Year: 2019

How to Create a Comprehensive Buyer Persona with Your MCA CRM Software

In any business be it in Merchant Cash Advance or any other creating buyer personas are one of the main keys to business growth. Buyer personas which you can easily create using Merchant Cash Advance Software help understand who your ideal buyers are for your cash advance business, what they require, and how you can best sell your services to your customers. In fact, an elaborate buyer persona aids businesses to zero in on the challenges, pain-points, and needs of your customers. Buyer personas also help you to understand how you should appeal to your prospective buyers and make them generate interest in your offerings.

In any business be it in Merchant Cash Advance or any other creating buyer personas are one of the main keys to business growth.
Buyer personas which you can easily create using MCA CRM Software help understand who your ideal buyers are for your cash advance business, what they require, and how you can best sell your services to your customers.

In fact, an elaborate buyer persona aids businesses to zero in on the challenges, pain-points, and needs of your customers.
Buyer personas also help you to understand how you should appeal to your prospective buyers and make them generate interest in your offerings.

Using a CRM can lead to sales conversation rate improvements of over 300%- Cloudswave Click To Tweet

Therefore, in this article let us find how we can effectively use buyer personas and evaluate how you can leverage them to increase your sales and revenue.
So, let us dig into this topic and start with the basics:

  • Their position in the company
  • Department which they represent
  • Their biggest challenges and pain-points
  • Their future goals and aspirations
  • Their gender, age, and personality types
  • How you should communicate with them
  • And finally, how your offerings can solve their challenges

What are the reasons for creating a buyer persona?

Mapping a detailed portrait of your most common and ideal type of buyers you can market to those prospective customers in a more personal and relevant way.
You can speak with your ideal buyers directly about their challenges and pain points and then present to them how your offering will help solve those issues.

You can use buyer personas in your MCA marketing efforts for:

  • Explaining to the prospective customers that they already have a problem and are not yet aware of
  • Reach out to your prospects in a manner that resonates and can engage them effectively
  • Kindle their interest in your offering
  • Provide knowledge about how your offerings will be able to solve their issues
  • Present real-life examples, how your offerings have helped their peers in MCA business
  • Convince the customers so that they use your offerings to solve their issues

Why buyer personas are so important?

Buyer personas are important since they allow you to deliver the right message to the right person, and not make the mistake of using assumptions about knowing your customer to drive outreach.

It also bars your sales and marketing teams from sending irrelevant messages to the wrong people, and therefore by delivering the right information to the right decision maker help to increase engagement and interest in your offerings, leading to more wins and growth in revenue.

To create a great buyer persona in any business, firstly you need to do a lot of research. Now, as mentioned before if you just run on assumptions you will mostly end up meeting leads that are inaccurate and do not capture the right details about the person involved in the buying process.

How to create buyer personas?

One of the most common ways for creating buyer personas is to send surveys using Merchant Cash Advance software to all in your present customer base to find out what they specifically need, where their challenges are, and how your MCA firm can solve those problems to make your prospective customers more successful.

After that, in the next step, you need to apply that knowledge to your buyer personas and use that learning to converse with your prospects in a more pertinent and engaging way.

You can also provide incentives to the participants of your survey for completing their task so that it can help you to find more data. Since the more data you have the better and accurate will be your buyer personas.

Nevertheless, what questions should you need to ask for creating your buyer persona survey?
The question may vary according to your unique business and its specific customer base. However here are a few general MCA related questions to get started, which are mostly used by our Merchant Cash Advance CRM users in the alternative funding business:

  • What is your gender, age, marital status, nationality, and other demographic info?
  • What is your sale per day in your business?
  • What is your role and job title in your organization?
  • How long you have been employed with your company?
  • Where is your retail outlet/company located?
  • What are the biggest challenges that you face while applying for a bank loan?
  • How many employees are there in your organization?
  • Which technology and tools you use every day?
  • Do you use CRM software for enhancing your customer relationship?
  • Have you applied for any bank loans/ if so when?
  • Why you prefer alternative funding over bank loans?

Well, these are just samples of the kind of questions that you could ask for a survey of your MCA customers when you want to create an ideal buyer persona for Merchant Cash Advance business by storing vital information of your present customers in you MCA CRM database.

However, always remember to keep your survey to 15 questions or less, since otherwise, your response rate will plummet down.

Moreover, do not ask for your participant’s names and other general personal information (as you already have them in your MCA CRM software) in the survey, as those data will be irrelevant to the task at hand.

Now, once you get all the information that you need, you can start looking for commonality in your participant’s responses and then start building your buyer personas based on the common traits that you will find in your customer base.

Remain cautious, when you send your survey to capture information for building your ideal buyer personas. Do not tell the customers your original purpose for sending the survey. Instead, tell your survey participants that you would like to understand better who your customers are so that you can serve them more efficiently, as per their requirements in the days to come.

Conclusion

Therefore, instead of shooting in the dark any more create buyer personas for your business as it is something that differentiates average companies from the exceptional ones.

Moreover, do not hesitate to create multiple buyer personas and save them in MCA CRM software platform. We as one of the most popular vendors of MCA CRM software have seen some companies that have 10 or more buyer personas in their system.

In a gist, armed with an accurate and solid buyer persona representative of your MCA firm will not only be able to reach out to your prospective customers and engage them more easily, but it will also aid in building trust with your prospect and therefore close deals more quickly, while maintaining a competitive edge in your MCA market.

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Tip On How To Engage Customers Like A Pro Using CLM CRM Software

Customer engagement, which is an incredibly necessary variable that foretells the success of your business, is often overlooked by several brands all across the globe. However what is customer engagement? To explain it simply, customer engagement as the words suggest is an act of engaging customers with your brand using personal outreach, social media, and a laundry list of many other techniques, using CLM CRM software.

Customer engagement, which is an incredibly necessary variable that foretells the success of your business, is often overlooked by several brands all across the globe.

However what is customer engagement?

To explain it simply, customer engagement as the words suggest is an act of engaging customers with your brand using personal outreach, social media, and a laundry list of many other techniques, using CLM CRM software.

CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) value awareness more than ROI and market share- Gartner Click To Tweet

It is needless to say that customers that are engaged to your brand will stick around longer, as they are more loyal and therefore provide your business with a reliable stream of revenue.

This is because customer engagement is a factor that directly impacts the satisfaction levels of your customers, and the benefits that were noted above stems from their satisfaction.

Customer engagement is, therefore, a part of the overall Customer Experience (CX), since the more better you can deliver CX using a CLM CRM software, it will lead to more satisfied customers.

Customer experience is so important a factor for business growth in the modern times since, in a Walker report, it has been forecasted that CX will outpace product price and quality by 2020 as the main differentiators for brands in the marketplace.

Hence, how can you increase customer engagement for your brand and reap the benefits that will help in your business growth?

Here are some of the best customer engagement best practices and tips that will empower and inspire you to take your customer engagement efforts to new heights.

Use The Right Software

First and foremost, in order to engage your customers effectively, your most essentially need an automation tool that will help you to streamline processes leading to less wastage of time on routine administrative works and help generate more focus on your customers.

One of the most popular tools that businesses use today for increasing their focus on the customers is easy to use CRM software solution, preferably a CLM CRM software, that not only helps you to store customer data but also aids in providing personalized experiences to your customers which increases engagements.

Actually, these days many organizations are opting for all-in-one CLM CRM software platforms like ConvergeHub because easy to use CRM solutions provides sales enablement, marketing automation, and customer support all in the same platform.

Moreover, with CRM software’s like ConvergeHub which is also one of the most popular QuickBooks CRM that offers QuickBooks CRM integration free, you can unlock the important customer data that is locked inside your accounting software QuickBooks and use it from the CRM to drive sales and customer engagement.

Ask For Frequent Customer Feedbacks

Ask your customers what you can do to improve your offerings that can better facilitate the benefits of using your products or services.

One of the most popular methods for doing this is to send a follow-up survey after the resolution of customer support calls.

You can also send an annual survey to all your customers, to uncover their pain-points that you may not be aware of, and then implement changes in your offerings or business processes based on their feedback and suggestions.

Now, when customers see that your organization is making the necessary improvements that your customers asked for, they will look forward to engaging more with your organization and become more loyal to your band.

Reply To Comments On Social Media

Today, social media is possibly the best place where you can engage your customers. As ‘Millennial(s)’ are overtaking the ‘Baby-Boomers’ as the largest consumer demography, we are going to view an increasing use of social media platforms.

Therefore, when someone is taking the effort and time to comment on your posts, it is necessary that you must respond as quickly as possible in an encouraging and polite manner.

Thank and compliment your customers, rather to say, stroke their egos and you will surely find that they will come back and get engaged with your brand since if you ignore them, they will be gone.

Using social media listening tools in CLM CRM software platforms to get alerted the very moment someone comments or mentions of your brand on the social media posts will help you to engage the right audience at the right time, and get a dialogue started.

Personalize All Your Customer Interactions

With so much of personal data stored in your CRM database , of your customers, you can easily personalize every interaction that you have with them.

Since doing this will not only make your customers feel that you know them, but it will also encourage your customers to get engaged with your organization.

Use your personalization efforts in marketing, sales and customer support workflows.

