Year: 2020

Buy CRM And Double Your Sales Productivity For Rapid Business Growth

Small and medium-sized businesses invest in online sales software platforms like easy to use CRM solutions primarily with certain strategies in mind. The biggest among these necessities for purchasing online lead management software or a business growth technology and tool is the need for collecting data that will help organizations to make informed business decisions that drive long-term growth. In certain cases, this news can be bad for sales staff. Since once you buy CRM for your business as a sales software means your sales teams have to learn another new unintuitive and complicated software. Which implies spending a significant chunk of extra hours each day for manually logging all sort of activities into the system, and thereby, finding lesser time to actually ‘sale’.

Small and medium-sized businesses invest in online sales software platforms like easy to use CRM solutions primarily with certain strategies in mind. The biggest among these necessities for purchasing online lead management software or a business growth technology and tool is the need for collecting data that will help organizations to make informed business decisions that drive long-term growth.

With 379 CRM systems listed on G2, only 18 % have a 4 or 5-star rating, which includes ConvergeHub - G2 Learning Hub (2019). Click To Tweet

In certain cases, this news can be bad for sales staff.
Since once you buy CRM for your business as a sales software means your sales teams have to learn another new unintuitive and complicated software. Which implies spending a significant chunk of extra hours each day for manually logging all sort of activities into the system, and thereby, finding lesser time to actually ‘sale’.

In other words, adopting easy to use CRM software for the organization most often means a decrease in productivity of the sales reps, and this happens so often that according to DMNews (operated by AC Business Media, Inc) 63% of all new CRM rollouts fail.

Nevertheless, the paradox lies in the fact that there are also several studies that show that sales teams using easy to use CRM software platforms most often outperform teams without online lead management software across several growth metrics in an organization.

Therefore, the good news is that it is possible for easy to use CRM software platforms to give you the best of both worlds, assist you to drive in strategic growth, and so in reality increase productivity consistently.

In this article, we are going to illustrate to you why so many CRM initiatives waste money, sabotage productivity, and suffocate the sales rep’s performance into a slowly diminishing, gasping tickle.

We shall also see how the right CRM can actually help your sales employees to track data from the CRM database  , drive strategies, and actually increase productivity in the process.

First things first: Why a modern sale is really this complicated

Doing Sales (going by the books), should be really simple.

A sales rep makes a contact, qualifies the lead, and then tries to close the deal.

Hence, a traditional sale is all about:

  • Contact
  • Qualify
  • Close
  • Wash, Rinse, and Repeat

So what is it that is getting things complicated?

Well, in modern times the complicacy arises, as there are other handfuls of big problems that tend to scale up with the growth in any businesses, such as:

  • Leads come from several channels with varying levels of interests, warmth, and qualifications
  • Lead follow-ups need to be tracked and thereafter recorded across myriads of interactions
  • Lead data needs to be analyzed and subsequently utilized for amending sales strategies accordingly

In the modern digital world, there are numerous channels than ever for harvesting leads for businesses, and each of these channels brings in different types of leads among which some even bring in multiple unique business segments for your businesses.

Now, each of these segments must be sold to after nurturing them independently, and all these actions must be recorded, tracked, and thereafter analyzed.

Well, over here we are not refereeing to hundreds but a few thousands of data events and the larger the business grows, the more activity it needs to coordinate and track its interactions and workflows.

Therefore, to do this, it is impossible to perform such a monstrous work, without the aid of software.

Hence, when it comes to sales, the core piece of business growth technology and solution required to perform these actions is an easy to use CRM or a Customer Relationship Management software.

In reality, your easy to use CRM is supposed to be the central cog for your organization’s business machine, which bridges marketing, sales, support, customer retention, finance, and business analysis into one automated, cohesive system on which you build your business.

As mentioned earlier, the CRM’s goal is usually to help in strategic decision-making, which often comes at the cost of the sales team’s success, and productivity.

Nevertheless, instead of making day-to-day activities more efficient and easier, CRM platforms often at times end up doing the exact opposite.

Let us take a look at why?

Why is it that 63% of CRM rollouts fail?

Just as it requires two people to begin an argument, CRM failures can also be the result of both the CRM software solution and the business organization itself.

Here are four key software platform based factors, which makes even the best CRM fail:

  • Too expensive and unnecessary complicated setup
  • Shady pricing models
  • Limited numbers of integrations
  • Software not built with the requirements of the sales teams in mind

HOW CRM SOFTWARE CAN DOUBLE YOUR BUSINESSES’ BOTTOM-LINE

The best sales and lead management CRM software do not just drive strategies, but it also makes jobs simpler for your sales teams.
Easy to use CRM solutions solve all the issues we were just talking about as it allows salespersons to make contact, qualify, and close the deals.

Hence, here is how CRM software can actually DOUBLE your businesses’ productivity scores, instead of suffocating it.

  1. Low cost, simple setup, and maintenance

While in one hand, an easy to use simple setup, which is low-cost, beats a complicated and expensive CRM setup anytime.

Nevertheless, most businesses are willing to take up an upfront hassle even if a little bit of complication is involved for a long-term boost in productivity.

This is exactly the reason as to why maintenance cost and ownership of a CRM is so important. Always remember, the more often your system is out of service or being worked on, the less productive your teams will be with that software.

Therefore, if you use an essentially maintenance-free system, that is simple and easy to use, you will never have to worry about losing your team’s productivity, while you implement or perform regular updates and checkups on your CRM.

  1. Simple lead assignment rules

Thanks to the growth of social media and digital marketing techniques, nowadays leads can reach the sales teams with increasing diverse histories. This includes:

  • PPC ads
  • Direct calls
  • Content marketing
  • Contact forms
  • Offline events
  • Social marketing
  • Prior purchases
  • Mobile opt-ins
  • Partner referrals and others

Sorting through these leads, matching them to relevant sales reps, tracking their activities through the sales pipeline, and briefing sales staff on all their past activities are functions that can take an entire team of managers if it were not for lead management software platforms to do it.

Best CRM software solutions, be it Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM platforms most often used by startups and small business are designed to integrate seamlessly with marketing software on the front end, which helps in allowing sales managers to easily import, sort, and thereafter assign leads to staffs with an automatic briefing on each leads history of their past likings and transactions.
For when these stated actions are done in the right way, it allows the sales reps to sit down and start contacting the leads, as easily as they would have done working their way through an email inbox.

  1. Better sales conversations through sales pipeline management

The most convenient ways to contact a lead in modern times are over email or phone calls, neither of which requires advanced online lead management software.

You can always pull out a Smartphone and can do both these without even needing to download an app.

However, although sending emails and calling is the easy part, nevertheless, the more challenging part comes with tracking and recording the conversations for the purpose of future training, and reviews required for strategic adjustments.

As we have expressed earlier that many CRM rollouts become unsuccessful because they are not built with sales staff in mind, therefore the best CRM platforms are built with salespeople in mind.

Hence once you buy CRM it not only eliminates all these issues by allowing emails and phone calls directly through the CRM platform with the help of different third-party integrations, but it also helps in tracking and recording every single activity, without the need for the sales reps to do a thing manually.

  1. Integrating marketing, sales, customer support and accounts data

While your primary priority is to help your sales teams to send more emails and make calls, you would also certainly want to train your staff, refine your sales rep’s sales approaches, and thereafter evaluate and redefine your company’s sales strategies over time.

It is a data analysis of your CRM database that allows you to achieve this. However, in order to collect usable data, you have to track everything from the beginning until the end, from marketing to sales, customer support and if you are using a QuickBooks CRM that integrates with financial software packages, then even accounts.

Hence, the ability to accommodate third-party integrations is a fundamental part of any sales CRM software that is worth its salt.

Conclusion: Sales software does not have to suffocate productivity

As we have discussed, in spite of most conflicting debates lead management platforms, like easy to use CRM solutions in reality, does not drain your sales team’s level of productivity, but instead, CRM software platforms drive a significant boost to your team’s success in the following ways:

  • Easy setup and maintenance
  • Better sales conversions through effective sales pipeline management
  • Straightforward lead assignment
  • Integrated data transfer across departments

So, get started and buy CRM to boost your businesses’ productivity there is nothing better than a lead management software that can help your company to find business growth.

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Why Do You Need To Go Beyond CRM For Delivering True Customer Service Nowadays

Several major changes have happened over the past quarter-century. Music has gone from spool tapes to CDs and pure digital media and while cabs are still operational, ridesharing services have made hailing a ride much easier nowadays. During this same time period, how modern companies interact with their customers has also come a long way. Although still, today telephones retain a certain level of popularity, nevertheless, emails, chats, and social media have all gained significant grounds in modern times. Advanced technologies like Chatbots which are powered by AI and machine learning are also nowadays adopted by businesses and customers alike.

