Year: 2019

How to Transform from Good to Great Customer Support Progressively

In the modern scenario, customer experience and customer satisfaction have become the most important factor for any organization, brand or an enterprise. Companies today strive hard to make their Customer Experience (CX) as smooth as possible using easy to use CRM software to help them in the process, a recognition that is the product of globalization and consumer awareness. Hence, the Voice of the Customer (VOC) is more vocal now than ever as they are dictating the policies of most companies be it big or small across the globe.

In the modern scenario, customer experience and customer satisfaction have become the most important factor for any organization, brand or an enterprise.
Companies today strive hard to make their Customer Experience (CX) as smooth as possible using easy to use CRM software to help them in the process, a recognition that is the product of globalization and consumer awareness.

Hence, the Voice of the Customer (VOC) is more vocal now than ever as they are dictating the policies of most companies be it big or small across the globe.
Many companies nowadays even take up social stances to support overwhelming public opinions on several issues.

80% of businesses use customer satisfaction scores to analyze customer experience and improve it. - Harvard Business Review Click To Tweet

Therefore, in such a consumer conscious marketplace, it is important and most necessary to understand the process and strategies you need to handle your customers while providing solutions to their issues.

Here are some of the ways you can provide world-class customer support to your customers:

  1. Chat Integration

Chat integration with your easy to use CRM software platform helps to store previous customer interactions in the CRM database so that the information lets your support team instantly access relevant customer data while resolving customer-facing issues.
Moreover integrating chat application with CRM software helps support agents to recognize the customers and thereby be more productive while providing solutions to their problems.
Additionally, as the chat application automatically greets the customer while a support agent is assigned to provide human-touch, it keeps the customer engaged until they are attended.

  1. Self-Service

CSS or Customer Self Service is an important feature that exists in most easy to use CRM software platforms be it Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM.

CSS is a functionality that allows your customers to perform standard actions like creating an account or a payment method without the presence of a customer support executive.

Hence, CSS is a feature that not only saves a lot of time for the support agents but the data that is entered also gets updated in the CRM database instantaneously.

  1. Interactive Voice Response

IVR or Interactive Voice Response is an extremely effective and convenient means for routing the call to specific departments in your organization.

Using IVR the customer calls the company and thereafter chooses from a series of options from the prerecorded voice prompts in the system.

IVR provides customers with the options which are categorized into sections so that they can find the appropriate department or agent with the necessary knowledge to solve their issues.

Therefore, IVR as support functionality accelerates the process of customers getting solutions for their questions and issues.

  1. Service Level Agreements

SLA or Service Level Agreement allows support and service reps to track their time spent to solve an issue.

The SLA factor is set up in such way that any unattended or unresolved support ticket gets automatically escalated, and are passed on to higher level support representatives who are well-equipped to handle the situation and solve the issues.

This is because; in SLA the support tickets keeps repeating unless the ticket gets resolved effectually.

Therefore, using SLA for resolving customer complains promotes a sense of responsibility and accountability within the support teams.

This way by assuring the customers that every question or support tickets are attended to, improves customer satisfaction for your brand drastically.

  1. Social Media Integration

With leads being tracked from all social media websites like Google, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and others, easy to use CRM platforms allows the users of the software to segregate leads generated from these websites and thereafter organize them based on priority so that support agents are capable of providing solutions at the earliest.

Conclusion

Nowadays, customers recognize the ease of doing business with a company and if they are satisfied with their services remain grateful for it.

Therefore embedding these features in your easy to use CRM software will not only improve customer relations speedily but also your enable sales and support teams to work seamlessly with each other to provide world-class customer experience and thereby find business growth rapidly.

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Best Practices Of Contact Management With Easy To Use CRM Software

It is often said that it takes a decade to build a reputation but just one minute to ruin it. Any good business strategy not only signifies more closure but it also means repeat business and happy customers. Now, how can you beget happy customers? The answer is easy- by understanding their requirements and delivering their needs. However, to do this you elementarily require more information about your customers and secondly an easy to use CRM or Contact Management software that helps you to build a stronger informational customer profile.

It is often said that it takes a decade to build a reputation but just one minute to ruin it.
Any good business strategy not only signifies more closure but it also means repeat business and happy customers.
Now, how can you beget happy customers?
The answer is easy- by understanding their requirements and delivering their needs.
However, to do this you elementarily require more information about your customers and secondly an easy to use CRM or Contact Management software that helps you to build a stronger informational customer profile.

Easy to use CRM is critical for your sales teams.

Patronage by loyal customers yields 65 percent of a typical business’ volume - American Management Association (2018) Click To Tweet

This is because Contact Management software aids them to dig out customer information gathered in the CRM database to find out your customer’s needs, wants and preferences.

Even though for startup organizations and small businesses purchasing a best small business CRM software could stretch their budgets a little, nevertheless, an easy to use CRM software offers certain most essential benefits that can empower your sales, marketing, and support teams.

As a part of your best small business CRM software, a Contact Management solution also features:

  • Centralized storage for contact information
  • Sales tracking
  • Easy to search through your CRM database
  • Email integration
  • Scheduling
  • Lead nurturing
  • Conversion management
  • Document management

Although the requirement for customer data is acknowledged by all in businesses, most organizations especially startups and SMBs fail to create a contact management plan that is integrated with the required touch points needed for converting prospects and nurturing existing customers.