Always remember used knowledgeably and with discretion, you can use the personal information of your customers in the CLM CRM software , to speak to them like an old friend, and not like an organization that just needs their money.

Create A Client Advisory Board

If you are not aware of how to develop a CAB (Client Advisory Board), create a group of perhaps 15 to 20 representatives from your high-value customers.

Ask for their participation, by inviting your selected customers in meetings, whereby they can express their concerns about your offerings and also suggest product or service enhancements that they feel you need to make your offerings more effective, or easy to use.

It is also suggested that you can summarize these meetings with your Client Advisory Board and inform your customers what your company is planning to do with their advice.

This is because; sending periodic emails to your customers, summarizing the meeting with your CAB will show that you truly care about their opinions and needs.

Conclusion

Following these tips will not only raise your customer engagements to new levels but doing this will also very soon make your customer become your brand advocates, which will lead to increased revenue and sustainable business growth.

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How To Switch Your CRM Software Easily?

There are several organizations who are discouraged from changing their CRM provider because it is perceived that switching CRM will be too painful, hard, and too expensive. However, is this true? You will always find a stack of blogs and articles in Google search with the keyword “CRM Failure”. Has your CRM also failed to deliver the results that you wanted? For example, are you considering a move to switch your software from Salesforce to any other best Salesforce Alternative CRM software because your employees found the former one too complicated to handle and too expensive for your small business, but you are just too scared to start all over again?

There are several organizations who are discouraged from changing their CRM provider because it is perceived that switching CRM will be too painful, hard, and too expensive.
However, is this true?

You will always find a stack of blogs and articles in Google search with the keyword “CRM Failure”.

Has your CRM also failed to deliver the results that you wanted?

In 2008, only 12% of businesses used cloud-based CRM – This figure has now increased to 87%. Click To Tweet

For example, are you considering a move to switch your software from Salesforce to any other best Salesforce Alternative CRM software because your employees found the former one too complicated to handle and too expensive for your small business, but you are just too scared to start all over again?

Well, it is true that most organizations hesitate from moving to a new CRM since they perceive the process to be hard, painful, and a costly affair. However, then again not doing anything may also be an absolutely wrong answer, since sticking with anything that you have and something that is not delivering the right outcome, in reality, is a step backward.

Now, before switching your CRM, think in the first place, why your company invested in a CRM.
Was it because of the believer that at the outset your CRM platform would benefit your business and make a marked difference by driving in more sales, increase your businesses’ productivity, escalate customer loyalty and many other things that a CRM can do more than just sales.

We are asking this because if it is the fact that your current CRM is not delivering desirable results, it does not mean that your required needs have disappeared. Therefore, why live with a business solution that is not bringing your desired benefits to your business?

Here are some of the key advantages of switching over to an easy to use and productive CRM software in the long run:

Cost savings

Tweaking and modifying the existing CRM system is one way to try and improve the present situation in your organization.
However, if this process is going to be complex, cumbersome and expensive and demands on-going modifications and endless changes, then this might not be the most cost-effective solution for your business.

Now, while a total change of CMR will require a higher initial up-front cost, nevertheless switching the CRM will over the course of time be financially beneficial for the growth of your business.
This is because, having an easy to use CRM software solution that performs properly and effectively will lower the overall cost of your CRM implementation and adoption, which will consequentially increase your company’s revenue and profits.

Enhance user adoption

User-adoption is always another major consideration when you are thinking about remaining put with your current CRM software platform.

While there are several organizations that may be investing more money, efforts, and resources trying to fix the issues in the problematic areas while using their CRM software, but it has been often seen that once your users have considered the system difficult to use and of no-good, or do not feel comfortable the way their CRM operates and performs then it is unlikely that your employees will like to get engaged with it even after the modifications have been made on the existing CRM system.

As one of the best Salesforce Alternative CRM vendor for startups and small businesses in the CRM space, we have often seen that any user’s attitude is an extremely difficult challenge to fix while adopting a CRM.
Hence a clean break is most often the best route in such situations as the benefits of changing the unproductive CRM software outweighs the challenges and costs involved in moving to a new easy to use CRM software system.

Choose the right vendor/implementation partner

When you are seeking at alternative vendors to replace your existing CRM system, be sure to check out if your new CRM vendor has moved at least one organization from your present CRM platform.

Ask them how did they do it?

Inquire how easy it was for them to perform the migration and what testimonials or proof-points do they have to back-up their claims.

In fact, it is a great thing if your new vendor can provide references whereby you can cross-check with other organization the level of expertise that you new CRM vendor provided while migrating CRM platforms (the one that you presently have) to their easy to use CRM software.

This is because moving any CRM is far more easier when your new CRM vendor has previous expertise and experience in moving organizations from your present CRM platform to their easy to use CRM platform.

Data migration

One of the biggest concern while switching CRM software is about data migration. That means extraction of all data from your existing CRM database to your new system.

Our suggestion is simple: Do not think of boiling the ocean.

You do not necessarily have to move all your data into your new CRM system. Rather, consider your data migration from the old system to your new CRM platform’s database as a data-cleansing exercise.

This is because the relevance of data about prospects and leads which are age-old being useful today is often too low (and that is without even taking about GDPR).

Therefore, try to filter out how much of your existing data in the CRM database is of use and real. That means live data and information vs. data that are just dirt and noise.

You can also consider storing your old data elsewhere and only bring forward the data you think is needed in your new easy to use CRM. Since once the new CRM system gets operational and you find that you require data from some other particular year, you can still import it. But do not try to do everything at once if it is not required.

Conclusion

Hence, you see moving to a new CRM is not as difficult as first perceived.

Nevertheless, if you know what is CRM, you must understand that selecting a new and more efficient CRM solution for your business will always take time and need attentive research and detailed technical discussions with a number of vendors in the CRM marketplace.

However, once you purchase the right CRM solution for your business, it will deliver the benefits that you originally envisaged for your business, along with happier staffs and customers.

Therefore, do not live with sub-optimal benefits from your CRM. Rather step up and switch your CRM software- since CRM migration, in reality, is not that hard.

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Left but Never Forgotten: Steps for Regaining Customer Trust and Revenue

There are a number of reasons that prompt departure of your customers. Therefore, how you react to the departure of your customers will either validate that your customers have left for a good reason, or since you still have all the data of your customer in your easy to use CRM platform, you can start the process of bringing back your customers and along with it the customer revenue that you generated from those customers in the past. In fact, businesses that perform a great job of winning back departed customers eventually results in creating a stronger relationship with their old customers with the passage of time. As a vendor of the best small business CRM software, here are time tested five steps we have found that can help your organization identify and regain the trust of your lost customers and build up an, even more, stronger relationship.

There are a number of reasons that prompt departure of your customers. Therefore, how you react to the departure of your customers will either validate that your customers have left for a good reason, or since you still have all the data of your customer in your easy to use CRM platform, you can start the process of bringing back your customers and along with it the customer revenue that you generated from those customers in the past which you can also check from your CRM database.

Reducing churn by 5% can increase profits by 25-125%. Click To Tweet

In fact, businesses that perform a great job of winning back departed customers eventually results in creating a stronger relationship with their old customers with the passage of time.

As a vendor of the best small business CRM software, here are time tested five steps we have found that can help your organization identify and regain the trust of your lost customers and build up an, even more, stronger relationship.

Track your departed customers

Although this is no brainer, yet most organizations only track their customer-retention (CRR) scores as a percentage of their overall business. This means businesses often do not get down for ascertaining the actual numbers of customers who have departed after interacting or purchasing just for once from their companies.

Therefore, in reality, your efforts must be about caring for the customers those who have departed- not merely the percentage or how their churn impacted your organization’s revenue balance sheet.

Hence, primarily quantify the volume of customers and business that has departed, which can be easily done once every month or in every quarter, depending on the volume of your business.

Identify and segment those who departed

If you have a high-volume business, you will surely acknowledge that all customers who have departed did not contribute the same value to your organization.

Now, you need to make a hard decision. Segment the low revenue generating customers from those who contributed higher revenues, and thereafter determine, the customers you will reach out for recovery.

Reach out for reconciliation with reasons and respect

Now that you know who you want to win back by analyzing past information in your CRM database , reach out to those selected customers with a phone call.

Our suggestion is to create two groups within your organization to make the calls.

The first group should consist of executives who should call a few (1-20) of the departed customers in every phase of the “rescue-cycle” to keep your company remain aware and close to the problems that are driving customers to leave your brand.

The second group, which is more important than the former one, should consist of a specially prepared team of people, who are already trained in recovery conversations to handle the departed customers.

Remember this is not a sales pitch.

Therefore, this primary part of the recovery conversation will be apologizing that the customer has left your brand, while the second part will be listening intently to the customer’s explanations.
The third part of the recovery conversation will be diagnosing and verifying back to the customer why they departed and cataloging that information in your easy to use CRM for the company, and thereafter in the fourth part extend unconditional support and offer immediate assistance in resolving the issues.

Finally, there should be an offer (never a sales pitch) extended to the customer for bringing them back to your brand.

The learning curve needed to hone the recovery conversational skills can be a very rewarding experience for your employees since we would suggest that you must not outsource this for regaining customer trust and revenue.