Several major changes have happened over the past quarter-century.
Music has gone from spool tapes to CDs and pure digital media and while cabs are still operational, ridesharing services have made hailing a ride much easier nowadays.
During this same time period, how modern companies interact with their customers has also come a long way.
Although still, today telephones retain a certain level of popularity, nevertheless, emails, chats, and social media have all gained significant grounds in modern times.
Advanced technologies like Chatbots which are powered by AI and machine learning are also nowadays adopted by businesses and customers alike.
In the past customer service teams documented their customer-facing interactions in a basic manner. Twenty-five years ago, call tracking systems might have been nothing greater than an off-the-shelf, customized database used for collecting customer details and record their problems (if at that time companies bothered at all).
Thereafter in the late 1980’s CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems were born and with the introduction of easy to use CRM software solutions customer-facing teams (sales, marketing, and customer support) no longer had to struggle to work with data stored in disconnected and silo business applications as all-in-one CRM presented a 360-degree united view of the customer’s purchase and service histories, which in turn could drive new insights into businesses for taking appropriate actions.

77% of customers would recommend a brand to a friend after having a single positive experience - Temkin Group (2019). Click To Tweet

Although as this above-stated concept was a step forward at that point of time, but the limitations of CRM are apparent right now.
Even in the present times an easy to use CRM does nothing more beyond providing an individualized view of marketing, sales, and service department in an organization, and therefore do not provide any priority on solving customer-facing problems, which makes it difficult to improve customer experience even with renowned brands across the globe.

Hence for customer support, it is time that they must look for a different approach, (one that prioritizes on improving customer experience), by implementing a service management approach which is the next evolution in modern business workflow today.

Engage Other Departments

The main concept behind building easy to use CRM is to consolidate customer information in a unified repository, which promises greater visibility into prospects and customers, their activities and history during their journey with any company.

Now although easy to use CRM definitely helps companies with their sales and marketing efforts, nevertheless it does not offer a route to improve service and customer experience even today.

With customer management, solving customer issues becomes the priority.

There when a service management platform is integrated into a CRM, it captures customer information and thereafter identifies, classifies and documents the issue. It even easily identifies issue trends and shares them with other departments in the organization.

Per say, integrating service management platforms with easy to use CRM software solutions not connects the teams using the CRM’s unified database but also provides those departments outside customer service with enhanced awareness of customer-facing issues and the outcomes they have on the customer experience when problems occur with their brands.

Assign work with built-in accountability

When integrated with the functionalities of a CRM software modern customer management platform’s workflow capabilities are the key to enabling the entire company to work together on customer-facing issues.

Now as problems are identified, customer service assigns problems to other departments within the organization and thereafter collaborates with them as they investigate and resolve those issues, which was not possible with earlier traditional CRM software platforms that lacked this visibility and collaboration and accountability that service management offers, which affected the customers resulting in deterioration of customer experience as customers had no idea of the timeframe needed by brands for resolving their issues  .

Deliver proactive service

The ease of collaborating across teams using a service management platform integrated into a CRM also offers an additional benefit- the quickest path top permanent resolution of issues.

This is because by working with other departments in the organization service management platform integrated into easy to use CRM helps in identifying the root cause of a problem and therefore can aid in fixing it permanently without offering a temporary workaround.

A modern service management platform integrated into easy to use CRM be it Salesforce or any other Salesforce alternative CRM software for small businesses even helps in simplifying the delivery of solutions to the affected customers in the self-service channels they prefer (like chatbots, knowledge-based articles and videos, automated email notifications and more).

Now, by addressing the root cause of the problems it implies that future customers will never face the problems, which in turn improves the customer experience of the brands proactively.

Drive a better customer experience

Finally, as Forrester and other market research firms have pointed out that today’s competitive business environment in the marketplace places high stakes on providing world-class customer experience, and silo CRM software solutions for customer services are not cutting it, therefore it is time for implanting a new tool, one that does more than just taking down customer details which modern service management platform integrated in easy to use CRM does aptly by better engaging the entire organization in solving customer-facing issues.

Conclusion

Therefore in a gist while legacy CRM software solutions can still benefit marketing and sales, but to boost customer satisfaction and drive world-class customer experience easy to use CRM software solutions that integrates with customer service management tools is the next evolution in customer service as it assigns the customer’s issues to the teams who can affect a permanent solution to the problems and ensure that subsequent customers will never encounter that issue.

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How To Maintain An Unsoiled Database In Your Easy To Use CRM Tool For SMB

Easy to use CRM is a business growth technology that collects and accumulates all the data of leads, prospects, and customers and keeps them stored in the CRM software’s database, which becomes the single source of truth for nurturing happy customers and driving conversions. However, if your prospect and customer database in the CRM is in a mess, with data integrity issues, the same database in the CRM can do more harm than good and can be counterintuitive to the purpose of buying an easy to use CRM for your company. Hence to help the users of new easy to use CRM for rapid business growth, here are some of the most preferred ways for sustaining an unsoiled database in your CRM so that companies can maximize the returns on their hard-earned investments for the best CRM for SMB that they choose for their organization.

Easy to use CRM is a business growth technology that collects and accumulates all the data of leads, prospects, and customers and keeps them stored in the CRM software’s database, which becomes the single source of truth for nurturing happy customers and driving conversions.

However, if your prospect and customer database in the CRM is in a mess, with data integrity issues, the same database in the CRM can do more harm than good and can be counterintuitive to the purpose of buying an easy to use CRM for your company.

With 379 CRM systems listed on G2, only 18 % have a 4 or 5-star rating, which includes ConvergeHub - G2 Learning Hub (2019). Click To Tweet

Hence to help the users of new easy to use CRM for rapid business growth, here are some of the most preferred ways for sustaining an unsoiled database in your CRM so that companies can maximize the returns on their hard-earned investments for the best CRM for SMB that they choose for their organization.

  • Bring in only important data when importing contact lists

When you are importing lists of leads into your best small business CRM, you should do so with extreme care. Always remain vigilant as to where is your data coming from? Which fields were used in the previous software and how do they correspond to the fields in your new CRM system? For example, you might be having some other additional custom fields in the previously used tool that are no longer useful for your business. Hence just concentrate only on the important and pertinent data fields that are critical for your business while importing them in your new small business CRM software.

  • Be sure all data is rightly formatted before importing contact lists

When you want to export data from a certain software to another system, with the intention of importing it into another, there are certain factors that you need to keep in mind. This process is done in most cases by importing and exporting data of a CVS (Comma Separated Value) spreadsheet.

Therefore, it is most crucial that the prospect and customer data in the exported file complies with the requirement of your new software system and its data importing process. This means every column header must have the exact identical titles and even the data is in the same format (i.e., data, number, percentage, plain text, and others) as it was before. Make certain it all aligns before doing the import since otherwise, you will view errors as there will be several data that will not get transferred into your new CRM software system.

  • Identify important data fields to avoid partial contact records

If you wish to market your offerings to these new contacts in the future, it is critical that you must define which data fields are most essential to have while importing the contacts to your new small business easy to use CRM system. For example, you can decide that without email, name, or phone numbers the lead data do not constitute a fully populated record of contact in the database.

Therefore, settle on which fields hold the most essential information important to your business model, and remain sure that your web forms also ask for that information. Even if you are manually entering data into your new CRM software, remain careful that those data collects are essential information before entering them into your CRM database.

  • Place validation on your phone fields and email on forms

Now it is a common issue with all businesses that someone will visit your website and thereafter place incomplete or completely irrelevant and falsified information in your web forms to receive your offerings. However, there are ways to avoid it. Allowing people to complete your form with fake information creates an incredibly messy CRM database, cutting down on the efficiency of the CRM system.

Therefore, as a remedy, place validation measures on your telephone number and email fields. In the present times, most easy to use CRM software platforms allows a user to instantly verify if an email or phone number is real and active. So put these measures in place, and do not forget to include CAPTCHA on your web forms to ward off the onslaughts of the bots.

  • Regularly check for duplicates

Records that are created and stored as duplicates can have a more harmful effect on the efficiency of your marketing strategies than you can even think of.

For example, if you have two or more records of the same prospect, it becomes a sheer problem for the CRM to find which one is most up-to-date or which data in the software the CRM system will utilize to create and deliver a personalized message to the prospects, leads or customers.

Because email personalization relies on the data accuracy of your best small business CRM platform, duplicate records will completely jeopardize the efficiency of your system. Duplicate records mostly occur when someone completes your form multiple times but place different information, or when someone enters a new contact manually and unintentionally enters different data into the CRM database.