Here are a few contact management best practices for your business using best small business CRM software:

1. Tracking interactions

When an easy to use CRM platform has an integrated Contact Management software it helps in creating a single page for viewing all the interactions between your prospects and your company, which aids sales, marketing and customer support teams in your organization to find quick access to the required information when and where they need it from the centralized CRM database.

Using the best small business CRM software all interactions of phone calls, meetings, emails, and social integrations are logged and stored with the contact information.

Therefore, once you have a CRM in place, a single click can provide you all the information of your leads, prospects, and customers and prepare your teams to make the calls with all relevant information at their fingertips.

Moreover, if you are using a QuickBooks CRM like ConvergeHub, which offers QuickBooks CRM integration free, you can keep on using QuickBooks for accounting, and at the same time see invoice and payment information, customer details, products, directly in your best small business CRM, which you can then use for business process automation, reminders, customer service, and follow-ups.

Hence, by bringing your different teams together Contact Management software when integrated with a CRM helps you to cross-sell and forecast which products or services of your brand can be of interest to your customers.

2. Better understanding of your customer

It is a known fact that customer service is far less expensive than acquiring new customers. According to a recent survey, it has been found that 9 out of 10 consumers in the U.S said that they are ready to pay more for enjoying a superior customer experience.

Hence, it does not really matter how awesome is your offerings, since the only thing that is of interest to the customer is how well they are being treated.

Now, equipped with an easy to use CRM software you can access everything that is needed to understand your prospects and customers, right from the history of their purchases, to their interactions in your website, their social media presences and more.

Therefore, with such homogeneous information at their fingertips, your sales and support reps can pitch their calls with more efficiency for each of your customers.

3. Up-selling and cross-selling opportunities

It is easy to access and share data when you have all the required information stored centrally in the CRM database .

Therefore, accessing customer history after implementing CRM software for your organization, according to a report published by NelsonHall, most businesses takes a great stride in up-selling and cross-selling activities.

For example, if one of your customer’s purchase histories shows that the customer has purchased several ankle-length jeans, by using automated email campaigning feature of the CRM, you can easily email the customer on sneakers or best-suited belts to match those jeans.

4. Increased profits

Can you imagine collecting a colossal number of business cards and storing them without an easy to use CRM?
We guess not.

Now even if you are capable of storing your customer and prospect’s data in silo software solutions it makes no sense of that data that is only visible to you, since it can reduce your sales and profits, as in this case your sales teams will be spending more time for finding information than leveraging it.

Additionally, manual data entry is a time-consuming and tedious process. Content management software is a platform that helps to organize data as specified and aid employees to devote their work hours to more important tasks than the administrative ones.

Now, because of the above stated reason as your business grows more efficiently by minimizing unnecessary middle work, your sales and support reps can retain more customers by offering them superior customer service, make up-sells and cross-sells by understanding the customer’s needs and find new customers through word of mouth advertising and networking and hence accomplish more in the same workday.

5. Targeted marketing

With the best small business CRM and Contact Management software in place, you can access several marketing templates and create timed and automated drip marketing campaigns.

Using easy to use CRM solutions you can not only group your potential customers by priority and interests but also create groups that fit best with your marketing plans.

Conclusion

Therefore, in a gist, every aspect of easy to use CRM software is cut-out to perform a particular task efficiently so that it can help your organization manage marketing, sales, and support better for your company and also your customers.

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Most Common Rookie Marketing Automation Pitfalls To Avoid Immediately

In modern times, marketing automation has become a vital tool for both enterprises and small businesses. Marketing automation (MA) is a tool that can aid you in gaining and sustaining competitive advantage by speeding up sales in the marketplace. Moreover, when MA is integrated into an easy to use CRM, it enables the user to personalize messages, engage more contacts and thereby builds a world-class relationship with prospects and customers. However, all marketing automation systems are not the same. There are many silo MA software apps and CRM platforms that need integration with third-party applications, which can not only cost time and money but also bring along with it the fear of things going wrong down the road.

In modern times, marketing automation has become a vital tool for both enterprises and small businesses. Marketing automation (MA) is a tool that can aid you in gaining and sustaining competitive advantage by speeding up sales in the marketplace.
Moreover, when MA is integrated into an easy to use CRM , it enables the user to personalize messages, engage more contacts and thereby builds a world-class relationship with prospects and customers.

Marketing automation on average drives upto 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead- Google (2019) Click To Tweet

However, all marketing automation systems are not the same. There are many silo MA software apps and CRM platforms that need integration with third-party applications, which can not only cost time and money but also bring along with it the fear of things going wrong down the road.

This is the exact reason businesses prefer to use all-in-one CRM software like ConvergeHub which includes Sales Force Automation (SFA) that is also popularly known as Marketing Automation in a CRM.

The four main benefits of using MA in an easy to use CRM are:

  • You can customize the MA for the unique requirement of your business
  • You can send multiple email campaigns 24/7 all at the same time
  • Automate your business processes specific to the contacts along their journey
  • Create alerts and reminders for enhancing your workflows

Nevertheless, there are also MA mistakes you can make along the way, which you must avoid as mentioned below:

MA Mistake #1

Send Emails to Contacts That Did Not Opt-In

One of the most important Marketing Automation best practices is that MA involves permission-based emails. This implies, you only send emails to people in your contact list that provides permissions to send them information about your brand.
You can get this permission when each of the contacts opt-in to your email, by providing their emails through authentic channels like web-to-lead forms, the free trial offers, buyer’s information forms and many more.

Therefore, going by the books, adding contacts manually or importing a list to your MA system is a violation of the Spam rules, since if you do it there are changes that doing so may compromise the delivery of emails and thereby reduce the success rate of your email campaigning strategies.