Categorize causes for departure and take actions

After these calls, organizations uncover a major opportunity to specifically identify the common issues that came from all these calls and therefore find a chance to trend and track these issues. Now, by attaching these problems to the revenue of the departed customers, organizations can prioritize these issues.

Within the second session of conducting your customer recovery program, the most critical problems will emerge and there will be no questions remaining on what you should focus on.
In fact, this program may also bring an opportunity from making these calls about the frontline service than your company can render immediately and provide specific feedback to the frontline employees in your organization those that serve the customers and the potentially contributed to the customer’s departure from your brand.

Therefore, creating a closed-loop process for this feedback is extremely important and the very specific information that comes out of these calls can also be very productive for coaching your employees once stored in the CRM database to reduce further churn.

Place returning customers into “Intensive Care”

Keep an eye on the customers individually once any customer has agreed to be rescued and has decided to come back into your business.

Conduct a review every quarter of your recovered customer’s existence with your brand. Tracking customer service and support calls, purchasing metrics, and other similar indicators will help in identifying the health of the restarted relationship.

We can assure you that your close attention towards your returning customers will not go unnoticed.

 Results That You Can Expect From Customer Recovery

The customer recovery process has been extremely fruitful in every business verticals, where we have seen this work.

As one of the most popular vendors of MCA CRM (Merchant Cash Advance) software, in alternative financing services with high levels of customer churn, we experienced as much as 35% customer recovery, for businesses that followed this practice.

Users of our easy to use CRM also registered an improvement in their frontline services as the feedbacks that gleaned from these recovery calls was provided immediately to the account reps and managers serving the customers who departed, using automation in the CRM for routing the support calls to the appropriate employees who can handle the recovered customers in the days to come.

Conclusion

Therefore the key to customer recovery in any organization is to ensure that there is a planned process, to get in touch, resolve and settle the problems with customers, who have churned, and a commitment and an intention to fix the issue which pushed the customer out through the door.

In short, the “customer rescue” practice is a boon for any organization that wants to re-establish relationships, bring back revenue and also prevent future revenue from departing from their company.

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Unique Ways To Use Your Easy To Use CRM For So Much More Than Sales

Now that you know what is CRM software, do you also know that easy to use CRM can do much more than just manage and monitor sales? In general, most businesses would use their CRM tool to predominantly manage activities like sales. Nevertheless, you should not just assume that your CRM is just a tool developed for daily monitoring of prospects, customers, and leads. The real fact is there are also several ways you can make use of your easy to use CRM solution, like for competitor tracking, HR support, or even something as simple as creating a content calendar- the right CRM system be it Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM software can carry out all these tasks for you and more.

Now that you know what is CRM software, do you also know that easy to use CRM can do much more than just manage and monitor sales?

In general, most businesses would use their CRM tool to predominantly manage activities like sales. Nevertheless, you should not just assume that your CRM is just a tool developed for daily monitoring of prospects, customers, and leads.

In 2008, only 12% of businesses used cloud-based CRM – This figure has now increased to 87% - SuperOffice Click To Tweet

The real fact is there are also several ways you can make use of your easy to use CRM solution, like for competitor tracking, HR support, or even something as simple as creating a content calendar- the right CRM system be it Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM software can carry out all these tasks for you and more.

Therefore, here in this article let us guide you with some other unique ways you can use your best small business CRM software if you are in an SMB to automate time-taking manual tasks:

  1. Integrate email marketing processes

Any recurring email marketing task or program can be automated and enhanced with easy to use CRM. If you are in a small business you can use an all-in-one CRM like ConvergeHub to gauge the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.
Hence, here is a basic snapshot of what you can do:

  • Completely synchronize your email’s inbox to any popular email provider like Gmail, MS Outlook and others
  • Use a variety of customizable email templates to save upon time preparing recurring customer communications
  • Email to all your contacts in the CRM database directly from ConvergeHub, which will be synced back to your inbox
  • Look at any specific contact or deal and view all emails associated with that person or deal at a glance
  • Find real-time notifications the very moment a prospect opens your email or even clicks on a link to help you with your follow-up strategies
  1. Hiring and onboarding

You can use your easy to use CRM for tracking your job hiring and company onboarding processes. Just consider the similarity between tracking your contacts through the sales-pipeline and moving a suitable candidate through a structured induction or hiring process.
For this, you do not need a customized HR CRM since an easy to use CRM like ConvergeHub can also handle both.

  1. Account management

There are several people those that think to track their primary sales is the only work of a CRM. However, it is also true that your best small business CRM software can even be used to up-sell to the customers or build a robust relationship with customers over time.

In other words, your job is not completed once you sign a deal. Customer churn is the enemy of sustainable business growth. Therefore, you should use your CRM tool to manage the customer’s entire buying journey to help increase your revenue per customer and most importantly the average lifetime value of your buyers which can be measured easily using CLM CRM software like ConvergeHub.

  1. Project and event management

Do you have an exciting and new event or project going on in your organization? Do not pay for another business software tool; use your easy to use CRM to track those processes as well.

  1. Track your customers

If your customers accept cookies, there are CRM software platforms like ConvergeHub that can be linked to your website that provides you visibility of the user’s behaviors. It acts as a tracking tool to let you see which pages your website visitors have visited and whether they have dropped out before making a purchase. Once armed with this valuable information you can use this data to retarget the customers with advertisements.

  1. Cut down on administrative tasks

Using easy to use CRM software platform you can automate repetitive tasks that do not need human intervention. Simple day-to-day tasks such as typing and sending emails, creating activities, developing reports, and also gathering background information on prospects, all can be handled by your CRM.

Hence, using CRM software not only saves your employee’s precious time, but it also slashes the cost you spend on your existing resources.

  1. Handle all customer data correctly

The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations) imposes limitations on how businesses in the EU (European Union) can store and then manage a customer’s personal data.

However, even if you are based outside the European Union, you still have to adhere to the GDPR norms if your company handles the data of any European resident in the CRM database.

Easy to use CRM is a system that is capable of storing and securing your prospect and customer data to ensure that no third-party can see or access it.

Conclusion

Therefore, whatever be the requirement of your business, the right easy to use CRM software tool will definitely be able to assist in making all avenues of your business operations more efficient.

Hence remember your best small business CRM is not just a sales tool, as every department in your company can benefit from this software.

However, the question remains are you making the most of your easy to use CRM software ?

If it is not, click on the link below and try ConvergeHub CRM, for you never know how powerful and scalable ConvergeHub is if you do not use it.

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How Data Science Can Boost Customer Experience For Rapid Business Growth

While content marketing may still remain the number one means to reach out to the customers on the internet, but in 2019 making use of data science is also the number one way to keep your customers around once you have caught their attention on the web. Data science which is also synonymous to big data or machine learning helps businesses that are already using easy to use CRM software platforms to develop a kind of customer experience or CX that leave consumers of your offerings satisfied and looking for more. We all know by now, that building customer loyalty is the golden key to longstanding success in any market, irrespective of which industry you are in. Therefore, in this article let us explore different avenues as to how you can use data science to help your business succeed over time, and provide exceptional customer experience.

While content marketing may still remain the number one means to reach out to the customers on the internet, but in 2019 making use of data science is also the number one way to keep your customers around once you have caught their attention on the web.
Data science which is also synonymous to big data or machine learning helps businesses that are already using easy to use CRM software platforms to develop a kind of customer experience or CX that leave consumers of your offerings satisfied and looking for more.

When assessing the most important CRM features, 18% of organizations stress the ability to see a clear snapshot of their data- Smart Insights Click To Tweet

We all know by now, that building customer loyalty is the golden key to longstanding success in any market, irrespective of which industry you are in.

Therefore, in this article let us explore different avenues as to how you can use data science to help your business succeed over time, and provide exceptional customer experience.

Personalize Services to Net Rewards

While it is equally true that consumers get bothered when services are too customized, recommendation services that are geared towards advocating new products and services to the customers, and are of high quality have the potential to rapidly improve sales per customer and price point per order for any brand in the present competitive marketplace.

Spotify, Amazon, Netflix are all benchmark examples of business and services that do a great job recommending the customers about their new products that entrance and excite the customers.

Give Customers What They Need

One reason that Uber faced recently is that potential customers of this transportation network company might avoid using its services for not being able to know how much their fare will be at the end of their rides.

Therefore, to address this grave issue company like Uber nowadays creates fair price calculators that allow the customers to find the best guess of what their fare might be even before they book their rides.

This can be considered as a great example of two ways that big data can be used.

Firstly by aggregating data, Uber apprehended that one of the main reason customers were restraining their need instead of booking the rides was the uncertainty they were facing about what the price of the ride might be at the end of their journey.
Secondly using a fair price calculator, customers can get a near-to-the-actual estimate of what their rides may cost even before they book the ride, and can make sure that what they end up paying is not too far-off from their expected rates.

Although after all, it is impossible to determine the cost of any single ride before it is complete. But calculators like this that uses big data technology to look over thousands of customer-related data of riders who have traveled similar distances at analogous times, found that they can be fairly accurate while providing their customers with their fair price suggestions.

Fix Issues Even Before They Happen

As a negative story about any brand nowadays can spread like wildfire on the social media platforms, therefore it is extremely essential that businesses must avoid issues with their customers, more important than ever to keep away from meting out unpleasant customer experience whenever it is possible, while selling their products and services in this competitive marketplace.