For example, if you have two contacts for ‘Stephen Smith’, but one has the name listed as ‘Stephn Smith’, it is possible that the person will receive a personalized email to “Stephn” rather than ‘Stephen’, which will no doubt create a bad impression for your company.

  • Delete unresponsive contacts

Always keep your database clean of unresponsive contacts. This means, those unresponsive contacts have either got them unsubscribed from receiving your email or your emails are bouncing, both of which indicate that they do not want to deal with your brand and hence they must be immediately purged out from the database of your CRM system. Deleting unresponsive contacts from your CRM database will ensure that your emails are going to live email accounts, which in turn also improves the accuracy of your email tracking and reporting functionality of the CRM.

  • Track lead source

Lastly, you need to monitor where the leads in your CRM database are coming from, as it will allow you to sharpen your marketing strategies while engaging them during the lead nurturing processes.

Tracking the source of the leads in your easy to use CRM platform, will help you to keep strategies tightly organized around whom each lead are, where they came from, and what their objectives were with your business.

Conclusion

Easy to use CRM technology allows businesses to do much more with fewer resources. It helps you to maintain a much more personal relationship with customers and prospects. Nevertheless, all these factors depend on having a clean CRM database , since if personalized communications go to the wrong people and tell them wrong things, it will ultimately hurt the reputation of your organization, and set in motion a wave of harmful consequences that will keep coming like a tide that you just cannot escape.

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How To Recapture Dormant Customers Using The Best CRM For Small Business

Smart business owners and sales representatives in all businesses using the best small business CRM system know the necessity to focus their efforts on retaining customer that are loyal as much as they need to pay attention to the acquisition of their new ones. We say this because it is much convenient to sell to the present customers rather than hunt around for finding new ones.

Smart business owners and sales representatives in all businesses using the best small business CRM system know the necessity to focus their efforts on retaining customer that are loyal as much as they need to pay attention to the acquisition of their new ones.

We say this because it is much convenient to sell to the present customers rather than hunt around for finding new ones.
According to Forrester reports, the chances of selling to previous customers of your brand are 60- 70%, while the chances of selling are 5-20% for new ones.
Moreover, in the same report, it has also been suggested that existing customers are also likely to spend on an average of 31% more than customers who are new.

Nevertheless, it is a common trait with several organizations, to abandon the existing buyers of their products and services when customers stop responding to their marketing efforts.

But, why should you abandon a customer who has already done business with you?

Hence, even if an existing customer has not responded for a long time, marketing expenses are still better spent on wooing existing but dormant customers than finding new ones.

The chances of selling to previous customers of your brand are 60- 70%, while the chances of selling are 5-20% for new ones - Forrester Click To Tweet

Now as finding new business is 4-10 times more expensive than reactivating dormant customers, here are three unique strategies that startups and small businesses can make use of to recapture the unresponsive customers stored in their CRM database:

Strategy #1

Email retargeting

By using email-retargeting strategy, you can use retargeting-cookie to set off ads on the web pages that your customer visits, after they click on the emails that you have sent them.

However, what happens if your customers are not clicking on the emails that you are sending or ignoring them completely?

Well, for this you can create a special email list of all your existing dormant customers and start an ongoing email campaign using your best small business CRM system just targeted to your inactive customers.
You can even upload this list to your retargeting program, so that people who are included in the list in your best CRM for small business will start viewing the ad’s of your brand’s across their social media websites and other web pages, without even having the necessity to click on your emails.

Strategy #2

Personalized Messaging

There are even instances when a dearth of customer activity can also occur because of your fault.

Hence, once your customer makes a purchase, always make sure that you follow up on that customer with targeted personalized messages using your best small and medium business CRM software that reflects your customer’s preference and add value to the customer’s experience with your company.

The entire point of collecting and analyzing your customer’s data with the help of the best small business CRM platform is to find out what makes your customers buy and then launch an effective marketing campaign that targets the interests of your active customers.

Using business growth technology like CRM you always have the advantage of understanding the habits and obtain the purchase histories with your existing customer. Occasionally, you can even remind your dormant customers as to how much they wished for a specific product, and send them communication with a money-off for that offering.

Additionally, you can also put forward new services and products that your existing customers might like which can be easily assumed based on their past behaviors and previous purchases.
Hence the more pertinent are your approaches in marketing, the bigger the chances you will have to recapture their businesses using your best small and medium business CRM software platform for rekindling your sales growth.

Strategy #3

Deep Linking

When you are trying to reactive your dormant customers, try to make it as easy as it is possible to make your customers take their desired actions. For this, while doing in-app marketing, always remember to include ‘deep linking’, which generates a shortcut connection to the product page that your customer is interested, without making the customer even reach on your businesses’ homepage and then search for the required product using the search bar.

It is of utmost importance that for customers who have remained unresponsive to your marketing efforts, you must primarily remove all the obstacles from their path, to make them purchase your products easily once again.

For this, many small and medium businesses also trust in sending app notifications or SMS messages with an exact link to the product that a particular customer was interested to buy in the past using SMS sending applications integrated with their best CRM for small business.

Takeaway

As re-engaging inactive ‘gone-but-never-forgotten’ customers is at all times more worthy as an investment, we are sure you will find these three strategies extremely helpful, and as a user of best small business CRM, find rapid business growth.

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Ways To Jointly Improve Customer Experience And Service In 2020

Customer Experience aka CX and Customer Service have enough of sobering stats to consider for business growth. Here are two of our favorites: In 2017, more than 54 percent of the consumers in the USA had greater expectations for customer service compared to prior years; the expectation of the consumers jumped to 66 percent for consumers aged from 18 to 34 years old – Microsoft It takes a minimum of 12 positive experiences to make up for just one unresolved negative experience – Ruby Newell-Legner

Customer Experience aka CX and Customer Service have enough of sobering stats to consider for business growth . Here are two of our favorites:

  • In 2017, more than 54 percent of the consumers in the USA had greater expectations for customer service compared to prior years; the expectation of the consumers jumped to 66 percent for consumers aged from 18 to 34 years old – Microsoft

  • It takes a minimum of 12 positive experiences to make up for just one unresolved negative experience – Ruby Newell-Legner

On a more optimistic note:

  • It was observed in a study done across 20 industries a modest boost in CX would help increase the revenue of a typical $1 dollar business, on average to $775 million over the next forthcoming three years – ROI of Customer Experience

  • Just a 5 percent boost in the retention of the customers can lead to a 25-100 percent increase in profits for your brand (whether it be through referrals, up-sells or repurchases) – The Loyalty Effect

Hence reading through these stats it is amply clear that customer expectations are high, and so the requirement for delivering quality customer service and product experiences leads to larger business growth.

It takes a minimum of 12 positive experiences to make up for just one unresolved negative experience - Ruby Newell-Legner Click To Tweet

Now as problems will always occur and it is hard to avoid the inevitable, whereby consumers will reach out to customer service, nevertheless, while many business leaders believe that just quality service to the customers will suffice but in reality, it is not good enough to simply just answer phone calls or respond to emails and chats quickly.

Therefore in this article let us consider how your business can focus on making an impact in 2020, by resolving to deliver great CX and customer service by diving deeper and collaborating with teams outside the customer service department to address the underlying reasons for the problems that customers face with brands.

Working across departments

It has been observed times and again that it is common for departments to operate in their own silos, without connecting with others.
Now, while this is indeed truly unfortunate, the isolation of especially ‘customer service’  is detrimental for businesses.

This is because, beyond serving as a voice of the company and a friendly face, customer service in any organization brings additional value to the company. By acting as the ear and eyes into the customer base, customer service can offer extremely valuable insights and eye-openers into the problems that customers are experiencing.
For example, products arriving with unclear instruction manuals, broken or missing parts, billing issues and more- all in a day’s work.

The issue is that these problems all originate (an can also be resolved) outside of customer service. Therefore, to address them properly it requires help from another team, and this is the very reason why customer service must create and maintain strong connections with other departments within the organization where those real solutions can be resolved easily.

With solid working relationship along with a shared purpose to raise the bar on Customer Service and Customer Experience, customer service can work in tandem with other teams to do more than just simply provide a workaround, and can address the core problem to resolve their customer-facing issues.

Discovering the root cause

Even though it is necessary to satisfy the consumers of your offering(s) with a sensible resolution in a timely manner, however when brands limit their responses to just repeating one-time answers they most often miss the opportunity to deliver permanent solutions to their customers since the fundamental cause underlying the problem continues to exist.