MA Mistake #2

Not Maintaining an Active Contact’s Database

Now, even after you get any contact to opt-in for your emails, you must also keep them active. This implies that you must continuously send emails with appropriate contents to keep your list engaged at least once every week. This is because, if you do not, your contacts may forget you and thereafter do not open your emails.

You can use re-engagement campaigns as an effective and time-tested method to get inactive contacts to get engaged with your emails.

Therefore, always maintain an active and clean contact list in your CRM database .

MA Mistake #3

Focusing on Wrong Metrics

Marketing Automation is an extremely robust marketing tool when integrated into easy to use CRM that allows the user to measure the results of their campaigns.

Some of the most important email campaigning metrics are:

  • Opt-ins
  • Sales conversion rate
  • Email opening rate
  • Link clicked rate
  • Landing page visits, and more

However, attending to wrong metrics can make you misinterpret the real results.

Therefore it is most important that you must know the metrics you are seeking to find with each campaign individually to determine your email campaign’s success using MA software.

MA Mistake #4

Not Split Testing Campaigns

All email campaigns done with the help of Marketing Automation differs by the number of contacts, type, content and more.
Hence, spit test your campaigns to find what works right for your business.
The key to spit testing your campaigns is to just focus one variable at a time like, offer, headline, price, design, target audience and others.

Take the campaign that wins as your new control and then tests other subsequent campaigns against it.

MA Mistake #5

Not Having a Certified Consultant on Your Team

We are finally talking about this mistake as MA is both an art and science. Marketing Automation in practice requires a mix of technological knowhow along with expertise in direct response marketing.

This is the reason why it is best to rely on an independent marketing automation software consultant to build your custom Marketing Automation system, train your employees and develop MA strategies for your business growth.

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How Can You Manage An Underperforming Sales Team Using Easy To Use CRM Software

Your business is using an easy to use CRM but your sales teams are not meeting their goals, is a tale which as old as time. When you hired your sales reps you thought they are the right fit for your organization, so why are they not exceeding their quotes now? While at times the problem lies with the employees themselves, nevertheless many times even something beyond their control is to be blamed for a dip in their performances. Therefore, here are a few best strategies for boosting your sales team’s performance based on case studies and real-world results, so that your employees can get back and hit their benchmarks in no time.

Your business is using an easy to use CRM but your sales teams are not meeting their goals, is a tale which as old as time.

When you hired your sales reps you thought they are the right fit for your organization, so why are they not exceeding their quotes now?

46 percent of sales teams report widespread use of CRM systems - Entrepreneur(2018) Click To Tweet

While at times the problem lies with the employees themselves, nevertheless many times even something beyond their control is to be blamed for a dip in their performances.

Therefore, here are a few best strategies for boosting your sales team’s performance based on case studies and real-world results, so that your employees can get back and hit their benchmarks in no time.

  1. Create a formal system for qualifying your leads

It is a common saying in organizations whose backbone is customer relationships and sales is that “you can never close an unqualified lead”.
Therefore the most prevailing factor as to why sales teams underperform is a breakdown in their formal prospect qualification process- or an absolute absence of a sales process in the team.

A sales process is most essential for any organization as having a workflow in place for qualifying prospects does away with the guesswork of who your sales reps should track and who to say “no”.

To do this you can start by:

  1. Finding the ideal customer for your business

Understanding exactly the kind of person you are selling to and thereafter passing on that vision to your sales reps is the primary step in the lead qualifying process.
Therefore never fail to remember to regularly update your customer persona(s) with a change in tends and market dynamics over time.

Capturing leads

By creating a lead generation funnel through your social media channels and website that captures contact info, you can turn cold calls into warm leads for your sales.

Consulting a lead score

Several easy to use CRM platforms can aid you clearly and quickly identify quality prospects. Many do this by analyzing the behavior of the visitors on your website and generating a lead scoring method based on parameters you set for making a lead ‘sales qualified’ by your marketing team.

This is because, once you have an automated process in place using easy to use CRM software that is capable of identifying who is most likely to get converted, your sales teams can follow-up speedily and keep their sales pipeline full.

  1. Optimize By Documenting Your Follow-Up Process

On top of qualifying leads, keeping a well-documented follow-up process bars a rep from wondering what to do next. An easy to use CRM software platform is capable of automating much of this process and remind your salespersons who they need to contact and when.

Easy to use CRM platforms also make it possible for the management to analyze and track data around all the team’s accounts so that they can find which follow-up strategy is working and which ones do not.

Therefore by developing a clear process at every stage of the sales pipeline, your sales team can find a better chance of performing consistently and meet their goals.

  1. Rethink Your Compensation Strategy

In a study done by Associate Professor Doug J. Chung an eminent faculty of Harvard Business School he suggested that several compensation strategies such as increasing sales quota for high performing sales reps, caps on commissions, may actually hurt any businesses’ long-term revenue generation goals.

Therefore, Prof. Chung suggested big companies should use a pay system that is tailored for each individual, with different components and bonuses in place to keep average, low-performing, and high-performing salespersons engaged.

Do you want to tailor sales incentives for individual members of your sales teams? Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Physical prizes

Offering latest technology-based products or accessories has the added bonus of reminding the sales reps of their achievements each time they look at it.

Recognitions

Mention at a company-wide function or in a newsletter may be just another way to remind the sales team members that their work has been appreciated.

