How to Improve Your Customer Retention with CRM
CRM is a multi-billion-dollar industry estimated to reach a by 2027. CRM solutions are now considered an essential investment for delivering excellent customer experiences in the long term.
However, the global pandemic still challenges the market, wreaking havoc on quotas and organizations’ ability to meet customer expectations and grow their businesses effectively. We also don’t have a clear picture of what causes the poor customer experiences impacting customer churn, satisfaction, and retention.
With marketing under huge pressure to impact revenue and sales struggling to find new ways to approach customers, how do you ensure you’re on the right path?
The new 2022 CRM Impact Report from SugarCRM is all about that—offering a path forward. Read on to see some of our key findings from 1,600 sales and marketing leaders around the world.
Customer Churn: The Result of Poor CX
The average customer churn rate is 32% globally.
Customers are increasingly demanding towards the companies that serve them. Failing to achieve their expectations impacts your business’s growth and usually results in customer churn. Every customer interaction is a moment of truth, and their experience can turn sour at any moment for numerous reasons. In fact, 55% are unable to identify customers at the risk of churning.
One of the first steps you should take when focusing on customer retention is gathering key data points that indicate how customers engage with your brand and identify customer sentiment indicators, cross-referenced with peer review sites, social media, and Net Promoter Score (NPS). The key to understanding the potential for churn is to fill in the gaps between customer expectation and their experience.
Managing Customer Feedback
73% of respondents admitted they need to implement customer feedback to improve customer service and experience.
More organizations realized that co-creating with customers is the secret to success in 2022. Co-creating with customers means giving them a significant role in finding solutions and creating and capturing value.
Additionally, 70% of respondents agree they need to do more to improve customer trust in their brand. You can start asking more questions and, at the same time, listening to what your customers have to say. It helps shape customer sentiment with your company on a fundamental level and ensures better customer retention over the long haul. Besides, you can start using your customers’ feedback to continuously improve your products and services.
The Growing Role of AI
91% say they expect to use AI technology to augment existing processes to increase over the next 24 months
The future is not only about listening and analyzing. We need more strategic investment to understand customer metrics and feedback better. This means automating and triggering actions in many different ways that only AI capabilities can achieve.
It starts with removing blind spots: understanding what your customers want and when they want it. It continues with a focus on eliminating busy work—making it easier for employees to create the experiences customers expect. Finally, AI removes roadblocks and friction points to enable brands to consistently deliver on their promises.
The interest in using AI has increased tremendously during the pandemic. Clearly, it is time to reconsider what it would take to create the experiences your customers expect instead of the experiences you provide with your existing technology. Delivering a great customer experience is getting easier with AI, as, with more data available, AI can enable more personalized engagement, more accurate predictions, and better decision-making.
Closing Thoughts
The 2022 CRM Impact Report revealed that businesses want to be empowered by their technology platforms and not feel burdened by the administrative lift of traditional CRMs. It also flags the necessity for optimizing customer engagement and experience.
We believe technology should make life easier for its users and easier to collaborate. Through extensive innovation, Sugar has differentiated itself from traditional CRMs. We are committed to strengthening predictability across all processes by providing AI-powered insights that help professionals focus on opportunities with the highest probability of conversion and the closest fit to ideal targets.
If you want to learn more about building meaningful relationships with your customers, get more insights by downloading our 2022 CRM Impact Report.