For example, the issues faced by customer service which have been cited earlier mostly comes as a broken process that originates somewhere outside of customer service in the company.

Like issues with products are results of problems of the quality control team in engineering or manufacturing departments of an organization. Similarly, billing issues happens when finance makes a mistake.

Well, it is true that customer service can provide the necessary details as to how the problem impacts the customers or how widespread is the issue, however, they just cannot provide the change required to stop the issue from recurring for the affected customer as well all the future customers, since the real solution to the problem lies elsewhere, and customer service must, therefore, work with other teams to identify the root cause.

Hence, once the root cause has been located, customer service can continue to work with the appropriate team to develop a solution to the issue.

Now, problems can arrive in diverse orders of magnitude, and so customer service and the team in question in your organization must work collaboratively on the best solution and thereafter if the issue affects all the customers a business process change might be necessary since if cent percent of the customers are affected by a specific problem, it neither portray a quality image of the brand nor can service teams carry on servicing all customers with the same issue over a prolonged period of time.

However, if the issue is of a lower priority or only a small group of customers is affected with a lower CX impact, other opinions can be accommodated whereby it might be more lucrative to provide a workaround touching a not so large subset of your consumers rather than totally recall a product or service for its issues.

For example, if the involved customer segment is small, and you buy CRM as a business growth technology for streamlining your business process and workflow, alternatives like using a knowledge base for automated self-service can be utilized to deliver adequate solutions to problems that are smaller in magnitude.

Maintaining visibility and accountability

When the customer service team and any other team in your company agrees to a process change or a workaround, the team owing the solution to the issue goes to work, even though the customer service’s job does not end here, as with the other team working on the solution, customer service still is required to know when the solution will be ready and deliverable to the customers of your brand.

It is only immaculate workflow that can make this possible, and so part of any customer service platform like an all-in-one easy to use CRM solution not only provides full visibility but also total accountability and also a timeline from issue identification till solution delivery. So that once the required repair is ready the customer service team can notify presently affected customers. Hence being spared from taking supplementary calls, chat, and emails on the same issue.

Improving customer service and CX jointly

When customer service in any organization operates in a silo, the status quo is maintained and nothing improves at the end.

This implies that in such an environment, even though the service might be satisfactory, but more importantly the CX does not get any better.

World-class Customer Service and Customer Experience can only be catered as a team when the customer service connected to the length and breadth of the entire organization. Since by doing this customer service can triage the issues, work cooperatively with other teams in the company to raise the complains, identify the real cause, discuss and agree on a solution and thereafter use workflow to monitor the resolution through to its conclusion.

This is because by dealing with the root cause, not only the existing customers of any brand benefits from receiving a permanent fix but it also ensures that future customers are never bothered by the same problem which ultimately improves CX and even helps the customer service be nullifying the need to address the same issue once more in row.

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Buy CRM To Decrease The Cost Involved For Running Your Business

Are you still in the era of printing out documents and adding your comments by pencil? Are you still printing documents and adding them to your file folders? Well, if it is so, then buy CRM as it is a business growth technology platform that can help you to become more digitally organized and therefore reduce costs in your office. Many among us use social media to advertise our businesses online yet we still incur a high paper wastage that costs us both time and money. According to a recent survey done in 2017, it has been found that 58% of office in Europe store paper records on their office premises rather than adopting a digital system, and out of them 2% of businesses has no structure for archiving their client communications. So how can we create an exceptional customer service, bring in loyal customers, and at the same time lessen the use of administering papers?

Are you still in the era of printing out documents and adding your comments by pencil?
Are you still printing documents and adding them to your file folders?
Well, if it is so, then buy CRM as it is a business growth technology platform that can help you to become more digitally organized and therefore reduce costs in your office. Many among us use social media to advertise our businesses online yet we still incur a high paper wastage that costs us both time and money.

Cloud CRM usage has grown from 15% in 2010 to 97% in 2019- SuperOffice(2020) Click To Tweet

According to a recent survey done in 2017, it has been found that 58% of office in Europe store paper records on their office premises rather than adopting a digital system, and out of them 2% of businesses has no structure for archiving their client communications.

So how can we create an exceptional customer service, bring in loyal customers, and at the same time lessen the use of administering papers? Digital record management gives you:

  • Improved business process through speedier retrieval and access of information
  • Make better-informed decisions through faster access to all right information
  • Better service delivery as the right information can be located quickly
  • Reduced staff time looking for information
  • Lesser compliance cost and increased ability to provide timely, accurate and transparent responses
  • Cost savings from less storage, creation, handling, and retrieval of paper records

Every business initiative starts with a singular person and so here are 8 workable tips on how you can organize your day and be on the way to digitally manage your growing organization.

  1. Plan your tasks and activities ahead

When you have several ideas and a multitude of agendas on your mind, it is impossible to do ‘everything’ at once. Therefore, sit in front of your diary and plan the different tasks over a period of time. However, make sure that your hard priorities do not get disturbed and so keep some open room for unexpected and important tasks that may come up in-between.

  1. Log everything

As with your database, your dairy is only good if you keep it updated every day. Write down in your dairy everything right from your colleague’s birthday to ordering flowers and management meetings. Not only does this help you but it also provides your colleagues and not to forget the front desk, an overview of your day or week. However, remember to make all your private bookings only visible to you.

  1. Avoid the Print button

Although it may depend on the job that you have as to what is really necessary to print. Nevertheless, in truth, most of us do not need much paper in today’s digital world. Hence, if you use an easy to use CRM you can conveniently save all your documents, emails, and activities as Projects in your CRM platform.

  1. Share electronically

Once you buy CRM it can help you to share your documents and emails, since using business growth technology you can have all your information stored in one place where they are traceable. Additionally, you also save time by not having to send an email to for example your sales group, and the possibility that your “crucial” messages do not get lost inside hundreds of other emails. You can also use applications like WeTransfer or FTP for sharing bigger files.

  1. Use electronic templates

There are several organizations that waste a lot of their time building templates for advertising, sales offers, invitation, and others. However, if you digital library available for your organization in your lead management software you will not only save money but also a lot of time by not inventing new templates and instead focus on your original work. Moreover, doing this will ensure a uniform profile and verbiage in all your outbound communications, which will be in accordance with the policy upheld by your company.

  1. Reporting

Are you getting tired of endless hours putting together an Excel spreadsheet with the latest sales figures in your sales pipeline? Today we all have to put in our optimal performances and show results to the management, and to do that we need to take out data from several sources, for example, sales by week, months or quarters or by the open rates on the e-marketing mailers. However, if we buy CRM, we can easily find all the sales data in one system and therefore take out standard reports or even if needed add an Analytics module to get the data reproduced in chart formations on the CRM’s dashboard.

  1. Contact information

Have you ever used Google or Yahoo to find company information or looked into a corporate website to find out information about a contact person? It is true that when a company does not have a contact database or a business directory, it becomes time-consuming for the employees of that organization to quickly find the relevant information. Therefore, having all the personal and company data in one place benefits the organization in several ways. Hence if your organization has an easy to use CRM system you can search for everything, for example, if you just have an email address you can search for all the related information tagged with the email which is there in your CRM database .

  1. Mailing lists

Are you buying your prospect lists from external agencies, if you do, we recommend to not to do it anymore? Start building your own prospect list, since this proves to be better leads and cheaper in the long run. Adding a call to action buttons to your website, getting subscribers through your social media channels and blogs or you can do it even by collecting emails at business conferences and do not forget to add these contacts to your lead management software so that you can send them direct mailers using your information stored in your CRM database.

Takeaway

Hence once you buy CRM the tool helps in automating your sales process by with the help of Sales Force Automation (SFA), track prospects, schedule appointments and follow-ups, warm up new leads, manages orders and quotes and thereby helps in closing sales deals in less time, which in turn saves money as the additional time your sales teams get can be utilized in starting and closing new deals.

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The Role Of An MCA CRM Administrator While Using This Business Growth Tool

Talking about the rise of burgeoning use of cloud-based Merchant Cash Advance software systems over the last few years in the Alternative Financing companies, there has been a steadily growing necessity to find qualified and well-trained people who are capable of taking care of this business growth technology and perform the duties and responsibilities of CRM administration consistently for keeping it out of the harm’s way. Even though for larger organizations the job of the Administrator of a CRM is in most cases a full-time work. Ne, for startups and small or medium businesses, the job of a CRM administration can be just one of the many areas of responsibility for the employee assigned to the role.
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However, what set Merchant Cash Advance CRM apart are those functionalities that cater to MCA industry for meeting with their unique purposes.  MCA CRM is designed to help Cash Advance businesses run their front-end operations and at the same time improve their customer lifecycle management for retention of the clients by providing unsurpassable services.

