10 Things You Can Do to Ensure Your CX Success
With 87% of leaders tagging customer experience (CX) as the top growth engine for their business, but only a third of them feeling prepared to address it, it seems there is a lot of room for improvement. Customers have power, and companies have started to see the value of offering them a great experience.
The new strategic approach, including for B2B, is to improve direct customer interactions. And with the right CRM platform for marketing, sales, and service, ensuring your CX success is more than just a pipe dream. With that in mind, we’ve compiled a list of 10 ideas you can implement within your CRM software to achieve CX success:
1. Form a CRM Committee
The CRM platform you choose to drive your CX can automate customer-facing processes, track their interactions, and provide you with a comprehensive record of customer information and status. It has a profound effect on customers’ perceptions of their experiences with your business. Since employee experience (EX) is a key driver of customer experience, the way your company engages its employees influences the success of CX initiatives.
Make it easy for your marketing, sales, and service users to make suggestions on improving the system. After you solve their requests, make sure you report your progress back to your users regularly. As a result, they will notice your interest and continue to engage and utilize the system.
2. Simplify CRM Displays and Processes
CRM platforms can be very complex, and not all users need to see or use all those capabilities. Remove any elements that are not necessary for daily business needs. Pay close attention to your dashboards, list, and detail views to only include features that serve a clear purpose for a particular user role.
Organize your CRM information screens to minimize how many times users must open additional windows or tabs to accomplish a task. If users need to do certain tasks many times a day, make sure you run through those processes many times yourself to spot possible sources of delay and irritation.
3. Create a Data-Driven Environment
It is easier to manage processes that can be represented by numeric metrics. Modern CRMs enhance your customer data to discover actionable insights. Take the time to create reports and dashboards to enable your users to quickly look at the information they need. Make sure the information you show is easy to understand for them. If you are successful, your users will come to rely on these dashboards to know where your CX pain points lie.
4. Bring AI to the Table
Understanding your customers’ data in your CRM isn’t enough anymore. You may also need to understand “when.” Modern CRMs leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to provide accurate predictions about your leads’ likeliness to engage and convert.
An AI-powered CRM can also detect your customers’ outlook and attitude towards you, understand your service agents’ demeanor with your customers, and help detect potential pain points in your customer interactions.
5. Implement a Customer Information Standard to Know Your Customers
When interacting with clients and prospects, having the correct information at your fingertips is crucial. This means defining your customer profiles starting with more general information like name, email, company, industry, and going beyond that, their purchase expectations, and the issues they’re facing.
Profile and document which products and services your customers use, and ideally, which of your offerings the customer is using a competitor for. Having this information readily accessible will help you deepen your customer relationships, expand your product offerings and facilitate organizational cross-selling.
6. Integrate Your Existing Software with Your CRM
The tools you use within your organization must be aligned to ensure your CX success. Doing so lets you get a complete customer view, historical interactions, and concerns and tailor information to offer them personalized experiences.
Look at the tools your teams regularly use to reach their CX goals. Modern CRMs include out-of-the-box integrations with marketing automation, email, eSignatures, team chat software, and more to help you keep your customers happy.
7. Connect to Financials
Knowing some financial relationship information is critical when setting your priorities and customer relationship objectives. Use CRM to determine which customers have outstanding bills, have not ordered in some time, or have decreased their usual order size. Having order and invoice details also helps your users address customer questions quickly.
8. Customer Tracking Process
Get clear about what the gap between what customers expect and what your company provides is.
Your customer tracking process needs to be well defined and managed to avoid creating silos that damage your customer experience. Instead, provide transparency to get a complete customer picture.
9. Train Your Users on Mobile App Usage
The world has gone mobile, has your software gotten the memo? A mobile-ready CRM can help your users access their data when they’re on the move or when computer access is inconvenient. Having your customer data on mobile is just half the battle, though—a fully-fledged CRM app should also include all the features your users rely on to make their lives easier.
Take the time to train your users to install and use your CRM’s mobile app and get work done while on the go.
10. Automate Your Quotation or Proposal Process
Do not deceive your customers’ expectations. Once your prospect product or service presentation is over, the clock starts ticking on delivering the promised proposal or quote. If you are unable to deliver a timely proposal or quote, your credibility wanes quickly. Leverage an eSignature platform to speed up the delivery and execution of documents between you and your customers.
Closing Thoughts
The number of brands improving their CX in 2020 was up 13% from 2019, and continuously grew in 2021. While we continue to see optimism for growth, many efforts are still needed to refine the customer experience. That is why 76% of executives consider improving CX is a critical priority.
The market will change, as well as your customers and even your employees—just as your organization grows, customer experience must also continually evolve. Listen more closely to your customers.
Learn how to keep up with this ever-evolving market using software that helps companies deliver a high-definition customer experience (HD-CX). Reach out to us for more insight on using CRM to deliver stellar CX.
