Customer Service CRM: How CRM Improves Customer Support
Customers and clients are interested in doing business with companies that cater to their needs and offer exceptional customer services. This requires businesses to go a step further in approaching their customers across their entire customer journey. Customer relationship management (CRM) is thus an effective customer service tool that enables companies to be more efficient in storing, managing, and resolving customer queries.
So, what is CRM in customer service, and how does CRM improve customer service?
Let's dive in. CRM or customer relationship management practically refers to a combination of strategies and technologies that companies employ to manage and analyze customer interactions and data across their entire customer lifecycle. Given that 65% of customers believe that excellent customer service weighs in more than advertising, the primary goal that CRM and customer service emphasize is to improve customer relationships and ensure customer retention.
Excellent customer service and retention is strongly associated with companies' sales growth. In other words, to provide meaningful customer service and confirm an upward sales trend, it is always in your favor to have a dedicated tool for customer service. Today we delve deeper to understand better customer service CRM and its many comprehensive features and benefits.
What is Service CRM?
A CRM is a database where companies store essential information about their customers, ranging from their contact information to the records of their transactions. Customer service CRM can be a potent tool in upping your organizational game to improve and streamline your customer relationship. Service CRM consists of various versatile features that allow companies to provide faster responses to customer queries and enable companies to keep their customer support services in the loop with their entire customer lifecycle.
Having an in-depth insight into the unique data of your customers based on their interactions and profile can aid the support team in resolving their customer queries more efficiently. In addition, having your hands on real-time analytics of support queries helps improve your customer experience. A service CRM is not confined to a member register. It is much more than that. The knowledge gathered by customer service CRM is much more than identifying and anticipating customer queries.
But, these data can be highly insightful information in driving companies' sales and marketing. Better customer experience equates to better customer retention. As a business, a better approach to navigating with your customers is not to view them as one-time service users. Instead, you should visualize and shape their customer experience around how they feel motivated to return to enjoy your products or services. In short, service CRM is the 'perfect' way to eliminate unnecessary hassles and frustrations and approach faster resolutions.
Customer Service VS. Sales CRM
Companies need a toolbox to manage and assemble the customer database, especially if they are a growing business with customers flooding in. Having an assembled set of data of your customers helps you optimize how you interact with your customers. Service CRM software is an essential element in tracking and pivoting the behavior and needs of your customer base.
Depending on your organizational goals and aspirations, there are various ways to focus on customer relationships. Many companies struggle with the differences in sales CRM vs. customer service CRM. Here, we offer you a critical distinction between sales CRM vs. customer service CRM to help you decide for yourself which feature works best for your company.
What Do They Mean?
A sales CRM is software used for tracking and managing sales and lead creation cycles. On the other hand, a customer service CRM is all that but also deals with the post-purchase experience of customers.
Functions
Sales and marketing teams are the most frequent utilizers of sales CRM, whereas customer support and sales teams can benefit equally from customer service CRM.
Profiles
There are various profiles involved in both domains that may depend on the company's goals. But the commonly identified profiles in sales CRM include sales representatives, sales managers, account executives, director or vice president of sales, and chief revenue officer.
Likewise, the most common profiles associated with service CRM are customer service representative, account manager, customer support manager, customer success manager, and chief happiness officer.
Key Features
Sales and customer service CRM differ significantly in their key roles and features. Some of the essential key elements of sales CRM include contact lifecycle stages, lead generation, deal management, sales, forecasting, win-loss analysis, and lead nurturing.
In contrast, customer service CRM consists of the following key features: omnichannel support, intuitive self-service, 360-degree customer view, automated workflows and resolutions, and proactive customer assistance. Reporting and analytics are critical features where both the sales and customer service CRM converge.
Benefits
Sales CRM offers benefits, which can be seen in generating revenue opportunities, profit forecasting, churn analysis, and customer lifetime value. On the other hand, customer service CRM is responsible for reaping similar benefits, including customer satisfaction management, customer effort score analyses, customer retention, royalty forecasting, and net promoter score analysis.