CRM gives businesses a 65% boost in sales quotas- Innopple Technologies Click To Tweet

Apart from this Merchant Cash Advance CRM also enables the lenders to keep detailed client data and maintain timely customer follow up with loan pipeline management to stay in control of the business.

Comparing Merchant Cash Advances to Traditional Business Lending

MCA or Merchant Cash Advance are gradually becoming more mainstream as several small and medium businesses that are not being able to secure a bank loan are turning to alternative funding sources. This is because; a merchant cash advance can be availed by a business quickly and that too with minimal paperworks. Hence, as banks continue to be very tight with their loans; merchant cash advance is becoming extremely appealing to small business owners over time.

How MCA works?

To illustrate in layman’s terms, Merchant Cash Advance, or an MCA provides purchases a pre-defined amount of a business’s future credit card receivables in one lump sum in return for the receivables, which is paid back to the lending organization over a certain period of time, which is usually calculated as a daily percentage of the customer’s debit/credit card totals. This is the key benefit that distinguishes MCA from conventional loans.

In other words, Merchant Cash Advance is not loaning a business any money, rather it is a simple process of buying a portion of the customer’s future business revenue.

Advantages of MCA Borrowings Over Bank Loans

The primary advantage of MCA over bank loans is that Merchant Cash Advance, in general, does not require any collateral, and liens (although this is always subjected to certain conditions). Apart from this, the other ranges of benefits that small businesses receive from choosing this kind of funding are:

  • No rigid monthly payments
  • No upfront fees
  • No UCC-1 (Uniform Commercial Code-1) at the time of funding
  • No collaterals (subjected to certain conditions)
  • No limits on how you spend the fund
  • Minimal approval time for disbursement of the fund

Therefore, the greatest advantage of MCA is that the amount, which the business pays, is based on the sum total of the credit card transactions that the borrower receives every day. As there are no set fees that must be paid every month, so small businesses taking merchant cash advance still have an access to a greater portion of their own revenues. This implies, if your sale drops for a specific month, your MCA payment will also become low to reflect that change.

Why use a Merchant Cash Advance CRM?

While all CRM may work for any business, Merchant Cash Advance CRM is specially designed for MCA businesses, as it not only helps in easy collaboration with the funders but it also helps MCA business in the following ways, which include:

  • Find a central repository for merchant contact information, related documents and underwriting information
  • Escalate the power of communication by integrated with DocuSign, Email, and Fax application templates for merchants and funders
  • Track deals from underwriting to funded stages
  • Syndicate and track approval numbers, management fees and commissions
  • Increase agent’s productivity by using quick lead capture form, easy edits, 360-degree merchant profile view and one-click deal conversion
  • Multiple fund submission and tracking

Takeaway

Therefore as a small business owner, if you find that you have the opportunity of expanding your business, but you do not have the time for traditional funding to come through, it is the perfect time to consider Merchant Cash Advance to get the finance you need, especially just when you need them.

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Talking about the rise of burgeoning use of cloud-based Merchant Cash Advance software systems over the last few years in the Alternative Financing companies, there has been a steadily growing necessity to find qualified and well-trained people who are capable of taking care of this business growth technology as an MCA CRM administrator and perform the duties and responsibilities consistently for keeping the CRM out of the harm’s way.

Even though for larger organizations the job of the Administrator of a CRM is in most cases a full-time work. Now, for startups and small or medium businesses, the job of a CRM administration can be just one of the many areas of responsibility for the employee assigned to the role.

43% of businesses applied for additional financing over the past 12 months - Federal Reserve Survey (2019) Click To Tweet

Nevertheless, for either case, the job of CRM administrator in alternative financing business can be a set of new responsibilities for many people using Merchant Cash Advance software .

Therefore, here are a few vital best practices to consider for anyone new to this role among hundreds of our MCA CRM users in the Cash Advance business.

Best Practice #1

Perform Habitual CRM Database Cleaning

CRM database can very quickly become dirty within a few months. Errors like creating duplicate records and entry of loose data both contribute to the escalation of this issue.

Therefore, juxtaposing ongoing MCA CRM training for the users of the platform and the use of (technically imposed) data entry formats and necessary protocols can aid in ensuring that proper information is placed in the right fields inside the Merchant Cash Advance software.

Like, never enter add-on notes or other information into an address or phone number field.

If you are a user of MCA CRM, you can use its native CRM database cleaning functionalities, duplicate avoidance capabilities, or even a third-party tool to periodically scan for supposed duplicates in the CRM to stay on the top of your data cleaning process.

Best Practice #2

Make the interface of the MCA CRM appropriate to each user

We from our experiences as one of the most popular vendors of MCA CRM software in the US have found that one of the many factors that help in user adoption of CRM solutions is the relevant and clean user experience of the CRM.

For each group of users (marketing, sales, operations, support, and finance) remove the fields and tabs that do not apply to the people in that functional role.

This is because a ‘less-is-more’ approach to screen layouts of the Merchant Cash Advance CRM software will keep the user’s attention riveted on the main information they require to view and maintain in this cutting-edge business growth technology and tool.

Moreover, doing this will also make information easy to find through search functionalities, in the easy to use CRM whereby reports will be more meaningful and complete, making your CRM an easy to work with software.

Best Practice #3

Take Written Consensus Before Adding New Fields

As the adage goes ‘with great power comes greater responsibilities’, therefore, it is very easy for an MCA CRM administrator to add new fields in the MCA CRM software. However, owing to this, fields can be at times added to the CRM platform, with no internal discussion or a little forethought.

Therefore, before adding any new fields in the Merchant Cash Advance software, it is most important to run the rationale for the new field and obtain buy-in from the manager whose teams will be responsible for maintaining that field in the CRM system.

Best Practice #4

Obliterate Old CRM Users and Create New Ones

Like all other businesses, when a user of your MCA CRM software leaves your alternate funding organization and a new user record is subsequently needed to be added to the Merchant Cash Advance software, the record of the previous user ‘SHOULD NOT’ be simply updated with the name of the new user and his/her email address.

This is because; doing so will make all the previous users’ past emails and activities to get associated with the new user’s profile in the CRM database.

Therefore, it is extremely important that your CRM administrator should deactivate the old users so that their licenses are freed up and their name remains associated only with erstwhile past activities.

Best Practice #5

Annotate Your MCA CRM Configurations

Whether you are creating an email template, adding a new custom field, or setting up a new workflow process in your MCA CRM, ensure that you as the CRM administrator must key in the purpose of the modification or addition that you have done in the associated notes or description field in the business growth tool.

This is because, although the reason for this addition or modification may be clear to you and obvious in the moment, however, down the road you may forget the exact reason or purpose which made you do so, and then if the reason is not apparent to you as an administrator of the CRM, it will also not be clear to the other stakeholders using the software in your organization.

Now, if your CRM does not have the required annotation field, create another parallel document in your system, that will take a note of these modifications and the reasons for performing these activities.

Best Practice #6

Never Forget to Create Backups of Your MCA CRM Data

Finally, as an MCA CRM administrator, what will you do if a user of your Merchant Cash Advance software deletes a vital company record accidentally, and along with all its related contacts, historic activities, and also the emails?

Even though most popular cloud-based Salesforce Alternative CRM vendors much like Salesforce creates backups of your data, however, if your CRM database ever needs to be restored you would lose all the changes that were made by the users of your MCA CRM since the most recent backup occurred, and so use an export service in your CRM and create consistent backups of your most important information in the CRM database, before it is getting too late.

Takeaway

The role of a CRM administrator involves a range of very important responsibilities. Hence, using this set of best practices, which if followed up on a regular basis, will for certain optimize the user experience of your MCA CRM software, which will even increase the user adoption rate of this cutting-edge business growth technology and result in more meaningful reporting of information from your preferred CRM that you use for your alternative funding businesses.

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Mistakes To Avoid For First Time User Of The Best Small Business CRM Software

So, you are a new user of the best small business CRM software and you want to bypass any roadblocks that could impact the successful implementation of your new and the best CRM for small business. Well, do not worry; you have come to the right place for finding some insider tips and tricks on using your easy to use CRM software platform. Therefore, here are the five most common rookie mistakes that we want beginners to avoid while working on their newfound business growth technology like a CRM tool.

So, you are a new user of the best small business CRM software and you want to bypass any roadblocks that could impact the successful implementation of your new and the best CRM for small business.

Well, do not worry; you have come to the right place for finding some insider tips and tricks on using your easy to use CRM software platform.