Extra time-off

Providing bonus vacations to the performing sales reps keeps the sales reps feel refreshed and also ready to jump back fully engaged at work.

Expenses-paid vacations

This idea is for long-term motivation for your reps as they are more expensive prizes, or you can also adjust for smaller budgets by offering a sumptuous dinner or other similar experiences to team members that meet their quotas.

  1. Prioritize Cooperation Over Competition

One common and most popular strategy for increasing productivity is sales gamification. However, it must be remembered that outright competition is not always the best technique to boost your sales team’s productivity.

Therefore, instead of investing in gamification models that pit salespersons against one another prioritize on collaborations in order to win more deals.

This is because, a sales culture that is cooperative in nature is not only essential for maintaining an enjoyable, healthy work environment but it can also help in enhancing the overall productivity of your sales teams.

  1. Refine your product

Your salespersons most likely hear a lot of both good and bad feedback from the customers.

Now let us face it, no amount of sales finesse can really make up for an imperfect product or services.

Therefore, in this situation, you need to invest more for developing your offerings and streamline the operations of your customer support teams.

It might also be wise if you can take a step further and ask your sales team members for their sincere feedbacks during the product development process, as they have a deep understanding of the customer’s opinions and the current market trends.

LITTLE IMPROVEMENTS CAN MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE

Employing an underperforming sales team can be really frustrating. However, this is also true that turning things around can be much easier than you can think.

Therefore get to the root of the problem and use a creative approach to fix lacunas and pitfalls for your sales teams that can quickly deliver the results your sales teams are looking for.

Remember, exploring the reasons for your sales team’s underperformance will not only pay dividends in the long haul, but it will also lay the foundation for creating better processes and foster a company culture that will remain even long after your current reps have moved on and new sales reps have joined your organization’s sales teams.

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Top Reasons Why Your On-Demand Startup Requires A CRM For Growth

One of the surefire ways to start a profitable and successful business is to cater to on-demand services. Irrespective of which industry you are in the present situation in businesses clearly states that the recognition of on-demand services is almost everywhere across the globe. This is because, if you see that there is a requirement for any particular product or service, you will surely find an online application that makes it feasible for the user to access that service without having to leave their current place, which justifies the mushrooming growth of on-demand startups every passing year.

One of the surefire ways to start a profitable and successful business is to cater to on-demand services. Irrespective of which industry you are in the present situation in businesses clearly states that the recognition of on-demand services is almost everywhere across the globe.
This is because, if you see that there is a requirement for any particular product or service, you will surely find an online application that makes it feasible for the user to access that service without having to leave their current place, which justifies the mushrooming growth of on-demand startups every passing year.

How Easy To Use CRM Can Work Wonders for On-Demand Startups

Simply put, implementing a robust CRM strategy will assist small businesses and startup organizations in understanding their customers and their needs in a better way, which in turn will help in boosting business growth.

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

With an easy to use CRM in place, your startup benefits from:

  • Improved ROI
  • Organized information
  • Scalability
  • Unified and collaborative interface
  • Automated service
  • Maximized up-selling and cross-selling activities

Apart from these the other most important and interesting reasons for which best small business CRM software becomes a must for any on-demand startups include:

  1. An Easy Solution For Finding Customers

If you are assuming that easy to use CRM is just a database for collecting your contact information, you need to dive deeper to know what is CRM in reality.

Any small business CRM is a mixture of a plethora of features and functionalities that includes sales funnel, automated campaigns, web to lead forms, landing pages and much more.

Therefore, in short, once you have your best small business CRM in place, your business will not only become more efficient, but it will also steady become better with its sales figures.

It is natural that you as a startup organization cannot bear to lose even a single customer. That implies you will find it important to leverage every sign of attention and interest from your target audience.

With easy to use CRM in place, you can do this by using Web-to-Lead forms that capture the actions of the visitors on your website. You can also further track using a CRM what your visitors explored, information on their time spent (page wise), and much more, which can easily help you to research and understand the interests and buying behavior of your prospects.

Moreover, the audience who visits your business webpage also gets automatically added as a lead once they enter their details in the Web-to-Lead forms.

Now, once you get the leads in your CRM database you can easily nurture them further according to your customer acquisition strategy for driving them home and generate more sales and revenue.

  1. Provides you all the data you need at your fingertips

Everything is data-driven nowadays in this fast-paced digital world. Right from where you as a startup should invest your marketing dollars to what are your customer’s buying habits.

This is the key reason as to why it is no wonder that you must adopt a proper data management system which can assist in sorting, analyzing and thereafter provide you with the right information exactly when you need it for your business growth.

Now, let us understand this with an example.

You have started an on-demand pet grooming application and you have a customer who is booking slots for your service, however not on a regular basis.

It is over here adopting the best small business CRM software for your on-demand business will help you to communicate and track the customer, in order to find out why he is not interested in becoming a regular customer.

Likewise, if you see that few of your other existing customers have the same booking pattern, using information from your CRM database you can easily introduce a new offer program specifically targeting them, like 5% off on every order for signing up with your program.

Will this not trigger and increase your sales?

Easy to use CRM software can provide you with all the useful data and information which can even help you to change your marketing and selling strategies in order to ensure that your business finds repeat customers.

This way, your on-demand startup will start earning loyal customers base over the course of time.

  1. Helps in customer retention and provides better customer experience

As an on-demand startup, your first focus should be definitely to primarily acquire, retain and then engage your customers while providing them a world-class shopping experience.

Easy to use CRM software platforms facilitate all your customer related information on a single page. It involves everything related to being a customer of your offerings; including customers purchase history, activities, and feedbacks.

