend on you and the goals you have set for your new investment, some of the most common must-have features include:
- Contact management: Contact management tools include profiles for your contacts, activity and engagement reporting, ticket storage, and appointment scheduling tools.
- Lead management: Tools for managing your leads could include prospecting tools, lead scoring, and segmentation to create more personalised campaigns.
- Opportunity management: Opportunity management tools often include sales pipelines, where you can distribute tasks among staff members and track activity.
- Reporting and analytics: Dashboards and reports can provide insights into your target audience, employees, and performance levels.
- Communication tools: Some CRM solutions have built-in communication tools, like call recording, email templates, and live chat messaging.
- Workflows: Workflows are standard automation tools that help improve your team’s performance by pushing them to follow pre-set activity paths.
- Collaboration: Team collaboration tools like private chat and file-sharing systems can make it easier to keep hybrid teams aligned.
Step 3: Get Your Team’s Input
One of the best ways to ensure you invest in the right technology for your sales, service, and marketing teams is to get their input. Even the best CRM solution will not do much for your business if your employees do not want to use it. With that in mind, ask your employees what features they like most and what they need from their technology.
Remember, the software should be simple enough to attract your team members and allow them to stay productive with minimal training. However, you may need to offer guidance to fresh staff members who are just coming to terms with CRM tools for the first time.
When considering your team’s needs, it is also worth considering how easy it is to deploy your CRM solution to remote employees, roll out updates from a distance, and deliver support to hybrid and remote workers with issues.
Ask your team members:
- What features do you think will help you offer the best possible service?
- Have you used any CRM tools in the past which might be helpful here?
- How are you going to use your CRM (mobile apps might be necessary for some workers)
Step 4: Consider Your Existing CX Stack
CRM solutions are potent tools for customer experience but rarely exist in a vacuum. Usually, these tools work best when aligned with other CX tools, like contact centre as a service software, service desks, and even collaboration tools.
Unfortunately, not all CRM solutions are designed to integrate with every tech stack. It is worth making sure any CRM tools you are thinking of using can work with the services your team members are using. Robust daily integrations or the ability to build APIs into a flexible environment will help you design a single-pane-of-glass climate for productivity.
Better integrations between tools in your CX system should also mean your IT team does not have to work as hard to align information across multiple applications. This reduces the risk of siloed data and security issues for your team.
Step 5: Keep Your Eye on the Future
Notably, the customer experience landscape has been evolving at an incredible pace lately since the pandemic caused clients to re-assess what they want from their service experiences. Choosing a CRM tool capable of scaling and growing to suit changing needs is essential.
Start by ensuring your CRM solution offers omnichannel tracking, so you can manage conversations across all the channels where you might interact with customers. It is also an innovative idea to look for a vendor capable of offering in-depth analytical tools and AI systems to help you pinpoint trends in customer expectations and changes.
As the CX space becomes more complex, many businesses will find it helpful to invest in CRM systems with advanced automation tools designed to help improve teams’ efficiency wherever they are.