Therefore, here are the five most common rookie mistakes that we want beginners to avoid while working on their newfound business growth technology like a CRM tool:

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  1. Specifying Incorrect Account Administrator

While using a CRM when the first account is created, the member of the core CRM implementation team who pioneers the account making process will become the administrator of the account by default. Therefore, we suggest you to select an appropriate administrator to set up your CRM account, before simply jumping into the system.
Keep in mind that the administrator will be the designated license creator, bill receiver, user selector, and the gatekeeper to assign who receives permission for using specific features within this cutting-edge business growth tool.

44% of businesses planning to increase IT budgets in 2020, up from 38% in 2019 - SuperOffice(2020) Click To Tweet

However, if anyone other than the right person among your teammates has been accidentally assigned the role of an account administrator, you can even, later on, switch their roles by modifying your settings.

  1. Importing Your Entire Contact List

It has been observed that more common than not, new users of CRM will mostly import all their contacts from Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, and other applications once they start working on their brand-new CRM platform. Now, when we use the phrase all contacts, we actually mean ‘all contacts’, which most often even consist of outdated, and irrelevant personal data. However, once that is done, when the user enters their Contact tab, they most often feel and realize that they need to clean up the list in the newly created CRM database.

Now, this can be an incredibly time-consuming process, like going through and selecting the inappropriate data, which may no longer be important to the user or to their company.

Save yourself this headache, by creating a list of contact within an Excel file in order to build a well thought out list of important connections that are presently required for your business. Save the file as CSV (Comma Separated Values) and simply import it to your CRM using the “Import a File” functionality. This process could save you a lot of time, and help you to get started with the best small business CRM software quickly.

  1. Forgetting To Tag Contacts Upon Import

It is most natural that after creating new contacts, the new information can always get blended within the rest of the customer database in the CRM. For this, we suggest you tag your contacts as soon as you import them, in order to classify where the contacts came from, whom they work for, or why they are being added to the easy to use CRM software solution’s database.

Hence, while a contact is being added to your team’s accounts, each member of the teams can tag their individual contracts with their name so that they can easily locate individuals that are significant and important to them while working with the software.

  1. Using Incorrect Email Addresses

All product updates, marketing promotions, and webinar news will be always sent to the email address that your CRM account is registered with right from day one after installation of the software.

Hence, using the right email address comes in handy when you are concerned about exporting your deals or contacts from your CRM account. Since CRM will automatically send these exports that have been requested to the registered email address that you confirmed while setting-up your best small and medium business CRM software platform.

Therefore, when selecting an email address for your CRM software’s account registration, be aware that all the important CRM-related outreach and data export will be received in that location.

Remember at any time if you need to reach out to your CRM provider be it a robust CRM like Salesforce or even any other Salesforce Alternative CRM platform used mostly by SMB to talk about your billing specifications and your account, it may be noted that you will need to write CRM vendor from your registered email account for adhering to security protocols. However, you can change your registered email address multiple times in your CRM settings whenever it is needed, as a safety measure or for other similar purposes.

  1. Duplicate Contact Creation Within Your CRM Account

Finally, oftentimes, contracts are listed with more than one email accounts and social platforms. Therefore importing various lists from all of your accounts unavoidably create duplicates in your best small business CRM software’s contact list. Nevertheless, most CRM platforms combine your contacts based on their individual email addresses and other specific options you can always specify to stay away since doing so creates redundant contacts and irrelevant company records.

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5 Way to Refine Your CRM Implementation Process In 2020

As customers are an invaluable asset to any company, therefore every business must work harder this year to gain new customers and sustain a good relationship with their existing ones. Nevertheless, the work of managing customers and the skills required for guiding them through the sales funnel is an overwhelming task. This is exactly where easy to use CRM be it Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM platform (mostly used by SMB organizations) could be a powerful tool in your arsenal that can streamline business processes by gathering, coordinating and organizing customer information stored in the CRM database.

According to a Beagle Research, it has been predicted that even though 36 percent of sales professionals are still to adopt easy to use CRM for business growth, nevertheless it is predicted that this will change as we head into 2020, as it has been aptly quoted by  Denis Pombriant:

“There is a great deal of white space in CRM to be claimed and this will be where humans will add the greatest value as we continue to bring CRM to businesses that were once completely manual.”

We highlighted this fact as according to another recent study conducted by  Grandview Research, it states that:

“The CRM market would be worth $81.9 billion by 2025 and Gartner and others publish annual reports indicating the market’s vibrancy.”

Hence as customers are an invaluable asset to any company, therefore every business must work harder this year to gain new customers and sustain a good relationship with their existing ones.

CRM as a whole is expected to reach over $81.9 billion revenue by 2025 - Gartner Click To Tweet

Nevertheless, the work of managing customers and the skills required for guiding them through the sales funnel is an overwhelming task.

This is exactly where easy to use CRM be it Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM platform (mostly used by SMB organizations) could be a powerful tool in your arsenal that can streamline business processes by gathering, coordinating and organizing customer information stored in the CRM database.

Easy to use CRM is a software that can work for any business, irrespective of whether you implementing it for a large enterprise or you are just a small startup.

Now even though CRM is a powerful business growth technology , it is a known fact that many businesses do not utilize it fully.

A Customer Relationship Management system has several benefits, like boosting retention and optimizing your sales, marketing, and support efforts and so in this article let us find out how you can improve the implementation of your easy to use CRM or your best small business CRM software solution if you are an SMB to ensure success and steady business growth.

  1. Involve Your Team In CRM Selection Process

Most often than not, the people who will be implementing your easy to use CRM tool are your sales teams.
Hence it is most important that you need to involve them when you choose your CRM software and buy CRM for business growth.

Always remember when selecting the software, that it matches your organizational requirements.

However, how do you identify your needs?

Well, your sales team can aid you to pinpoint the challenges they face in their sales cycle and even provide solutions as to how CRM can address the problems for sales growth.

Now once your sales team is recognizing the issues, your marketing team needs to identify the touch-points with the customers, how they manage their communication or the time they need to deal with the leads and prospects to qualify the leads.

We say this because only armed with the knowledge of the underlying issues, you can choose an easy to use CRM tool that will ensure streamlining your processes and provide efficient customer management for your business.

Moreover, even before you buy CRM if you accept the ideas and thoughts of your sales and marketing teams into consideration it is natural that they will embrace the software without resistance, easily.

  1. Show Your Employees The Value Of Utilizing The Software

As one of the most acclaimed and award-winning CRM for SMB organizations, we have frequently found that sales teams most often have a negative opinion about using this business growth technology and tool.

This is because most often than not sales professionals find this tool as an unnecessary burden due to the time they need to update customer-related data into the CRM database.

Hence irrespective of whether you are buying CRM for small business or for a big enterprise, you need to highlight its value in the marketing functionalities and aspects of the software.

This is because as sales reps most of their time spend researching on customer data or doing follow-ups on prospective buyers on their list.
Now, with the marketing industry becoming increasingly data-driven, sales teams once they understand the value of easy to use CRM which aids harvests prospect’s data, such as a prospect’s interests and hobbies, location, purchasing behavior, age group, and more and then analyze patterns and trends in this data, sales teams are more likely to get on board on the use this business growth technology for enhancing their data management skills.

Remember, you should sell your CRM software to your employees as a tool that can make their works simple by reducing tasks and optimizing their efforts in sales and marketing, so that your sales reps acknowledges that the tool will be able to provide them with all the necessary information to influence sale at their fingertips, easily.

  1. Thoroughly Train Your Employees

For your teams to cherish the easy to use CRM tool, they need to grasp the ins and out of the software. Now, while it an easy to use CRM may be straightforward and simple to use, you still need to educate your employees on how they must use the software for harvesting optimal ROI.

The CRM training should cover all the guidelines on the operational aspect of the tool. For example how to enter the company’s data in the CRM database , or use the dashboard more efficiently, or create customer segmentation based on different filters and more.

Remember, as employees are diverse in nature, and so while some might find it easy to figure out how the software works, others without additional and ongoing training might even make mistakes which can lead to ineffective use of the software.

Additionally, encouraging your employees to take a short course on the goals and implementation process of this business growth technology most often increases the adoption rate of the software.

  1. Define your CRM strategy

Now, if you are just trying to use a robust business growth technology solution like a CRM as a plug and play tool, you are surely setting yourself up for failure.

Hence, before the implementation of your CRM, rather even before you buy CRM for your business you need to create an excellent and a doable strategy to ensure you maximize the use of the software.

How do you come up with a strategy?

Well, for example, once you have recognized the goals like generating high-quality leads or goals like customer retention, you can easily come up with a definite strategy to meet up these goals.