Therefore, using a CRM, as a startup organization you can be more geared up to respond to your customer’s questions and issues quickly and efficiently.

Moreover, if you use your CRM for profiling and segmentation of your prospects, it will further help you to take better care of your prospective leads and customers.

Viewing the purchase history of your customers can also help you to foresee the offerings of your brand that your customers are interested in ordering or find out when they will re-order again.
Based on this information out of your CRM database you can use your CRM to send push notifications, reminding your customers about your products and services or send a special offer pertaining to the last order(s) of your customers.

Apart from this best small business CRM also provides its users with an easy flow of their sales process, right from ordering till billing.
Additionally, as the most effective business management tool CRM software even provides the users with important customer data stating what you need to be prepared with for your future sales.

For example, once your company’s sales team takes the order, the billing department will access the same information inside the CRM and process the bill, after which the shipping department will look into the same information inside the CRM and prepare for dispatching the order.

Therefore, once this process is being carried out, you can update your customers in real time at every stage in the sales process to keep your customers informed about the status of their orders.

This way, best CRM for small business can provide a stellar customer experience and hence help in the retention of your customers.

Conclusion

Properly implementing and managing a CRM system for your on-demand startup can not only save your time but also create happy and satisfied customers in order to reap the maximum benefits for your business growth.

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How To Better Align CRM Strategy With Easy To Use CRM Software

IT industry experts and innumerable business gurus often talk about the importance of aligning technology in accordance with the most strategic goals of your business. Now, this also true with easy to use CRM, or Customer Relationship Management software, whereby for a CRM implementation to achieve success, the software must be closely aligned with your businesses’ CRM strategy for finding growth. Therefore, to align your CRM strategy with the CRM software, you primarily need to understand exactly what your organization is hoping to achieve from your CRM?

IT industry experts and innumerable business gurus often talk about the importance of aligning technology in accordance with the most strategic goals of your business.

Now, this also true with easy to use CRM , or Customer Relationship Management software, whereby for a CRM implementation to achieve success, the software must be closely aligned with your businesses’ CRM strategy for finding growth.

91% of companies with more than 11 employees now use CRM software - Buyer Zone Click To Tweet

Therefore, to align your CRM strategy with the CRM software, you primarily need to understand exactly what your organization is hoping to achieve from your CRM?

This is because, while strategies can be unique and different for every company, the following easy to use CRM system’s capabilities can be adapted and reviewed and thereafter applied for all organizations aiming to implement their CRM solution in the pursuit of enhancing customer relationship for their business.

Ease of implementation and use

Although “ease of use” in CRM software is a subjective opinion, nevertheless several organizations want to adopt a CRM system that is relatively easy to deploy and use.

This is because, if the CRM solution is not so, it may exceed the budget on start-up cost, detract their projected ROI from the CRM, or even worse the users of the CRM may not embrace the software willingly.

For example from a usage point of view, does your CRM system requires excessive keystrokes, screens, mouse click, and page refresh to perform common tasks and processes?

Or how easy it is for your employees to access the screen in the CRM’s dashboard they find most useful for their day-to-day activities and tasks?

These factors need to we evaluated and thereafter modified, as the easy to use feature is most needed and an important attribute especially for small businesses, that mostly have fewer training programs, limited support channels, and also inadequate IT resource.

Scalability

How scalable is your best small business CRM software?

Businesses, especially small organizations will undoubtedly change, and so they need to plan in advance for their future growth.

Because of this, your CRM application must be capable of accommodating the change and growth in business, which may include supporting an increase in the users of the software, or a boost in transactions without failing on its performance.

Therefore, an easy to use CRM that is not scalable will ultimately provide diminishing returns for your business growth .

Cloud based CRM software platforms offer near limitless scalability, since if you purchase a SaaS CRM you can easily scale-up or scale-down your user counts as per your business needs.

Business Process Automation           

One of the major advantages of using your best small business CRM software is that it can very easily automate most of your business processes, which eventually leads to increased productivity for your employees.

Therefore, one of the key features that you need to evaluate while adopting your easy to use CRM software is the level of sales process automation or SFA (Sales Force Automation) capabilities it provides.

This is especially true with small businesses that are looking for trimming their labor costs or are bootstrapped with limited resources.

Most easy to use CRM like ConvergeHub offers workflow designers in the software, which permits businesses to set up triggers for events and automate business processes with the help of the CRM system.

Software Customization

There is possibly no CRM in the marketplace that is capable of accommodating all of any organization’s business needs.
Therefore, the ability of easy to use CRM application’s to be tailored and customized can make a great difference in business to software fit and ROI.

Moreover, the level of customization that is possible with your CRM application also makes a big difference in the success and failure of the CRM implementation process.

Best small business CRM software like ConvergeHub enable their customers to configure, customize and upgrade their easy to use CRM software solutions to their requirements or changing business goals.

Hence, before adopting a CRM look into the level of flexibility the software offers which is a differentiation most small businesses need today to compete effectively in their respective marketplace.

Reduced support and maintenance

Deployment of easy to use CRM software in an enterprise can lead to very large support requirements and IT maintenance services.

This is the exact reason as to why, a growing number of organizations are opting for cloud based CRM systems, rather than traditional on-premise licensed software products.

Cloud based applications do not require internal maintenance and support issues because SaaS CRM vendors handle many frequent problems with the software on behalf of their customers in a shared service setup.

