The Only Reason Why Small Businesses Fail to Grow Without CRM

According to a report published on non-CRM adopters, it has been seen that more than 50% of small enterprises fail in the very first year, and greater than 95% small startups fail within the first five years.

Here are some greater surprises for you:

• 40% of SMB are profitable
• 30% of SMB reaches break even
• 30% of SMB are constantly losing revenue
• 9 % of SMB gets the chance to survive beyond 10 years

Businesses, regardless of their size, are regularly challenged with finding unique means to capture new customers, improve their up-sell and cross-selling opportunities, increase sales and along with it keep their existing customers happy so that they return times and again.

Apart from this above-mentioned fact, small businesses also experience added challenges that inhibit their growth. These are varying causes around issues such as, management, leadership, cash flow, which sometimes can or even cannot be changed.

However, the primary reason that makes a small business fail is that the establishment does not care about their customer service. This is a surprise since providing good customer service is one thing that all businesses can always do something about, regardless of their size.

 The Cost of Bad Customer Service

In today’s competitive market, where social media is the channel for venting out our satisfaction, as well as our discontent, the cost of not providing optimal customer service is paramount.

Let us look into some of the facts we discovered in some of our few in-depth customer research surveys:

• 78% of customers have bailed out from making an intended purchase because of inferior service experiences.
• 12 positive experience is needed on an average, to make up for one negative experience
• News of bad customer experience reaches more than thrice as many ears as news of praises for good customer service experience
• For every complaining customer, there are 26 other who remains silent
• Only 4% of dissatisfied customers are heard by any typical business ( and we do not want to think what happens to the rest)

Easy To Use CRM System Is One of the Secrets to Making Customers Feel Special

More than 72% of buying experiences are related to how the consumers feel they are being treated. We guess you will be surprised to know that although more than 85% of companies say that they deliver “excellent customer service” but only 8% of their customers think that these businesses really deliver “excellent customer service”.

However, it is not too time-consuming or difficult to close this gap and make your customers feel special. It is all about centralizing your customer related data and making use of this information by understanding what is a CRM database in a smart way to improve the relationship and find growth.

In other words, every small company needs a CRM software for small business and make use of the best CRM tools to centralize your customer’s information.  Therefore, if your business is already not using a CRM system, we think it is a good time to consider getting it. With today’s Cloud CRM solutions, which are available as a SaaS (Software as a Service) platform, adopting a CRM for small business is completely affordable, while its benefits are priceless.

Here are 4 benefits that your small business can find by using an affordable CRM software:

1. Collect all your information in one central place

Many small businesses keep all their customer information scattered in various places. It can be in Excel spreadsheets, Rolodex or in their Emails. Although at the time the information was captured you can remember the customers but three months down the road becomes hard to remember where you stored the information and why even kept that note on a specific customer in the first place. Moreover, since the information is probably kept on your personal PC, others in your organization may not have an access to that data and communication trail and that will eventually create problems. Having an easy to use CRM software can help you to forgo all that pain.

Best customer management software like CRM provides you the ability to store several communications with your customer like calls, emails, meetings, in a central place and let everyone in your business retrieve the information instantly. Therefore using a customer service CRM software not only creates a better experience for your customers, but best CRM tools also save a lot of time and headaches.

2. Help to keep you more ‘in sync’ with your customers

We all like immediate gratifications. Therefore, there is nothing more annoying than having to repeat your issues to different departments for resolving your problems. A customer relationship management software actually helps you to become more ‘in sync’ with your consumers, because Converged CRM systems such as ConvergeHub combines all sales, marketing, customer support and billing data in one database.

CRM system help improves the quality of customer communication and your support staffs level of responsiveness by connecting different departments in your organization by using this software.

3. Help improve trustworthiness of your brand

We all know that people get busy and consequentially forget things, especially sales and customer support reps in the company. However, when the market is as competitive as it is today, your word should be your bond. Commitment and trust create a solid foundation for customer relationships. CRM software for small business is a valuable tool that helps you to forge a trustworthy relationship with your customers. Using CRM tools you can create follow-up activities on your customers and can monitor the stages that your open sales are at, and so can be easily warned if you are about to lose any customer due to lack of attention on your side. Therefore, once you use an easy to use CRM, you do not have to use age-old yellow stickers and your customers will never feel that they are neglected.

4. Offer relevant products easily to your customers

Generic offers and messages often do not make your customers feel that they are special, which a targeted and personalized content does.

Sales and marketing CRM lets you slice and dice customer data, in thousand different ways, so that you can create and send messages and offers towards specific customers, showing that you care about their needs.

Conclusion

There are several reasons as to why a small business can either make or break within a few years or months. However, for this while some reasons are truly out of our control others like providing awesome customer relationship is something that can be easily controlled and improved by all small enterprises.

Concisely, the business success mantra is simple- Make your customer the center of everything that you perform and everything will fall into place.

Small business CRM certainly does not have to expensive. If you are on a tight budget download the free trial version of our ConvergeHub CRM software and let your business, bloom successfully.