For this evaluate your businesses’ workflow at each stage of the CRM implementation process and thereafter analyze its performance on a regular basis.

In other words, irrespective of the plan of action you decide to take, make sure that the easy to use CRM should complement the vision laid down by your company.

  1. Lead By Example

Even though in an HBR (Harvard Business Review) publication it states that in 2017, CIO magazine reported around one-third of all CRM projects fail it has been observed that most CRM implementations fail due to the dearth of support from the top management in the company.

Hence if the senior managers in your company are not a part of the CRM implementation process, your employees will likewise keep on neglecting to embrace the software.

This the reason, once you buy CRM you must get all the leaders on board from the beginning to create a ripple effect. For this make your managers take part in the training, attend meetings, and stay abreast of the latest CRM implementation processes.

Conclusion

Remember, CRM implementation in any industry is an ongoing process, and therefore you need to tweak your CRM strategies from time to time.

Nevertheless, once you buy CRM you should always keep your employees and teams happy working with the system by incorporating their feedback in the implementation process until the time the systems get adopted by your employees completely.

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Key Customer Service Skills That Every Service Reps Should Know For Business Growth

Since ages, customer service skills are so critical for businesses both big and small to get right because of its undeniable ability to help businesses and brands maintain their existing customers and acquire new prospects for their company. Now effective customer service does never happen just by deputing one of your customer-facing employees on the front desk or at the phone and thereafter make them face the customers. Therefore businesses must ensure that their customer service reps have the right skill sets to be able to encounter the most difficult and complicated of customers which is what that makes a big difference in establishing the credibility of your brand since according to a recent survey done by PWC it was found that more than 54 percent of consumers in the U.S. believes that customer experience at most companies needs improvements. Hence to let you find and agree on what are the customer service skills that can help you to make the difference here is a list of the most important skills every customer service representative must always have for finding business growth.

Since ages, customer service skills are so critical for businesses both big and small to get right because of its undeniable ability to help businesses and brands maintain their existing customers and acquire new prospects for their company.
Now effective customer service does never happen just by deputing one of your customer-facing employees on the front desk or at the phone and thereafter make them face the customers.
Therefore businesses must ensure that their customer service reps have the right skill sets to be able to encounter the most difficult and complicated of customers which is what that makes a big difference in establishing the credibility of your brand since according to a recent survey done by PWC it was found that more than 54 percent of consumers in the U.S. believes that customer experience at most companies needs improvements.
Hence to let you find and agree on what are the customer service skills that can help you to make the difference here is a list of the most important skills every customer service representative must always have for finding business growth.

73% of customers fall in love with a brand and remain loyal because of friendly customer service reps - RightNow(2020) Click To Tweet

Eight Most Essential Customer Service Skills

  1. Understand the Customer

As a customer service representative, you should not just identify what is the problem and determine its solution. In fact, your customer service reps must understand their customers as the customers are human beings and have emotions that must not be neglected by your company.
Hence service reps must empathize with the customers (let them know that it is understandable that they are frustrated) and thereafter find out the problems and provide a solution, but most essentially with a human touch.

  1. Product Knowledge

It is needless to say how important it is for your customer service reps to understand your brand’s products and services so that they can efficiently and quickly provide a solution to the issues faced by the customers without having to look them up as ask others for a solution.
This is where an easy to use CRM comes to use, as it not only helps in providing all the interactions that the customer had with your brand, but it can also help the support rep to find out the solution to frequently asked customer-related issues by providing answers stored in the system’s knowledge-base.

Always remember a knowledgeable employee will help put even the most agitated customers at an ease.

  1. Listening Skills

Ensure that your customer reps spend reasonable time to actively listen to what your customers need. Hence, never let your reps just assume solutions based on the problem until they understand the issue entirely by listening to them intently, since listening to your customers can go a long way in making them feel more loyal to your brand.

  1. Time Management

Irrespective of if your service reps are using a robust and popular CRM like Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM platforms used by startups and small businesses, time management should be one of the most important customer service skills that need to be understood and nurtured by many.

Therefore, use business growth technology solutions that can help you access that your service reps are spending the appropriate time with each customer and also perform their admin works that go along every day.

  1. Deal with Personal Emotions Rightly

Now, this may be one of the greatest challenges customer service reps face at work. Since if you did not get enough sleep, or have a sick child at home or someone cuts you off on the road on your way to work, it can be really difficult to put that all aside while you are on the job.
Nevertheless, as soon as you pick up the phone or face a customer it is best to keep all that personal stuff aside since customers who are worried about their own problems never want to hear the agony and pains in the voice of the service reps when they want a solution to their pain points and issues.

Hence, let patience be your best friend and instead of getting irritated with your customers let them know what you can do for them and thereafter wait patiently as the ultimately de-escalate enough to have a civil conversation.
Additionally, even though at times it may seem tempting to talk with a customer who is similar to you as a friend, never relax your tone and language around them because ‘they get it’. Instead always maintain professionalism at work, especially with your customers, since it helps in building the reputation of your brand.

  1. Respond Quickly

If your business is using easy to use CRM platforms, which are mostly Omni-channel business growth tools there are a number of ways to respond to customers nowadays.

Therefore irrespective of whether you are using enterprise-level robust software like Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM software whenever your customers get in touch with a concern or a comment over email, social media, chat or phone, make sure that you respond to them quickly.
Now the timing of your response may change depending on the channel that your customer is using, for instance, while a chat or email conversation must be replied to immediately, comments on social media platforms can be attended to within a couple of hours.

  1. Be Authentic

Being authentic with the customers in pain is a very important element in providing world-class customer experience to the consumers of your offerings.
We say this since there is always a very big difference between “putting on a happy face” and being yourself to exude a positive vibe and attitude towards your customers.

Hence, never be fake, but rather put up the nicest version that you have in front of the customers so that they feel happy with your services and come back for more.

Therefore we reiterate that you must put your personal struggles aside and wear a smile that will, in turn, help you to embrace a positive attitude. You may be surprised, but your actual mood may change for better once you do so.

  1. Encourage Teamwork

Finally, the ability of a customer service representative to work with their bosses, teammates, and others is also one of the most important skills required for providing world-class customer service to the consumers of your offerings in order to find the complete skill set needed for satisfying the customers.

Conclusion

A study done by American Express Bank revealed the uncomfortable truth which indicates that more than 33 percent of the consumers in the U.S. would proactively consider changing brands and companies after only one instance of poor service.
Hence there is nothing more fearful in today’s competitive markets if businesses have to lose one-third of their customers because of a grumpy or misinformed customer service representative.

Nevertheless using an easy to use CRM which can be Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM platform is one business growth solution that can make all your customer service reps more efficient by putting all information pertaining to the customers at their fingertips while automation found in most easy to use CRM will also help businesses save money and time and thereby predict consistent revenue growth.

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Tends In Customer Support To Look For In 2020

Loss of customers and revenue are the inevitable results of poor customer support, and so implementing new methodologies and trends helps to boost revenue. Therefore without ado here are the latest customer trends that you must look for in 2020.

Loss of customers and revenue are the inevitable results of poor customer support, which leads to loss in business growth and so implementing new methodologies and trends helps to boost revenue.

93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases with companies who offer excellent customer service. Click To Tweet

Therefore without ado here are the latest customer trends that you must look for in 2020:

Trend #1

True Omnichannel Experience

Potential leads and customers find your offerings on any number that are available to them nowadays.
Hence, offering your potential leads and customers the ability to continue their customer journey between different devices and platforms will be of utmost importance in 2020.
In fact, the multichannel experience that customers presently know is a significant step-up from the erstwhile single-channel experience.
Nevertheless, as multichannel tends to be siloed nowadays it allows interactions between several platforms but inhibits the continued journey between one to the next.

Therefore, in 2020 businesses is more likely to hold on a customer throughout their journey by incorporating an omnichannel experience that ensures identifying and implementing all of the platforms potentially used by their customers that is sure to boost up customer service ratings.

Trend #2

Connect Through Social Media

Using social media platforms for boosting engagements in marketing is nothing new. Nevertheless, it may be news to you that in 2020 you should no longer focus on numerous social media platforms, but rather scale them down to the ones that make more sense for your type of business, which will let you spend more quality time on the few chosen platforms rather than lose sight of engagements on some of your many platforms on the list.

For this try to evaluate your target audience and engage with them in their preferred media. Try to understand whether your audiences respond more to images, videos or texts.

Get engaged with your prospective leads and customers often and do not forget to thank them for their feedback.

Additionally, apologize to your customers and prospects for any negative experience and provide them with enhanced support.