System integration

Another key consideration that you must watch out while adopting your easy to use CRM, is the level your CRM system integrates with other applications like ERP or an Accounting software that will help in contributing to your CRM strategy for your business.

There are several CRM applications in the market that provides their software platforms with the capability of enabling simple integrations and data exchange with third-party applications.

For example, small business CRM like ConvergeHub, which is also known as the most popular QuickBooks CRM provides QuickBooks CRM integration free and so allow the seamless transfer of data between the CRM and the accounting app, which helps in generating more revenue.

Versatility

Before adopting a CRM, you need to find how much functionality your company is looking out of your easy to use CRM?

Many CRM systems deliver SFA (Sales Force Automation), marketing automation, sales order processing, PRM (Partner Relationship Management), customer support as part of their basic offerings.

Additionally, you even need to understand what kind of analytical capabilities and business intelligence, such as online analytics processing, data warehousing or predictive reporting that you require for your business.

This is because, once you get these questions answered, during the CRM selection process, by understanding your business needs can prove invaluable during implementation and for aligning your CRM strategy with the software.

Remote access and mobility

Nowadays as most of the workers are mobile, they prefer the CRM application’s ability to be accessed from various locations and types of devices on the go.

Now, cloud based CRM applications allow the users to access their easy to use CRM even via a Web browser, regardless of their location and thus do not make them remain tied to any particular desktop.

Information Security

Confidentiality and strong information security are most essentially required, especially for applications and systems that house sensitive information like customer data, sales forecasts, and others.

For example, security considerations for a CRM include encryption, access control, and also an array of layered security protocols.

Therefore, before purchasing your CRM apply extra due intelligence to the CRM service provider’s security infrastructure as physical and logical security should always be on your highest priority while using this technology for your company.

Takeaway

While the CRM software’s capabilities and features should not be used for laying down your CRM strategy, nevertheless, understanding what to look for and what is available in the CRM can help to identify opportunities and craft a workable strategy that can be easily implemented within the constructs of the software.

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Why You Need Marketing Automation In Your Best Small Business CRM Software

Approximately 9 out of 10 buyers in the B2B segment nowadays begin their buying process online. They start their buy cycle journey by searching on the internet to find independent product reviews, while also asking their friends and colleagues in social networking websites who they recommend and read contents in customer forums to view what existing customers have to say. Research has shown that B2B buyers educate themselves with online contents and therefore approximately three-quarter of their buy cycles gets completed even before they have started their engagement with a vendor.

Approximately 9 out of 10 buyers in the B2B segment nowadays begin their buying process online. They start their buy cycle journey by searching on the internet to find independent product reviews, while also asking their friends and colleagues in social networking websites who they recommend and read contents in customer forums to view what existing customers have to say.
Research has shown that B2B buyers educate themselves with online contents and therefore approximately three-quarter of their buy cycles gets completed even before they have started their engagement with a vendor.
In other words, B2B buyers usually shortlists a vendor even before they interact with those vendors.
Therefore, it is tragic for the vendors that if they are not found in the online discovery process, they get excluded from the sale opportunities.
Now, marketers are also keenly aware that the previously held vendor-led sales cycle has been completely replaced with an online buyer-driven sales cycle in modern times.
Hence modern day marketers are also presently shifting their marketing budgets towards digital marketing campaigns or doing content marketing, email marketing, marketing in social media, paid marketing using their best small business CRM software platform, which is gradually becoming the most preferred methods for engaging and attracting online buyers with their offerings.

76% of B2B marketing professionals strongly agree that their ability to track marketing ROI gives marketing more respect - Forrester Click To Tweet

 The Problem Areas

Now, even after increasing their investments on online marketing methods markets are incurring several tactical challenges, which include:

  • How do marketers track, identify, and engage anonymous online prospects?
  • How do marketers link the volume of digital history to each online buyer?
  • How do marketers identify which online prospects can be ranked qualified and which are not?
  • Once the marketers find an online prospect in the company website, how do they convert them to a recognized person?
  • How do companies do all these activities without adding new staffs?

Therefore, now we need to consider how these tactical obstructions contribute to much larger challenges.

When sales are slow, sales reps rants that they are just not getting enough leads to convert from the marketing teams. Although this may be at times right, then again when sales are good, sales reps even then opines that the leads delivered by the marketing teams are not up to the mark.

In a recent study published by Insights (a global leader in business development solutions), it has been found that more than two-thirds of sales reps rate their lead generation capabilities as “needs improvement”.
Additionally, in the same study, it has also been highlighted that marketers only supply on an average only 30% of the leads sales needs on a day-to-day basis.

Viewing from a lead generation perspective, the marketing department in any organization, is made responsible to bring segmentation, relevant and personalized contents, highly tested messaging, and scale up demand generation campaigns using their best small business CRM software, to acquire the required volume and quality of leads which is needed by the sales teams to achieve their revenue objective for business growth .

However, this becomes a tall order for marketing, when the leads buying intents are unknown or the sales reps harps for more leads, whereby in several instances marketers throw all their leads over the fence, which consequentially incurs several ramifications, which include:

  • Good lead falls between the cracks when marketers also combine unqualified leads in their lead distribution to sales.
  • Productivity in sales drops when sales reps become lead qualifiers rather than lead verifiers or are forced to become their own marketing shops.
  • The CPL (Cost per Lead) increases drastically when sales reps are made to acquire their own leads one at a time, as opposed to the marketing teams that apply repeatable process to acquire leads in bulk.
  • Leads that are not acquired by the marketing do not benefit from lead nurturing campaign and other marketing programs and so they have higher chances to be languished or get lost.