One way big data technology with the help of easy to use CRM software can improve customer experience is by spotting issues that the average human simply cannot see.

For example, several disconnected customer support representatives for a brand might all get separate service calls from customers complaining about a minor issue with their offerings, which can go unnoticed and disregarded for its simplicity.

However, an intelligent system dedicated to machine learning technology can easily identify that problem across an array of call logs in easy to use CRM software and instruct the CRM to send automated alerts to someone higher-up in the organization to investigate the issue immediately.

Optimizing Product Locations

In both online retailing and brick and mortar stores, organizing products and services in an optimal pattern is always necessary and an interesting thing to do.

For example, if a customer is browsing laser printers, having refill cartridges and other accessories for the printing device nearby may seem logical.

But big data is a technology that can perhaps even tell you that someone purchasing a laser printer might also need a new chair or table for their office, or a laptop that perfectly matches that specific customer’s needs.

Therefore big data when used with easy to use CRM software that has all the customers data in its CRM database , can allow your business to better arrange your offerings online and also in brick and mortar stores by creating product association, which greatly increases the amount of customer purchase per visit.

Conclusion

However, businesses also need to careful of the extent to which they should use big data technology for boosting customer experience and consumer satisfaction for their business growth .

In the modern times, there are even many customers that do not trust companies with too much information about their leads, prospects, and customers, and so will opt out of cookies and other collection options whenever they visit your brand’s website.

Therefore the best way for brands to improve customer willingness to share their information is to act responsibly towards their customers, which means companies should protect their customer’s information in their CRM database , never sell their customer-related data to other third-party sources, and use the information they have in their easy to use CRM platforms carefully, only for the benefit of their consumers in the days to come.

Now, if you are further interested in knowing how your organization can engage technology for rapid business growth; continue reading our “Business Growth Manifesto”.
Since even the best CRM software and big data technology in the world will not improve your business if your business process is in shambles, your workflow is disjointed, or your employees do not feel the necessity of using the software.

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Recent Trends and Developments in Chatbot Customer Support Strategies in 2019

The developments in Chatbot services have traveled a long way and have also achieved huge success and milestones since its beginning that started back in the 1950s. During the initial years after the launch of this technology Chatbots were only used as an interface for web development services to enhance business interactions, however times have now changed and technology has also evolved greatly over the last few decades just like it has happened with easy to use CRM software in the CRM marketplace.

The developments in Chatbot services have traveled a long way and have also achieved huge success and milestones since its beginning that started back in the 1950s.
During the initial years after the launch of this technology Chatbots were only used as an interface for web development services to enhance business interactions, however times have now changed and technology has also evolved greatly over the last few decades just like it has happened with easy to use CRM software in the CRM marketplace.

80% of businesses want Chatbots by 2020- BusinessInsider Click To Tweet

Now, if we look at the Chatbot technology we will certainly accept the fact, that although Chatbots were their all along, however, this technology has gained unseen momentum and popularity over the last few years. Especially in 2018-19 the trends in Chatbot technology has shown some amazing runs that portrays several tweaks to its traditional technology as it is becoming more and more useful for rendering support to the customers and prospects in small and medium-sized organizations that are using best small business CRM software platforms to enhance the customer experience associated with their offerings and find rapid business growth.

This is happening because, the recent development in the field of Big Data and AI (Artificial Intelligence) has significantly improved the level of technology usage in Chatbot development, helping Chatbots to evolve from simple answering applications to the advanced Chatbots that are smart and intelligent enough to effectively interact with prospects and customers in the CRM database .

Hence there are many organizations that are looking to hire app developers for implementing Chatbots in their business websites and integrate its functionality with an easy to use CRM for leveraging its power in providing world-class support to their prospects and customers.

Advancements in Chatbots nowadays are allowing the implementation of AI tools which is the main reason for Chatbots to gain this large consumer base, like small organizations with limited resources those that are most essentially in need of remaining online 24/7 using Chatbots.

Since Chatbot technology aids in providing instant response to the requirements and questions of prospects and customers living in completely different time zones across the globe.

According to the Harvard Business Review and InsideSales:

“A five-minute delay can result in your chances to attract lead decimation. In ten minutes the delayed answer will reduce your chances to get the effective contact up to 400%.”

Therefore, it can be easily said that with the extensive area for development, Chatbot technology just like easy to use CRM software, has a boundless unrestrained space and future to thrive and grow, but what seems to be the trend for this year provides us the picture as depicted below, as according to BusinessInsider:

“80% of businesses want Chatbots by 2020.”

Replacement of Legacy App Interfaces

There are several web and app development services in 2019 that have already adopted the trends with legacy app interfaces replaced and interchanged by unique interfaces, which results into using Chatbots for making interactive conversations with a customer instead of simply navigating through the UI of the app.

This way it has been found that businesses using Chatbots gets high-level of engagement with their customers, as irrespective of whether your customer is a Baby Boomers (age 55+) or a Millennial (age 18-34), people are looking to Chatbots for providing them on-demand answers to their questions in real time, since 55% of people in the USA believe the top benefit of interacting with a Chatbot is getting instant responses to their inquiries.

Follow-line of Google Duplex

Built on an RNN (Recurrent Neural Network) using ‘TensorFlow Extended’, a general purpose Google machine learning platform, Google Duplex is an AI (Artificial Intelligence) chat agent that can perform definite verbal tasks.

It has been recently observed that small and medium businesses that use best small business CRM software is using this innovative tool to book appointments and orders on the command of the users, which in the years to come can also be followed by other similar ideas, because technology never waits to evolve, which is more so pertinent in the present times.

Human-like Chatbot Experience

The entire race in the Chatbot technology is for rendering human-like experiences to the users of the application. Therefore, business establishments that are working on Chatbots are also slowly becoming smarter to deliver human-like experience through Chatbots, using technological advancements in AI, Big Data, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning.

Additionally, in an HBR survey, it showed that decision makers and business leaders are turning towards the broader umbrella of business automation technologies that also most importantly includes CRM integration with Chatbots, for things like marketing, sales, and customer support services.
According to the HBR study:

“Forty-two percent of participants believe automation technologies in these areas will mostly improve the customer experience. And 48% said that they already use automation technology for these business functions, with 40% planning to implement some form of automated technology by 2020.”

Chatbot powered UI

It has been found that UI or User Interfaces that are Chatbot enabled helps the UI to deliver information quickly, as interacting through Chatbots is a lot more simpler than using app-based UI tour.

Automatic Customer Support Center

The most advanced artificial based voice and other devices are the server-less technology that is currently deployed Over-the-Automated-Call-Center.

In the present times smart Chatbot development companies can help you to set up the automatic call center and infuse them with the deep domain knowledge base to serve the customers 24/7, and that too without any reduction in efficiency.

In-depth Customer Data Analysis

In the present times as AI is helping data mining and analysis activities that are most necessary for finding customer insights for businesses, hence Chatbots in 2019 are getting integrated with Machine Learning which is aiding Chatbots to solve even technical tasks.

Moreover, this effective analysis of Chatbots about customer insights and pattern recognition using Big Data and Machine Learning technologies integrated with the app along with data collected inside the CRM database is helping Chatbots to gain an advantage in real-time scenarios over the human mind.

Conclusion

As the ultimate goal of almost all businesses is to engage the customer, show them their plans, sell the customers their offerings, and provide world-class support services an innovative and futuristic Chatbot technology will definitely help businesses to achieve these goals.
Since looking at the trends in Chatbot technology although friendliness and approachability” are not areas where consumers believe Chatbots are particularly strong, according to a Drift report 15% of consumers in the US have used Chatbots to communicate with businesses in the past 12 months and this number is on the rise steadily.

To know more on how you can use technology to find massive business growth read our “Business Growth Manifesto”, to identifying areas that can be optimized or automated in your organization and then implement technology that will optimize, automate and improve your business processes.

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Key Customer Experience Metrics That You Must Measure and Cannot Leave Behind

In this modern era of data analytics, most businesses have enough information, metrics, data, and dashboards in their easy to use CRM software platforms to deal with. However, unfortunately, when it comes to Customer Experience or CX, most organizations do not always keep a track or measure and report the right metrics for their organization. In a report published in 2018 by NPX & CX Benchmark states: “One-third of businesses (especially small and medium organizations) do not measure their Retention or Customer Churn.”

In this modern era of data analytics, most businesses have enough information, metrics, data, and dashboards in their easy to use CRM software platforms to deal with. However, unfortunately, when it comes to Customer Experience or CX, most organizations do not always keep a track or measure and report the right metrics for their organization.

By 2020, more than 40 percent of all data analytics projects will relate to an aspect of customer experience- Gartner Click To Tweet

In a report published in 2018 by NPX & CX Benchmark states:

“One-third of businesses (especially small and medium organizations) do not measure their Retention or Customer Churn.”

Well, this is indeed an irony since businesses spend a considerable amount of their time and resources in sales and marketing but ultimately they do not keep a track of how many of those acquired customers have been retained or try to find what were the reasons for their attrition.

Hence, how big or small your business is, and in which sector your company belongs to, here are key 4 top of the line Customer Experience metrics that you should track and measure at all times using your best small business CRM software.