Many small businesses still rely on handling customer interactions the old-fashioned way, where they struggle with multiple excel spreadsheets and filing systems. What they should know is that there are many better ways to optimize the burgeoning data and long-term value of customer insights.
Using CRM software to provide high-quality customer service and eventually bolster your company image can reap more long-term benefits. Good CRM software carries various features and primarily combines three main functions.
Marketing Actions
Companies need to have necessary clues about marketing trends. After all, the market drives sales and vice-versa. Good service CRM software is the one that allows marketing automation. In other words, it should be capable of analyzing and creating meaningful insights from the information gathered from market studies.
Sales Management
Another essential function of good software is automating sales management so that your sales teams are more productive in identifying the sales trends of your present and potential customers.
After-Sales Service Management
The first step in the 'customer-company' interaction is sales. Robust after-sales service management is crucial to maintain that interaction and enable customer retention. Good service CRM must allow companies to generate remote assistance services where the companies can help customers make the best and most of their purchasing experience.
Recommended Reading: Complete Guide on Ecommerce Customer Service
Benefits of CRM in Customer Service
Whenever a customer decides which companies' products and services they should opt for, it is not merely about pricing and quality. Customers equally care about how much the companies are invested in their customer journey. Thus, it would not be wrong to suggest that great customer service and experience qualify as the actual 'game-changer' in driving sales growth and building a company's brand image.
Whether you are a small or big business, improving your customer service can go a long way in your organizational growth. The implications of customer service CRM systems can be, therefore, highly critical to small businesses as well as large corporations in various ways:
- Increase the Agent Productivity
- Personalized 1:1 Experience Support
- Automate Support with Smart Bots
- Improves Customer Experience + Loyalty
- Makes Analytics & Reporting Simple
For those wondering how CRM improves customer service, let us dig in and learn more about the same.
1. Increases the Agent Productivity
Having direct and easy access to information about your customers' interactions with your company (e.g., past purchases, current orders, or interaction history) can enable customer support representatives to provide effortless customer service. You can input all your customer data in your customer service CRM and even include their personal, business, and social media information in a single place.
As a company, when you are experiencing such flexibility to work with a wide range of customer information that a few commands can pull up, you ought to notice a faster query resolution process and increased agent productivity.
Related Read: Benefits of Live Chat for Ecommerce
2. Personalized 1:1 Experience Support
A happy customer means a happy business. Thus, CRM and customer service help companies gauge their customers' level of satisfaction with their business.
Given that each customer is unique and can carry some unique traits, CRM service can allow companies to tap into those unique traits and provide enhanced and personalized experience support. CRM services will enable you to create custom fields so that businesses can further personalize their interactions with each customer.
3. Automate Support with Smart Bots
Humans are an important aspect of customer service. But there are many things that human staff may not efficiently work on. Service CRM tries to fill that gap by automating support with smart bots. The use of CRM software in CRM can allow businesses to automate menial yet necessary customer support and sales funnel tasks. To create consistent communication and improve loyalty, one can use customizations to offer some benefits.
Related Read: Customer Self-Service: Benefits, Best Practices & Examples
4. Improves Customer Experience + Loyalty
There are dozens of templates triggered based on events developed for the customer service CRM, which companies can use to their advantage. For a more productive interaction, service CRM supports organizing channel tickets raised by customers in a single dashboard that can be automated (if the query is relatively simple) or efficiently monitored by support staff (for complex queries).
From sending automated emails to creating different canned responses, smart bots can easily do versatile tasks using the customer service CRM.
5. Analytics & Reporting
CRM and customer service extend into analytics and reporting, as well. Customers' preferences drive companies. Even though their preferences may possess unique values, the big data derived from quality service CRM software helps companies pull reports about their customers.
Companies can rightly identify valuable insights and trends about their customers through easy access to one's customer data via customer service CRM. This can be further used to draw meaningful information that can play a key role in advancing business growth.
Conclusion
A business that understands how critical service CRM can be in fostering excellent customer relationships is already a step ahead in its organizational growth among its competitors. With the help of customer service CRM, companies can effectively gauge their customer sentiments and their common pain points and consequently enhance their customer experience. Try Richpanel Customer Service CRM & Helpdesk