Remember, doing so not only your unhappy customers will always remain grateful for what you did but your other customers once they see that cared enough for your unhappy customer will trust your support that they need right on your social media platforms.

Trend #3

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI is getting more smarter every day. Hence, in 2020 look to implement AI in as many of the customer interactions you have. Nowadays AI assistants are changing the way we live our lives with Google Assistant, Alexa and Siri.
Hence in 2020 using AI to automate customer support processes will help businesses considerably, whereby brands should automate some of the customer-facing interactions that will help them exponentially.

Trend #4

Machine Learning

In 2020 data-driven customer service will be much more prevalent than ever before. This is because nowadays machines are becoming more efficient to ‘learn’ fro data using algorithms that are increasingly getting more competent in understanding how to connect with the customers better and thereby help customer service teams to make better decisions that aids in business growth.

Once considered prohibitively for SMB organizations customer service Chatbots are one of the intelligent outcomes of Machine Learning and can now be easily integrated even in most best small and medium business CRM software platforms.

Additionally, real-time data that are needed for Machine Learning can also help in the detection and prevention of fraud in businesses.

Trend #5

Internet of Things (IoT)

It is predicted that IoT is going to help drive sales and support activities much more efficiently in 2020. This is because according to a study published by Statista it has been predicted that there will be more than even 30 billion connected devices installed worldwide this year which is twice as many as it was in 2015.

Therefore, businesses must not underestimate the importance of IoT this year, as business growth technology solutions are trying to leverage all and any connected products to enhance the customer experience, which is becoming more important than ever.

Trend #6

Remote Customer Support Representatives

With all the cutting-edge technologies that we have in hand as we enter 2020, there will be a trend more towards remotely locating customer support representatives in all businesses.

This is because with the growth of this trend companies are becoming increasingly capable of saving their employers money on office space and on higher salaries that are required for big cities across the globe by hiring employees who can work from the convenience of their own homes.

In fact, this trend will not only attract more recruits but will also provide organizations a much larger pool to choose from.

Tend #7

Real-time Support

Nowadays with customer support reps potentially available 24/7 which can be accessed from anywhere across the globe and with the previously mentioned Chatbot technologies that can be at present even integrated into the best small business CRM software platforms, there is a need for emphasis on real-time support in several different formats.

Therefore, it can be predicted that real-time support will likely boost up conversion rates in 2020 with faster response time and quicker resolution of issues.

Trend #8

Live Video

It also can be assumed that 2020 will see a rise of live video streams which will help businesses to reach out to more people on social media channels which in turn will increase the brand’s visibility. Live videos can be used for the promotion of contests, webinars, product giveaways and more.
Hence businesses this year will find more options to announce in advance or just go live whenever they want, which in turn will encourage followers of different brands to pay attention to their brand’s social media platforms.

Trend #9

Personalized Content

Personalization will be more important than ever in 2020, with the growing trend of less human contact and more automated interactions in businesses.

Luckily, this will be easier than ever to accomplish with the assistance of AI technology whereby in 2020 personalized content will look more like targeted advertisements that are well aware of the customer’s name, gender, location, and even their likes and dislikes.

Trend #10           

Predictive Analytics

Both with robust CRM software solutions like Salesforce and with solutions like best CRM for small business establishments and startups predictive analytics will be called upon much more frequently this year.

This is because with predictive analytics helping businesses to foretell their customer outcomes, brands will be able to provide world-class customer service to the consumers of their offerings.

Predictive analytics will even help businesses to discover issues even before they arise, and alleviate those problems, by running hundreds of scenarios based on data they already have in their easy to use CRM platforms to provide proactive and personalized service to the customers.

Takeaway

Finally, with all the security breaches in the news, the security of customer data is going to be extremely important in 2020.

In all businesses, customers provide a lot of information when they buy your offerings. Hence both CRM for enterprises and even the best CRM software for SMB organizations will ensure that the customer data in their business growth technology solutions are locked up tightly that will enhance the trust of the customers for their businesses.

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Why Use CLM CRM For Implementing A Customer-Centric Strategy For Your SMB

There is nothing new about customer-centric organizations. This is because ever since the creation of the Customer Lifetime Management CRM technology or CLM CRM software, the thought that all product decisions should be related back to the customer is like a no-brainer. Nevertheless, this idea feels as vague and unappreciated as ever, as most of us just offer mere lip service to it but do not always honor what we preach. Therefore, it is high time that we must begin thinking of customer-centricity as an objective and not just a principle and better use CLM CRM to enhance the customer lifetime with your brands.

There is nothing new about customer-centric organizations.  This is because ever since the creation of the Customer Lifetime Management CRM technology or CLM CRM software, the thought that all product decisions should be related back to the customer is like a no-brainer. Nevertheless, this idea feels as vague and unappreciated as ever, as most of us just offer mere lip service to it but do not always honor what we preach.

When you create a customer-focused company, you create products or services that your customer enjoys and so wants to repeat that experience again. - Nucleus Research Click To Tweet

Therefore, it is high time that we must begin thinking of customer-centricity as an objective and not just a principle and better use CLM CRM to enhance the customer lifetime with your brands.

What is CLM in a CRM?

Plainly speaking by the books Customer Lifecycle in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a term used that describes the succession of steps a customer goes through when taking into consideration, buying, using, and thereafter upholding their loyalty to a company’s products or services.

Hence, although you and your employees are always pushing yourselves hard to satisfy your customer’s needs, nevertheless being customer-centric requires taking actions, rather than simply making a desire to appear conscientious.

Why is customer-centricity so important?

Keeping buzzwords and business jargon aside, irrespective of whether you are a user of CLM CRM, customer-centricity makes sense in this present digital world.

According to Bill Macaitis, CMO/CRO of Slack:

“The voice of the customer so far has never so strong as it has been now with the growth of social….businesses are increasingly acknowledging the power of word-of-mouth marketing strategies today, and how that starts and ends by providing a great experience for the customers. ”

But how does this translate in the scenarios of our real world? Let us look at the plea from Randy Garutti CEO of Shake Shack to his employees:

“I would like to challenge you to put our company out of its business…because we are so damn generous with what we offer the people who walk in through this door.”

Therefore, his words illustrate a bigger effort to empower his staff to do whatever it takes to build optimal customer experience. Rather it is just not, giving a ladle of custard to an unruly crying kid.

Hence, the big picture is when you create a customer-focused company, you create products or services that your customer enjoys and so wants to repeat that experience again. Customer centricity, therefore, looks at the lifetime value of the customer using different metrics found in CLM CRM, which increases customer satisfaction and reduces churn rate over a period of time.

Common pitfalls of customer-centricity

Now, if acting customer-centric is so easy and understandable, why then it is so challenging?

There are three major challenges in being customer-centric that Forrester sited in their Vendor Landscape report (2015):

Lack of clarity: Not all in an organization understands the definition of the experience that their company is willing to deliver to its customers.

Failure to affect company culture: No organization can implement a customer-centric culture in an organization without embedding it in all parts of the establishment.

Loss of interest: Cultural transformation is not the end goal; rather employees need to practice customer-centricity with unsuppressed intentions and focus that should be a perennial process and not just as a temporary fad.

The biggest issue with customer-centricity is that cannot be classified as a singular project. Since being customer-centric is a collection of all the actions and activities that an organization performs- right from mundane everyday decisions to company-wide initiatives.

How can you implement a customer-centric strategy?

Therefore how can you make the practices in your business reflect all about the customer in this consumer-obsessed market?

So underneath are a few researched tips to make your business more customer-oriented in this present world:

  1. Truthfully consider that the customer always comes first

You cannot fake caring about your customers; you need to employ passionate and genuine employees who want to view your business through your customer’s eyes. For this, you need to make your company’s core value the heart of any onboarding practice, and continually support your commitment to these tenets.

  1. Measure the customer experience

It is important that you must always measure the success of your customer-centric in order to practice what you are preaching to your employees in your organization. Using a CLM CRM software platform, you can gauge your rate of churn and even NPS (Net Promotion Score) as a baseline.

NPS is calculated and measured in one simple and straightforward question: Would you recommend this company to a relative or friend?

  1. Let feedback drive your improvement

Once you are gauging your customer’s experience and going after your customer’s ever-changing desires and needs, let that feedback lead to real changes in your products, services, and your company.

Conclusion

Businesses are not going to shut down this customer-centric trend anytime soon, so what does that signify for consumers and their competitors?

Well, it implies more of digital marketing (including interactive materials like blogs, newsletters, eBooks, and videos), and automated marketing, with the help of business growth technology like CLM CRM software solutions, which can be even found in best small and medium business CRM software platforms for SMBs.

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