What are the CX top of the line metrics?

Top of the line metrics in CX are those that bear minimum stats you should measure which are outcome indicators and lag measures that can be easily found in your easy to use CRM platform’s dashboard. These metrics help to keep us tied to our organization’s long term visions and goals for strategic business growth . Therefore, to show an improvement on these metrics, we need to improve other independent or lead Customer Experience (CX) metrics in your CRM database.

The most vital top line CX Metrics that you should always measure are:

  • Net Promoter Score
  • Customer-Lifetime-Value/Cost-of-Acquisition-of-Customer
  • Customer-Churn
  • Customer Effort Score

So let us talk about each of them now briefly.

  1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Possibly, there is no need for a detailed explanations since NPS has gained tremendous popularity in the recent times, as in a report published by Forrester it indicated that more than 70% of both big and small organizations listed in the Fortune 1000 companies use Net Promoter Score to measure the loyalty of their brands.

The biggest advantage of this metrics is its simplicity (you can use a single question format) to evaluate the customer’s intentions to recommend your offerings to their trusted ones, like friends, colleagues, and relatives.

The uniqueness of the NPS question lies in its 11 point survey, which is scaled from 0 to 10, with 0 to 6 as detractors, 7 and 8 as passive, and 9 and 10 as promoters of your brand.

In order to calculate your brand’s NPs, detract the percentage of Detractors from this percentage of Promoters.

For an example, if 60 percent of your respondents in the Net Promoter Survey (which you can perform using email campaigning functionality in your easy to use CRM) are Promoters and 10 percent are Detractors; your brand’s NPS is 50.

The importance of NPS is that it provides an insight into the customer loyalty spectrum for your business so that you can identify the weak points in your customer experience that needs improvement.

  1. Customer-Lifetime-Value/Cost-of-Acquisition-of-Customer (CLV/CAC)

What is interesting and we are looking for in these two metrics is the ratio of CLV to CAC that can be easily measured in all best small business CRM software platforms.

What is Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)?

CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) which is also known as LCV (Lifetime Customer Value) is the net economic or financial value associated to the relationship between the customer and the brand or the company.

CLV is an ideal metric that illustrates and lets us know how much revenue we are making from each customer. Additionally, when CLV is averaged out, any organization can easily generalize it for its entire customer base.

CLV is an important measurement that you must measure using your easy to use CRM software since if you are not making enough money from your relationship with your customers, it is no brainer that you may sooner or later seize to be in business.

Calculating net contribution (profit margin) or net financial value from an ongoing relationship with your customers will definitely involve the contributions that your buyers have made in the past and an ongoing estimate of their future contributions for your brand. Therefore, CLV or LVC is estimated metrics.

Hence, to explain it in its simplistic form, Customer Lifetime Value is the average sum of purchases made by your customers till they retire or churn.

Therefore, CLV takes into consideration the “average contribution from each customer per period” and the expected number of periods that the customer remains with the company.

For an example, if the average revenue of a CRM company like ConvergeHub is $59 per user/ month for its Premium Edition billed yearly, and if the cost of offering the service is $40, then its average customer contribution is $19 per month. Now, if the customer stays with the organization for 24 months before churning out, then the CLV for that customer is $456 ($19 x 24 Mt.)

This calculation takes into consideration, the Customer Retention Rate (or in a reverse way the Customer Churn Rate) and average contribution per customer.

We all know that the future value of cash flow is at all times less than its present value, therefore, this formula can be improved or adjusted also to include this aspect.

As Customer Lifetime Value engages an economic value to Customer Relationship strategy, CLV is considered as an excellent metric for the following:

  • Evaluate if your delivery model is viable
  • Helps to refine your customer support strategies, so as to increase your CLV
  • Sensitize your team members about economic value and inculcate ownership into their actions

Apart from this, evaluating each customer individually as against average CLV, to find out whose relationship is more precious for your brand can also help in customer segmentation for up-selling and cross-selling your other offerings.

What is the Cost of Acquisition of Customer (CAC)?

CLV alone may aid you to a certain extent to refine your organization’s operations and service delivery models; however, we all know that Customer Experience (CX) begins right from Marketing.
Therefore, now you need a metric that considers an end-to-end impact, and that can only be measured by considering the Cost of Acquisition of Customer for your brand.

Cost of Acquisition of Customer (CAC) is the average cost of acquiring a customer which can include right from marketing and sales expenses to offers and discounts that your organization (if required) provides to its customers.

CLV/CAC

The ratio of CLV to CAC is extremely important and useful to evaluate the complete business model and its viability for any organization.

We say this because, when the CAC is greater than CLV, it clearly indicates that the business model is not a viable proposition at all.

Therefore, as a thumb rule, your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) must be 3 to 4 times more than your Cost of Acquisition of Customer (CAC).

There are several factors which drive this; however, CX professionals can play a significant role in optimizing this ratio using different levels of Customer Experience strategies to the purchasers of your offerings.

Apart from this tacking the trends of CLV and CLV/CAC ratio can also aid CX professionals to gauge the impact of CX initiatives that have been implemented in your organization.

  1. Customer-Retention or Customer-Churn

Over the course of time, Customer Churn rate has become one of the other most popular metrics as most CX professionals talk about it while assessing ‘Customer Experience management’ of any organization.

Nevertheless, according to the NPX and CX benchmark report published in 2018, it states that:

Only one-third of companies proactively track their Customer Retention Rate (CRR) in their organization.

In simple language Customer Churn is the percentage or proportion of customers those who have discontinued or left after using a brand as against the total base of its active customers in the list.

In fact, the Customer Retention rate is just the inverse of Customer Churn rate, for which the math is:

1/Customer Churn Rate

Although apparently, it might look extremely easy, however, in reality, there are several scenarios such as non-recurring business models, pure subscription models, businesses with lock-in periods and without lock-in periods, and others that needs to be taken into consideration while measuring CCR. Therefore calculating CCR (Customer Churn Rate) for a brand is actually a very tricky process, which is one of the major reasons as to why businesses do not most often like to calculate their Customer Churn.

Nevertheless, we have found that base-lining an organization or brand’s historic churn rate is a far superior way to access the efficacy of that company’s Customer Experience initiatives as even lack of accurate data for benchmarking across industries is not a matter of concern to perform this calculation, which is a good metric to know the effectiveness of an organization’s Customer Experience strategy.

Revenue Churn Rate

Revenue Churn Rate is a variation of Customer Churn Rate since this metric portrays how much revenue got lost within a given period of time.

In other words, Revenue Churn Rate as the name suggests is a very pertinent economic and financial indicator of customer loyalty in ‘subscription-based business models’.

The math over here is, if $100 K is the recurring revenue of last month and if that has decreased to $90 K in the present month, there is a revenue churn of $10 K this month. Which means the Revenue Churn Rate is 10% [=100-90/100].

However, it must be most essentially remembered over here that you should take only into consideration the base of installed customers and should never add new acquisitions to the current month. Moreover, another simple version of the Revenue Churn Rate also ignores customers who have upgraded their subscriptions (a refinement that is not cover in this article).
Therefore RCR (Revenue Churn Rate) is as good as CCR (Customer Churn Rate) for all types of subscription-based business like Cloud Based CRM software solutions, except that downgrading a subscription would impact the RCR but not CCR.

  1. Customer Effort Score (CES)

This is a CX metric that is mostly neglected by several organizations across the globe. According to an NPX & CX Benchmark report published in 2018, only 15% of businesses use CES and hence it is one of the most under-utilized metrics by the CX Management fraternity.

However, it must be acknowledged that Customer Effort Score has a greater statistical correlation with both repurchase and enhanced spending rates than NPS.
That implies CES is a better metric to predictive repurchase and spending behaviors of your customers than Net Promoter Score.

For example, most of us would cherish to use a web-based check-in facility rather than stand in a check-in queue while boarding flights in an airport. This reduction in the customer’s effort by helping the customer to “get their job done” can radically increase brand preferences.

Much like NPS, Customer Effort Score (CES) is also measured through a single question but with a 5 point scale.

Another advantage for measuring CES is that the same question can be asked to the same customer times and again after every transaction as it obviously makes sense to find out if the customer has found it effortless to transact after each and every deal.

 Conclusion

There are also many more metrics such as Turnaround Time, Service Levels, Compliance Percentage, and others that can also be tracked to measure CX of a brand, which we shall discuss later on.
So subscribe to our blogs for learning more or read our Business Growth Manifesto, which is a definitive guide on how to use technology to fuel massive business growth.

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Top Benefits Of Contact Management And Easy To Use CRM Software

Talk about Customer Relationship Management software, to start with it can be said that CRM is a much broader concept than contact management. Since at the core, CRM is a practice of managing and nurturing your organization’s customer relationships. However, while we say it is a concept, it is largely implemented through a CRM software solution, and all CRM platforms include built-in contact management capabilities.

The difference between Contact management and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is often confusing for people who are not aware of what is CRM software. This is because both are very similar concepts. However, they have some distinct characteristics that differentiate these two.

Last year in 2018 we found out that overall CRM usage increased from 56% to 74%- Buyerzone Click To Tweet

Therefore, let us start by clearing up this trivial confusion.

