The Benefits of an Intelligent Customer Experience Platform
SugarCRM offers various tools to help automate sales, marketing, and customer service processes, leaving managers free to focus on strategic initiatives to make their companies more profitable.
What makes Sugar different from other tools used to manage customer relationships is its foundation, the intelligent customer experience (CX) platform. The platform uses a custom data model that makes it easier than ever to analyze raw data and determine the best way to allocate resources, allowing businesses to generate more revenue and increase overall customer satisfaction.
Keep reading to learn more about how the intelligent customer experience platform can transform your business.
Overcoming Data Overload
Before exploring the intelligent customer experience platform in more detail, it’s essential to understand some of the most common challenges businesses face. One of the most significant challenges is data overload.
With so many businesses capturing information about their customers, it’s no surprise that trillions of megabytes of new data are produced every day. Due to data overload, many businesses collect data without taking the time to analyze it and understand what it means. Unused data takes up valuable digital storage space and represents wasted labor hours that could have been spent on more important activities. In fact, many sales professionals spend a large portion of their time not selling but rather on admin tasks like data entry.
Businesses that take the time to analyze customer data have an important advantage over their competitors. They’re able to gain insight into customer expectations and make better decisions as a result.
SugarCRM’s intelligent customer experience platform is designed from the ground up to help businesses develop robust customer intelligence programs, the first step to understanding customer behavior and identifying ways to increase customer satisfaction.
Customer Intelligence
The term “customer intelligence” refers to the process of collecting customer data, analyzing it and using it to gain new insights that can be used to guide managers through the decision-making process.
CRM software can help firms get a handle on their business intelligence efforts, but it’s important to remember that not all software packages are created equal. Most CRM software is designed to help companies merge multiple databases or synchronize data across multiple systems. The problem with this approach is that it’s time-consuming and makes it difficult to ensure customer accounts are always synced.
Why is this a problem? Because employees may be relying on outdated data when they make sales calls or prepare for meetings. If employees don’t have current data, they may give the customer inaccurate information regarding pricing, product features or delivery times, leaving customers frustrated and wondering if they should continue to do business with your company.
A better approach to customer intelligence relies on a four-step process:
- Collect data from as many sources as possible, including customer surveys, emails, text messages and comment cards
- Consolidate the data into a single data model
- Augment the data from internal sources, including posts and profiles published on social networks
- Use artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze the data, uncover key trends and guide employees
Implementing this four-step process yields a holistic view of every customer account, ensuring that sales, marketing, and customer service understand exactly what to do next.
SugarCRM at Work
How can the Sugar intelligent customer experience platform improve efficiency and help employees convert more of their leads into paying customers? These are just a few of the ways the CX platform helps companies make better use of their data.
Converting leads into sales: The CX platform uses artificial intelligence to make predictions regarding buyer behavior. If the platform notices that a prospect is eager to buy, that insight will be delivered to the sales representative during the first sales call. Using these insights can help sales representatives close more sales and generate more revenue for your business.
Discovering which channels are most effective: These days, multi-channel marketing is a must for business success. One of the challenges of multi-channel marketing, however, is determining which channels are successful and which ones are a waste of resources. The CX platform offers insight into which campaigns contributed to each purchase and how much revenue has been generated with each marketing channel.
Making intelligent predictions regarding upcoming trends: It doesn’t matter how much data you collect if you don’t use it wisely. One way to turn your CRM database into a valuable business resource is to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to predict upcoming trends.
Finally, only with Sugar can companies unlock high-definition customer experience or HD-CX, a high-fidelity view of the customer powered by data within CRM and other critical business technologies to create a rich picture of the customer. This view benefits everyone within the organization to understand what customers need attention and where organizations can benefit and seek additional opportunities.
- Marketing can easily identify new target segments based on customer account histories.
- Sales professionals to engage in consultative selling and anticipate customers’ needs. Users receive “next best action” guidance, helping them save time and focus on the sales tactics that are likely to be the most effective.
- Customer service gains visibility into customers and churn predictions, ensuring that service representatives know which customers need attention right away.
Automating Marketing, Sales and Customer Service
Many organizations consider their marketing, sales, and customer service teams to have completely different functions. Smart managers know that marketing, sales, and customer service need to work together to satisfy customers’ needs, generate referrals, and ensure that first-time buyers become loyal customers.
Combining marketing, sales, and service functions is also key to training a business intelligence system to make accurate predictions. The more people use the CX platform, the more data the platform has to analyze, ensuring that the insights it generates are as targeted as possible.
Customer Intelligence with SugarCRM
If you’re analyzing data manually and struggling to make predictions that can help your marketing, sales and service employees figure out what they should do next, SugarCRM can help. Visit our products page to learn more about the solutions we offer to help companies ramp up their marketing, sales and customer service efforts.