The Business Solution- Marketing Automation Software

The solution to all these above-stated issues lies in making marketing to acquire the bulk of leads using repeatable processes and thereafter transfer only those leads that are qualified to the sales teams.

Does it sound easy? Well, it is not.

Nevertheless, in the modern times marketing applications like best small business CRM software platforms have responded with automation and methods to tackle both these online marketing problems and their overarched lead generation objectives.

Marketing automation is a software application which not only brings process and precision but it also capable of analyzing lead generation campaigns. To be more specific marketing automation in easy to use CRM software helps to acquire, track, score, nurture, and thereafter send sales-ready leads to the sales team.

Here is how marketing automation in best small business CRM software do it.

Digital Tracking

Marketing automation systems when integrated into CRM software is capable of tracking website visitors using cookies, store click-stream data by cookie ID and after that apply IP reverse to identify the leads. Now, using this technique when anonymous visitors become known, the cookie history is associated with the lead records.

Additionally, marketing automation software in a CRM software helps marketers to create landing pages along with registration forms which are also capable of converting unknown visitors into know contacts, to be stored in the CRM database.

Moreover, by tracking the lead’s digital footprints, marketing automation applications can easily find out what contents the leads have consumed, what searches they have made online, which can help marketers to understand the buyer’s preferences and where they are in the buying cycle.

Lead Scoring

This is a process which can be performed using marketing automation in a CRM, whereby leads are assigned points for the lead’s attributes and behavior in order to measure if a lead is fit and has the propensity to buy the offerings.

By capturing actionable data points which helps in scoring buyer’s behaviors like the volume of the lead’s visit to your company’s website, the type of searches they performed, the specified pages they read on your website, and the number of contents they downloaded, marketing automation software in a CRM automatically update lead scores and thereafter once the leads reach a threshold score, the system automatically forwards the sales-ready leads to the designated sales reps for immediate follow-ups.

This way using lead scoring techniques marketing can forward fewer but higher quality leads to the sales teams.

According to a study, it has been found that 10 percent increases in lead quality can generate 40 percent increased productive for the sales teams.

Lead Nurturing

The over-abundance of information about products and services in the internet has changed the way buyers search and research for their requirements.

According to a research, it has been found that in the B2B space:

“25-30% of new leads are sales-ready when received, about 45-55% are not sales-ready when received but about three-quarters of this group will eventually become qualified, and about 25-30% of new leads are not sales-ready when received and never will be.”

Therefore using marketing automation businesses can build lead nurturing campaigns which are capable of delivering educational and informational contents to the leads to engage and advance the required leads until they are matured and becomes sales-ready.

In other words, lead nurturing creates high impact revenue opportunities that can go untapped in your business if you are not using marketing automation in your easy to use CRM software.

Lead Transfer

Marketing automation software is an application that can forward sales-ready leads automatically to the sales teams once those leads have reached a preapproved threshold score by implementing lead nurturing processes.

Moreover, using marketing automation applications marketers can deliver more intelligence with their sales-ready leads, which can empower the sales reps to close their deals in lesser time, and also deliver updates when previously transferred leads gets engaged in an unusual behavior or any new activity.

Lead Analytics

Business intelligence gathered from a closed-loop reporting system helps in continuous process improvement and thereby helps in business growth.

When marketing automation software is integrated with easy to use CRM system it is capable of tying every lead, customer, and revenue dollars back to the marketing program that created them.

According to Forrester Research:

“76% of B2B marketing professionals strongly agree that their ability to track marketing ROI gives marketing more respect.”

Conclusion

Therefore, if marketing automation which is also known as Sales Force Automation (SFA) is used with easy to use CRM software, it does not only offers a tremendous potential for generating new leads from anonymous visitors and nurture them till they become sales-ready, but it also makes your sales teams more efficient by helping your sales reps concentrate more on what they do best (sale) for generating more revenue and bring rapid business growth.

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Methods And Benefits Of Measuring Customer Satisfaction With Easy To Use CRM

Customer Satisfaction or CS is an extremely important, however mostly overlooked aspect of a successful business endeavor all across the globe. This is because, companies concentrate too heavily on acquiring fresh customers and spend little time or resources on satisfying the existing ones, which can be quite damaging for sustaining success in business, for both small and large enterprises. That is why measuring CS is so important with the help of easy to use CRM software, to find out whether or not your purchasers are truly happy using your brand.

Customer Satisfaction or CS is an extremely important, however mostly overlooked aspect of a successful business endeavor all across the globe.
This is because, companies concentrate too heavily on acquiring fresh customers and spend little time or resources on satisfying the existing ones, which can be quite damaging for sustaining success in business, for both small and large enterprises.

That is why measuring CS is so important with the help of easy to use CRM software, to find out whether or not your purchasers are truly happy using your brand.

Existing customers who are happy with your brand on an average spend 67 percent more than your new customers. Click To Tweet

Therefore, in this blog, let us discuss some of the main benefits of preserving satisfied customers and thereafter cover the three most common techniques and metrics for measuring customer satisfaction easily.

BENEFITS OF KEEPING CUSTOMERS HAPPY

Cost Effectiveness

Do you know that your existing customers who are happy with your brand on an average spend 67 percent more than your new customers?
Additionally, it costs 5 to 10 times more for acquiring fresh customers than retaining your old ones.

Now, considering these above-stated statistics, it is naturally pragmatic to assume that you should be spending a decent sum of your marketing budgets on customer retention programs.