What is Contact Management?

To explain in a gist, contact management is often a part of your easy to use CRM strategy. That means contact management is the practice of organizing and storing data of contacts so that anyone in your organization can access it effortlessly.
In other words, contact management is just what it sounds like- the process of managing your contact’s data irrelevant of the fact whether it is stored in a Rolodex, spreadsheet or inside your CRM database.

What is CRM?

Now to talk about Customer Relationship Management software, to start with it can be said that CRM is a much broader concept than contact management. Since at the core, CRM is a practice of managing and nurturing your organization’s customer relationships. However, while we say it is a concept, it is largely implemented through a CRM software solution, and all CRM platforms include built-in contact management capabilities.

Nevertheless, a best small business CRM software be it Salesforce or any other Salesforce alternative CRM platform does a lot more than performing simple contact management processes.

Easy to use CRM software solutions allow you to automate loads of manual tasks, which eventually save time and your resources.

All-in-one CRM systems like ConvergeHub provides built-in marketing automation and sales enablement capabilities, help-desk module and even aids the finance departments in your company if you are using a QuickBooks CRM platform that offers QuickBooks CRM integration free.

Therefore, since the key takeaway in the modern times is that contact management is built into all easy to use CRM software platforms, so let us now consider the benefits that apply to both these concepts as illustrated below:

Top Benefits of Contact Management and CRM

Long-lasting and better customer relationships

A main aspect of CRM is that it permits you to store an extensive amount of data about all your customers, which also include demographic data such as location, industry, gender, age, apart from just names and emails.

An easy to use CRM software can also track and store behavioral data in the CRM database, such as, when a customer, prospect, or a lead clicks and opens an email; visits your website, subscribe to your email list, downloads contents, make purchases, and many more.

This information gathered in the CRM database , helps your sales, marketing, and support teams to maintain a much clearer picture of who your customers are, how they have interacted with your organization in the past, problems they have faced, and others.

Therefore, a CRM system helps your teams to get to know and interact with your leads, prospects, and customers in a more personal manner.

Using an easy to use CRM platform helps your customers to perceive you as a human being, and not just an abstract entity that charges them for their purchases, which in turn, results in forming a closer bonding, customer loyalty and help build trust with your brand among your customers.

Improves management of data

It is no brainer that when you store your contact database in a spreadsheet, you naturally run the risk of performing human errors in the data entry process. Additionally, if any of your colleagues or employee needs any information about a specific contact, you will have to send them the entire spreadsheet or dig up the information they requested and then send it, which will take a considerable amount of resource and time.

However when you have a CRM in place, you can find all your marketing, sales, customer support, and even accounts data (if you are using a QuickBooks CRM) stored in one central location which can be accessible to all.

Moreover, once you know what is CRM, you can easily understand that a CRM solution is the best application for eliminating data processing errors, as most customer data in the CRM is collected using web-forms and then they are added to the CRM database.

Reduced spending

If your company is a startup organization or a small business enterprise, once you adopt the best small business CRM software solution, with so many processes automated, you will not need as many employees to man the ship, which leads to less money spent on employee salaries.

Additionally, if you are using an all-in-one CRM software that comes with built-in sales, marketing, and support automation, you also do not need to invest in separate silo software systems, which will save you the cost of purchasing multiple systems for accomplishing various business-related functionalities.

According to Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of research, in Nucleus Research:

“With a return of $5.60 for every dollar spent, investing in CRM is a no-brainer. Further, that investment has significant staying power. As vendors add social, marketing, analytics, and mobile access capabilities to their offerings, organizations have an opportunity to gain even more returns from CRM.”

Personalize customer interactions

Irrespective of whether you are using a CRM like Salesforce or any Salesforce Alternative CRM software like ConvergeHub, personalizing interactions with your prospects and customers helps your teams to communicate in a more relevant manner that resonates with them.

With all that personal data of your prospects and customers stored in the CRM database, your teams can easily prepare themselves for a call by viewing through the customer’s and prospect’s demographic data and interaction histories, touching on elements that will interest the selected audiences and thereby increase their level of engagement.

Moreover, looking into issues that your customers have faced in the past, your support teams can find an understanding of each customer’s use cases, and pain-points, before they interact with someone submitting a support ticket, helping them to personalize their support requirements to the specific needs of the customer.

Improved customer satisfaction and experience

Customer satisfaction is the main element to foster increased revenue and rapid business growth.

Customers feel themselves valued when you pay close attention to their requirements and what they need to be successful, which your company representatives can easily cater to when they are using an easy to use CRM and see a full history of the customer’s history of interactions with your company.

Studies show that by 2020 customer experience with a brand will surpass its product and price factors as it will be the key brand differentiator in the marketplace.

If you know what is CRM, you must also understand this by now that contact management and CRM software allows you to deliver world-class customer experience.

In reality, with your business processes automated, team aligned, and hence more time freed-up to interact one-on-one with your customers, easy to use CRM help your business to deliver an even better customer experience that would never have been possible without a CRM in place.

Better collaborations and alignment across teams

Aligning your team’s efforts can be challenging, which is especially true with sales and marketing, as each of them has their own agendas and therefore works in silos.

Easy to use CRM is a software that bridges this gap.

Using an all-in-one CRM software that provides a 360-degree view of every leads, prospect, and customers help all teams to work with the same data from the CRM database, whereby marketing can see what sales reps are doing and vice-versa.

For example, using a Converged CRM software like ConvergeHub your marketing team can easily collaborate with sales on developing a lead scoring model and ensure MQL (Marketing Qualified Leads) are passed to sales as quickly as possible, which can be automated.

Moreover when customer support data is attached to each contact’s personal records in the CRM database, sales and marketing reps can gain insights which problems each customer has experienced before up-selling or cross-selling to the existing customer base, and if necessary delay reaching out until the customer’s issues are resolved and they are happy once more, as a consequence aligning the two team’s efforts.

Insight into and data-driven decision making

If you know what is CRM software, you must know how CRM platforms are capable of providing extensive reporting, metrics, and analysis of data, which helps to keep your finger on the pulse of how your teams are performing in real-time.

Metrics like sales-funnel analysis, campaign performance metrics, sales closing rate, customer retention rate, and others found with the help of CRM system help company leaders to make data-driven strategic decisions about their businesses’ present and future growth.

Most easy to use CRM solutions has customizable dashboards that display these metrics in a way that they can be accessed in a moment’s notice, which makes the decision-making process a breeze.

Conclusion

Therefore, contact management and CRM is a process and software that elevates collaborations, increase productivity, raises the level of satisfaction among your customers that adds-up to faster revenue and better business growth.

Hence, now that you know what is a CRM if you are not using a CRM to manage your contact data and business processes, today is the time to start.

Implementing an easy to use CRM software like ConvergeHub is no brainer.

So click on the link below and avail its free trial right away.

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How To Manage Your Brand Reputation With CLM CRM Software

The reputation of your brand is more important now than ever. This is because consistently maintaining a positive reputation not only increases customer loyalty, but it also helps build the confidence of your prospects and customers in the market, which aids to position your brand as a leader in your market place. Now, with strategic brand reputation management skills assisted by a CLM CRM software, you can easily improve your brand’s reputation in your space.

The reputation of your brand is more important now than ever. This is because consistently maintaining a positive reputation not only increases customer loyalty, but it also helps build the confidence of your prospects and customers in the market, which aids to position your brand as a leader in your market place.

Now, with strategic brand reputation management skills assisted by a CLM CRM software , you can easily improve your brand’s reputation in your space.

77% of strong omni-channel companies store customer data across channels, compared to 48% for weak omni-channel companies- Aberdeen Click To Tweet

We all know, being positioned as a brand with a positive reputation is extremely important in today’s ruthlessly competitive market. Since it has been found in a research done by Forrester that consumers nowadays will typically read about 10 product or service reviews before finalizing on their purchases, which is why having a positive reputation is so crucial in today’s marketplace.

Key Brand Reputation Management Best Practices

Here are ten time tested highly-effective brand reputation management tactics for improving your brand’s reputation with CLM CRM software for business growth.

  • Excel At Content Marketing

For finding a positive brand reputation, content marketing is a critical element of effective brand reputation management.

For an example, content marketing such as producing educational contents that help solve common problems faced by your audience is considered as a key component of inbound marketing.

Therefore rather than distributing sales-oriented contents, it is more beneficial to generate Blogs, eBooks, Infographics, and others, that can educate your audience rather than attempt to sell your offerings.

Now, once people take notice of your contents and it starts to make its rounds, your audience will share the contents with their friends, relatives, and colleagues, which will surely expand your brand’s presence in the marketplace.

It has been observed that brands that focus on empowering their customers with helpful and novel ideas increase their brand’s reputation significantly, which results in rapid business growth.

  • Improve Customer Satisfaction

This is no brainer that, satisfied customers stay with your organization for a longer time, and therefore spends more on your offerings, which helps to create a long-term and reliable revenue stream for your organization.

Therefore, using a CLM CRM software helps in increasing customer satisfaction which is not only the key to business growth , but it also helps in creating a direct impact on your brand’s reputation as satisfied customers share their positive experiences with your offerings with their colleagues and friends that surely acts as a boon for your reputation management efforts.

  • Focus On Customer Experience

Put your spotlight on customer experience as it is rapidly overtaking products and price as the most crucial variable in the consumer’s decisions to purchase your offerings.

This is no surprise since according to a Walker Study it has been stated that:

“By the year 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.”

Therefore, if your organization does not believe in adopting a CLM CRM software that helps in delivering stellar customer experience, you can be sure that your prospects will soon look for a competition that does.

There are several ways to deliver a great customer experience using an easy to use CRM software platform, those that include but are not limited to:

  1. Reach out individually to each customer once every quarter to personally check in their pain points.
  2. Send customer surveys using marketing automation in your CLM CRM software to find-out areas where you can improve upon your services and offerings and then implement their feedbacks.
  3. Make use of campaigning functionality in your best small business CRM software if you are an SMB or a startup organization through email newsletters or any other forms of product or company updates.
  4. Deliver world-class customer support.
  • Deliver Impeccable Customer Support

The quicker and more effectively you can solve your customer’s pain points and issues, the better the reputation of your brand will be in your marketplace. Using help-desk automation functionality in your CLM CRM software platform, you make the easy to use CRM work as a reputation management software and thereby streamlines customer support for your brand.

Always remember to offer multiple support channels (live chat, phone, email, social media etc.) so that your customers with their problems and issues can reach out on the channel they prefer to communicate with your brand respectively.

Apart from this also make sure to increase your organization’s First Contact Resolution (FCR) rate, which can be easily traced and analyzed with the help of a CLM CRM software platform.

FCR mentions the number of help desk incoming tickets that your support teams can resolve on their first attempts, without having to look and search for a solution and then get back to the customers at a later point of time after their initial contact with the customer.

Using dedicate help groups to ensure that each of your customer support tickets get handled by a subject matter expert and is hence resolved on the very fast attempt every time, helps in enhancing your brand’s reputation. Since the longer your customers need to wait for a solution, the more frustrated they will get with your brand.

  • Use Social Listening Tools To Respond To Negative Comments

When anyone posts a negative comment about your brand on social media websites, it is utmost imperative that you must respond as quickly as possible since negative sentiments spread like wildfire on social media networking sites.

To do this you can leverage social listening tools found in most CLM CRM software platforms to get notified about alerts any time someone refers or mentions about your brand and organization on the social media websites.

Always be empathetic in your responses. Since you must remember that your response will be publicly-visible for the world to see, and so responding in a humble way, will surely help your organization to generate a reputation as a customer-centric brand.

Personalize Your Customer Interactions

When you use an easy to use all-in-one CRM platform, you can find access to 360-degree contact views of your leads, prospects, and customers, which provides deeper insights into each customer’s needs, challenges, interests, products purchased, past support tickets and more.

Therefore, using a CLM CRM software your support agents and sales reps or anyone else who interacts with your customers can dig out information from the CRM database , even before reaching out to a customer, which helps in finding common grounds before their customer interactions and deliver more personalized contents to your customers.

When outreaches are personalized, it makes customers feel valued, creates rapport with the customers, which in turn generates customer satisfaction, brand loyalty, and improves your brand’s reputation management efforts.

  • Increase Employee Satisfaction

It is a big mistake if you overlook the satisfaction of your employees when developing brand reputation management strategies for your company.

According to the Institute of Employment Studies:

“Satisfied employees perform 20% better than unengaged employees and are much more likely to become brand advocates.”

That implies, satisfied employees not only work harder, have higher morals but they also help deliver superior customer experience as they most often go out of their way to satisfy the needs of their customers.

Therefore, start a program in your organization by which you can survey your employees about the satisfaction in their workplace and implement necessary changes based on their feedback.

Nurture Brand Advocates

Brand advocates can be anyone right from your customers, employees, or anyone who loves your brand enough, likely to speak positively about your brand and recommend your offerings to others.

Arguably, brand advocates are the most effective tool for managing the reputation of your brand.

Brand advocates can really elevate your brand’s reputation from average to exceptional, by recommending your brand in the social media websites.

Therefore, use social listening tools to find when someone makes a positive comment about your brand. This is because, by engaging the right person in the social media platforms, you can open the door for creating new brand advocates, whom according to researches shows that consumers trust way more than traditional brand promotion activities.

  • Generate Customer Testimonials And Success Stories

As we said even earlier, researches indicate that consumers place more trust in brands and their offerings which are recommended from peers, friends, and colleagues rather than just counting on traditional advertisements.

Therefore, allow your current customers to share their positive experiences with your brand through customer testimonials and tell the market how great your offerings are which you can also distribute to your prospects as your success stories.

  • Increase Social Media Engagement

It has been predicted by social media experts that there will be approximately 3 billion social media users by 2021.

Hence, an upbeat, positive, and an agile social media presence can be a major driving factor behind a superior brand reputation strategy, as the importance of engaging your prospects and customers on social media will continually increase over time.

Conclusion

We are sure using these best practices to develop your brand reputation management strategy assisted with a CLM CRM software, and implementing it as soon as possible, will definitely help you to maintain a positive reputation for your brand by focusing on customer experience, employee and customer satisfaction, and catering to all your customer’s needs to create a customer-centric brand that will steadily make your business grow.

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How To Measure Sales Skills For Phenomenal Business Growth

If you are a trainer or a sales manager you must have spent plenty of time and effort trying to quantify and measure your sales rep’s skills. You must have also in the process come up with useful training methodologies and tests, most of which your sales teams have failed or performed poorly during the sales training programs, but nevertheless closed their sales in flying colors that enhanced your company’s business growth. However, from our experience as a vendor of small business sales CRM software platform, we found that there are no other better indicators for sales growth than viewing sales pipeline metrics for evaluating a sales person’s skills.

If you are a trainer or a sales manager you must have spent plenty of time and effort trying to quantify and measure your sales rep’s skills.
You must have also in the process come up with useful training methodologies and tests, most of which your sales teams have failed or performed poorly during the sales training programs, but nevertheless closed their sales in flying colors that enhanced your company’s business growth .

65% of businesses adopt a CRM within their first five years- Software Advice Click To Tweet

However, from our experience as a vendor of small business sales CRM software platform, we found that there are no other better indicators for sales growth than viewing sales pipeline metrics for evaluating a sales person’s skills.

To be more specific and precise, we would like to highlight just four sales pipeline indicators for your business growth, which can be easily found from your CRM database, such as:

  • Pipeline Velocity
  • Size of the deals
  • Number of deals accomplished over a period of time
  • Number of conversions done over a period of time

Now if you are someone who has just purchased an easy to use CRM platform like ConvergeHub and is getting started with sales pipeline management, before reading these four metrics that can help to measure sales skills check the “Sales Cycle” in your business, which is according to Trackmaven:

“The sales cycle is the process that companies undergo when selling a product to a customer. It encompasses all activities associated with the closing sale. Many companies have different steps and activities in their sales cycle, depending on how they define it.

Finding a clear cut definition of a sales cycle that spans across the sales industry is tricky. This is because many variations of the definition exist. Some people define it as the time it takes from starting from nothing to closing a deal. Others define it as the time it takes to bring a qualified prospect to close.

Regardless of the definition, however, businesses should keep track of the length of their sales cycle to ensure that their selling process is efficient.”

Why is the sales cycle important for business growth?

Keeping track of the sales cycle provides businesses deeper insights into the efficiency of the operations in sales. Tracking, analyzing and comparing the length of the sales cycle to the standard length across your industry provides information on business growth. For an example, if an organizations sales cycle is shorter than the average length of its industry, it can mean that the organization’s sales department is more efficient than its competitor, whereas a longer sales cycle indicate higher chances of sales falling through the crack.

Here is how the above mentioned four metrics help to measure your businesses’ sales skills:


  1. Measure how fast deals go through the pipeline

You can measure the average age of deals at each stage of the sales pipeline or the average across the whole length of sales cycles, or alternatively measure the average length of time it takes to close a deal.

Now, let us compare two hypothetical sales people and see why measuring sales cycle plays a big role for your business growth. If Tom closes a deal in 6 weeks on an average and Tim does it in 3 weeks, there must be a substantial difference in their work methods and skills.
Since, based on the these numbers we can easily assume that Tom does not have the tendency of gaining small-sized agreements (or mini-closes) during the process of sales, while Tim’s pipeline velocity is a good indicator to show that he uses confirmations like:
“So if I am understanding correctly, are you willing to consider our offering if it helps you save more than $2000?”
Furthermore, Tim probably takes matters into his own hand during the sales process, and continuously checks at a regular interval if another decision has been made by the potential customer.

It is no brainer that pipeline velocity increases with time.
That means sales pipeline velocity must remain higher with experienced sales reps in your organization since it is a sign of danger if that is not.

You can be even more specific in measuring your rep’s sales pipeline velocity using information stored in your CRM database, by starting to measure deal age by each sales stage that you have made in your easy to use CRM software for continuously monitoring predictable revenue for your business growth.


  1. Measure the average size of a sale

Much like deal velocity in the sales pipeline, the average size of deals is another aspect that should increase with time, (assuming that the business you are into does not have any constraint for deal size).

The average size of deals that can be monitored from information stored in the CRM database of your easy to use CRM software is an excellent indicator of the negotiation skills and confidence of your sales teams.