Nevertheless, in a report published by Corporate Vision, it has been stated that 80 percent of small and big enterprises, mostly spend 70 percent of their marketing budgets on inbound and outbound marketing, and therefore less than 30 percent on customer retention programs for their brands.

Hence, companies that concentrate on customer retention as their main priority will be those that will come out on the top not only today, but also in the days to come.

Brand Loyalty

Customers who are loyal not only stick around longer, but they bring in more revenue and help to develop brand loyalty for your company.

In a report published by Capgemini, it has been found that 8 out of 10 customers are willing to offer more for enjoying enhanced customer experience, which in turn builds up loyalty for your brand.

Therefore, simply speaking, if you provide world-class customer experience and generate loyal and satisfied customers, your customers will reward you with recurring business effortlessly.

Word-of-Mouth Advertising

According to a report published by Accenture, it has been found that 55 percent of consumers in the U.S express loyalty for companies and brands they love by recommending them to their friends, relatives, and families.

Therefore, once your customers are satisfied with your offerings and support activities, they are more likely to recommend your brand to others.

Now, as it has also been found that 83 percent of consumers trust products and services that are recommended by friends and family, as satisfied customers in several instances share their product recommendations on social media websites, therefore, this free advertising is one of the most effective types of advertisement for brands in the modern times.

Market Differentiation

Last but not least, creating stellar customer experience helps to differentiate your business from the existing competition in the marketplace.

Therefore, in today’s extremely competitive business environment, if you do not focus on world-class CS and CX, you can be sure that your customers will leave you for any vendor that does.

THREE METRICS FOR MEASURING CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

There are 3 key models for measuring CS using easy to use CRM software , which we are going to discuss next in this article for helping your brand find rapid business growth.

CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score)

CSAT which uses a scale of 1 to 5 is most often used for gauging the level of customer satisfaction with any particular offering.

The ratings that customers use to rate their satisfactions in CSAT are:

  • Very Unsatisfied- 1
  • Unsatisfied- 2
  • Neutral- 3
  • Satisfied- 4
  • Very Satisfied- 5

Now, if you want your Customer Satisfaction Score survey to consist of 5 questions, take the average of each of your customer’s response, which will provide you that individual customer’s CSAT score for your brand and your offerings.

Next, once you have enough responses gathered up in your CRM database after sending your survey, take each individual customer’s CSAT score, add them up and thereafter divide them by the total number of respondents, which will provide the overall CSAT score for your offering.

According to Marketo Inc. generating and evaluating CSAT score is the most effective way for measuring short-term CS at a granular level.

However, using your brand’s CSAT score in conjunction with any one of the other customer satisfaction metrics (stated below) in your easy to use CRM is advantageous for better measuring the customer experience of the consumers of your brand.

NPS (Net Promoter Score)

While Customer Satisfaction Score can be used to measure short term satisfaction of your customers, NPS or Net Promoter Score is a metrics that is used more to measure the long term satisfaction level of your customers.

Now, unlike CSAT, which consists of several questions, NPS relies just on a single one.

“How would you recommend our brand (product or service) to others?”

The response to this singular question in an NPS survey is measured on a scale of zero to ten, where 10 is the ‘most likely’ and 0 being the ‘least likely’ answer in the survey.

The intermediate scoring patterns in NPS are:

  • Promoters (who will stay and buy more in the future from your brand) – 9 to 10
  • Passives (who do not have any strong emotion for your brand) – 7 to 8
  • Detractors (who are not satisfied and may leave your brand or dissuade others) – 6 to 0

Math for calculating NPS

Let us assume the NPS survey that you performed using your sales force automation in your easy to use CRM has collected answers from 100 respondents, where 70 or seventy percent are ‘Promoters’, 20 or twenty percent are ‘Passive’ and 10 or ten percent are ‘Detractors’.
Now to find the NPS score for your brand, you need to subtract 10 from 70 (ignoring 20 percent those are Passive) to come up with 60, which will be the overall NPS for your brand.

Remember, you can also have negative NPS, which would happen if you have more Detractors than Promoters in the survey.

Because of this while any NPS above zero is considered ‘Good’, a score in-between 50 to 60 is considered ‘Excellent’ and a score above 70 is accepted as ‘World-class’ in this customer satisfaction metrics for your brand.

CES (Customer Effort Score)

CES or Customer Effort Score is different from CSAT and NPS in that it does not directly measure customer satisfaction, but rather measures the amount of effort the specific customers have put into an interaction with a brand.

There are several businesses across the globe that makes use of CES to find out the effectiveness of their customer support functions.

In other words, CES measures the level of reduction of the efforts made by the customer while interacting with a company. Since the lesser headache a customer has every time they call up customer support, they will leave satisfied, which will, in turn, increase the CX with your brand.

In general, CES is a metrics that is calculated by asking the customer the amount of effort they had to put into interaction in the scale of 1 o 5, where:

  • Very Low Effort – 1
  • Very High Effort – 5

Now, once all your responses are in after your CES survey, calculating the average of the numbers produces the company’s CES.

While calculating CES a score of 2 or lower implies that your brand is successful in making your customer’s life easy, while a score above 4 suggests that your company must rethink how they can support their customers more efficiently.

Conclusion

As maintaining satisfied customers is more important in the present time because of increased competition than ever before, focusing on measuring customer satisfaction and enforcing changes based on the customer feedback, will not only help to continually improve the customer experience for your brand, but also pave the path for a bright future and rapid business growth.

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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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