Average deal size shows whether your saleMeasure the number of leads or deals in the sales pipelines reps do have the courage to go after the ‘Big Fish’ and whether they can identify the requirements of the prospective customers during their meetings and calls.

In other words, the average size of the deals indicates how well are your sale rep’s in choosing the right prospects for your organization’s business growth, or how good are your salespersons at finding out the real requirements of the prospects and thereafter skilled enough to match them to the premium products and services offered by your company.


  1. Measure the number of leads or deals in the sales pipeline

It is extremely important that you must measure how many leads or deals someone can add within a specific period of time and what is the total number of deals in the sales pipeline in your CRM database.

Now, if the numbers of new leads/deals are scarce, it is a good enough indicator to show that either your sales reps are not very good at initiating their first contacts or they are simply not working hard enough towards generating new leads.

Therefore, that number of deals added within a specific period of time shows sales skills as well as the work ethics maintained by your sales teams, which is one of the best indicators of success in sales and business growth that can be easily measured using a best small business CRM software like ConvergeHub the award-winning CRM for small and medium businesses.


  1. Measure total win conversion, and conversion by stage

Most owners and sales managers measure the win ratio of their sales reps, since it is a piece of very pertinent information if you look at it by sales stages.

For an example, if Tim has a 75% conversion ratio from “First Meetings Done” to the “Proposal Made” stage in the easy to use CRM software platform, and if it is just 25% for Tom, this can mean one of two things.
It is either Tim is way ahead better at turning a prospective customer’s needs into identifiable “Pain” or that Tim tends to waste time more on nurturing hopeless leads and prospects in his sales pipeline.

Therefore, always compare this sale metric in the CRM database relative to other members in your sales teams.

Conclusion

Hence, all said and done, if you know these 4 sales pipeline metrics (pipeline velocity, size of the deals, number of the deals and conversion ratio) for each team members in your sales at each stage of the sales pipeline in the CRM database, you will have a pretty good idea of each person’s sales skills in your sale team and you can easily compare them with each other for generating more sales and find rapid business growth.

Remember, you do not always need to track every metrics found in your easy to use CRM software at all times since it is definitely wiser to pick only the metrics in your CRM database that matter the most for your business and focus on them for fast-paced business growth.

Although, in conclusion, I would once more reiterate that sales pipeline metrics are the most to-the-point indicators found in an easy to use CRM software like ConvergeHub and other Salesforce Alternative CRM software solutions for highlighting the sales skills of your employees, nevertheless if you have found even better ones, please do add your ideas in the comment below.

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Most Important Integrations That Every MCA CRM Must Have For Business Growth

If you are an owner of a Merchant Cash Advance business, chances are that you have sat in on a few meetings with your employees to help your teams understand the best approaches to manage their leads, contacts, customers, and opportunities. Now, what begun with a Rolodex machine, a date book, and a telephone has now evolved in MCA businesses to the use of sophisticated online lead management software applications- better known as MCA CRM platforms, like ConvergeHub, which is customized for Cash Advance businesses. If you are not aware of what is CRM, you might wonder what is exactly the purpose of Merchant Cash Advance CRM software, how it can help your business to attract and retain more customers, or how you can integrate your easy to use CRM with your MCA website for rapid and consistent business growth.

If you are an owner of a Merchant Cash Advance business, chances are that you have sat in on a few meetings with your employees to help your teams understand the best approaches to manage their leads, contacts, customers, and opportunities.
Now, what begun with a Rolodex machine, a date book, and a telephone has now evolved in MCA businesses to the use of sophisticated online lead management software applications- better known as MCA CRM platforms, like ConvergeHub, which is customized for Cash Advance businesses.

Integrating QuickBooks and CRM helps your business deliver a better customer experience. Click To Tweet

If you are not aware of what is CRM , you might wonder what is exactly the purpose of Merchant Cash Advance CRM software , how it can help your business to attract and retain more customers, or how you can integrate your easy to use CRM with your MCA website for rapid and consistent business growth.

So, here are the answers to your question.

What is Customer Relationship Management software?

The main task of any CRM software be it customized for Cash Advance or any other business, is that it is an application that helps your sales, marketing, support, and even accounts manage your leads, prospects, customers, leading to business growth and more sales.
It is a software that helps to keep track of your leads and customers, their relationship with your organization, keep a record of whom they work for, what they are doing, what they are thinking about buying, or keep a tab on how often they contact you, among an incredible number of other options that CRM also aids in business.

The major benefit of using Merchant Cash Advance software in your MCA business is to find the ability to streamline your sales process, increase interactions with your Cash Advance customers and prospects and finally nurture those relationships in a way you see it fit for your business growth.

Therefore, regardless of whatever easy to use CRM software that you use, for Cash Advance, Retail, Reality, Legal, or any other business, majority of CRM software platforms, gathers the same type of information and have identical types of goals, such as:

  • Perk up customer communication and customer retention plans
  • Enhance company profitability by ushering business growth
  • Increase focus in your business
  • Increase prospect and customer tracking abilities

What are CRM integrations?

The best and the most popular easy to use CRM software especially Salesforce Alternative CRM software solutions are the ones with the highest user adoption rates. This is because, the more your sales, marketing, support, and accounts are willing to input data, the better will be the CRM platform’s ability to enable your employees to engage more customers and perform better over time. Hence inputting more data in the MCA CRM leads to increased business growth.

As with most easy to use CRM software platforms there is no one-size-fits-all solution, as vendors of CRM software as a whole strive to meld different functions to accommodate the needs of individual employees, to personalize their workflow, and create a uniform system that better tracks performance, ensure consistency in customer engagement, and improve productivity for business growth.

Now, CRM platforms can achieve this above-stated feat, with official and third-party integrations.
While official integrations are native collaborations between the MCA CRM and external software solutions, third-party integrations need the use of APIs or web services such as Zapier.

Here are some of the most used integrations that your MCA CRM platforms must have for increasing your alternative lending business’s growth.

  1. QuickBooks (Online)

For organizations, especially the ones that cater to financial services, QuickBooks accounting software is one of the most popular third-party software used along with their CRM platforms.
MCA CRM software platforms like ConvergeHub, offers QuickBooks CRM integration free, and is widely accepted as one of the best QuickBooks CRM software for any alternative lending business who are looking forward to using the data from their QuickBooks accounting software to build a closer relationship with their customers and generate more sales.

Once you integrate QuickBooks and your MCA CRM together, there can be a free exchange of information and data between these two software applications, whereby you can continue to use QuickBooks for accounting purposes, and at the same time see all the customer’s details, products and services for sale, along with invoice and payment information directly in your CRM.
You can then use this data from QuickBooks CRM for reminders, follow-ups, customer service, and business process automation.

  1. DocuSign

A plethora of signing on documents is most essentially required in alternative lending businesses. Therefore, most Merchant Cash Advance software users prefer integrating their MCA CRM with DocuSign that can help them to manage every aspect of each contact from preparing and sending documents for signing to managing them in their CRM platforms.

Using DocuSign with CRM for your business growth helps in remaining rest assured that everything stays legal, secure, and visible with a complete audit trail, apart from saving money and time and enhance your customer’s experience with your organization, delighting your customers along the way.

  1. Ring Central

MCA CRM is a storehouse of information about communications between your teams and your leads, prospects, and customers. Therefore, most companies in alternative lending business integrate Ring Central, which is an external software that help users to dial and log calls through RingCentral inside the CRM in a smarter way to enhance productivity and enrich customer interactions. This integration between the MCA CRM and RingCentral is perfect for small businesses who want to have a reliable voice service inside their CRM and efficiently manage customer phone calls.

  1. Google Drive

Google Drive integration for Merchant Cash Advance CRM software allows the users of the MCA CRM to share, sync, manage and access files associated with records through Google Drive right from within the easy to use CRM account. All attachments from your respective CRM records gets stored and synced into your associated Google Drive account with the help of this most important integration, used by many in alternative lending businesses.

  1. Google Calendar

Integrating Google Calendar with your MCA CRM software helps to bring all of your events, tasks, and meetings from your Google Calendar to your Merchant Cash Advance software, allowing you to stay updated by referring to what you have planned so that you never miss out any opportunities.

Once you use this integration for your alternative lending business and edit the calendar of your choice in real time, you can make a decision if you want those alterations to be reflected in either the Google Calendar, or MCA CRM software’s calendar, or both.

  1. Lead Generator Tool

If you are using ConvergeHub, the best MCA CRM for small businesses, you can also download and integrate its Free Lead Generator Tool.

Using this integration allows you to visit any lead’s social media page and capture all information instantly with no manual typing and hereafter save qualified leads from social media, other websites and even Gmail with one click of the mouse for even more sales power and business growth.

This integration (which is most often liked by all ConvergeHub MCA CRM users) helps to capture qualified leads into the sales funnel in a flash and use the power of CRM to convert them into paying customers – all for FREE.

Conclusion

Hence, the only limit to the ways you can use ConvergeHub MCA CRM is your imagination. ConvergeHub CRM seamlessly integrates with more than 30 third-party integrations, helping you to integrate your billing, call management, e-signature solution, and others, for a complete customer data, smarter selling, leading to rapid business growth .

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