Why does client retention matter for a business?
The success of any business depends on not just acquiring new leads but also maintaining existing customers. Client retention is vital for a whole number of reasons, including:
- It’s 500% to 2500% more costly to bring in a new customer than it is to retain a current client, states a report by the Harvard Business Review.
- Companies can bump revenue by up to 95% if they increase customer retention by just 5%, research by Bain & Company finds.
- Loyal and happy customers will have nothing but kind words to spread to their social circles, earning you free promotion
Breaking down the ins and outs of your typical customer relationship management (CRM system).
In the past, businesses relied on endless apps, databases, and spreadsheets to keep track of communications with leads and to nurture client relationships & sales. It was all way too cumbersome and important information often slipped through the cracks, not to mention the runaway trouble of obsolete data.
CRMs present a more efficient and automated business relationship management platform to help companies stay on top of customer data from a multitude of sources, namely:
- Contact forms
- Social media
- Emails
- Purchase records
- Call centers, etc.
For all their advances though, CRMs still don’t entirely eliminate manual data entry. Sales reps often have to painstakingly key in networking data to the system, with manual errors often sneaking in. All this trouble can be avoided by simply automating CRM data entry on our smart networking platform, StayTouch.
Why CRMs are great for business
CRMs present a wealth of benefits for companies regardless of size, some of which encompass:
- Improved customer satisfaction and experience
- CRMs enable successful, data-driven marketing initiatives
- Enhanced customer retention
- Improved workflow efficiency
- A centralized database- no need to rummage through multiple sources
Overall, research establishes that you can bump up sales by 29% by simply incorporating a CRM into your workflow.
CRM tips to make your platform a goldmine
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Keep a close eye on consumer behavior
A CRM platform makes it easy to monitor your sales cycle in its entirety. This allows you to deduce purchase patterns across periods so you can retarget your marketing strategies.
More importantly, CRMs let you into the mind of your buyers via social media and various other channels. You can know what they’re looking up, what they’re most interested in, among other details you need to offer perfect purchase solutions.
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Ensure clients can easily set up meetings
Your CRM should have convenient meeting scheduling capabilities. Short of switching to a new platform in case yours doesn’t, you could also complement your CRM with third-party virtual meeting scheduling tools with more in-depth features like:
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- Calendar syncs
- Event management and invites
- Meeting notes & transcriptions
- Reminders
CRMs are never stand-alone systems sadly, a grave assumption that many businesses make. Partnering your platform with the right technologies is key to ensuring even more success for your business.
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Always be on top of your data
Customer data changes all the time. Clients can switch residential addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, etc., among other important details. If your business has a contact list numbering in the thousands, it can be overwhelming to keep track of all these changes without an efficient contact management tool.
To save you time and trouble, leave all the hard work to our enterprise contact management platform so you don’t have to lift a finger. Our automated contact change updates make it easy to keep your customer profiles up to date.
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Feed your CRM with social media data
Social media is a goldmine for marketing data. If your company has several social media pages, there’s much to gain from linking them up to your CRM.
Besides keeping in touch with your market’s needs, you’ll get a front-row seat to your existing customers’ social networks who may have shared interests in your products or services. Our powerful professional relationships management tool can come in handy when it comes to freely expanding your market reach with automated CRM data entry.
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Make mobile device access a priority for your CRM
Mobile CRMs offer many benefits for sales reps and businesses as a whole, such as:
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- Ready access to customer data on the go
- Better productivity and customer service
- Increased sales
Switching to a CRM with mobile and cloud access capabilities is, therefore, a no-brainer. If you already own a CRM that you’re quite pleased with but it doesn’t have mobile access, you could outsource to a mobile app development company to sort this out for you.
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Be on the lookout for CRM updates
Don’t update your CRM often? You could be leaving security loopholes for hackers to exploit. Moreover, software updates are often meant to streamline inefficiencies and faults in the system, so it’s wise to schedule regular CRM updates or, better yet, set it up to automatically update.
You’ll know it’s time to update your CRM if it has scaling issues, limited automation, no mobile access, and if you’re bumping into lots of defective data signals.
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Give your CRM the right partner
To err is human, however, mistakes can have devastating consequences for a business’s sales initiatives. With bad CRM data:
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- Leads receive mismatched messages
- There’s an upturn in unsubscriptions
- Sales dwindle
- Revenue and win rates plummet
To safeguard CRM accuracy, it’s important to ensure an automated means by which to transfer networking data from a remote networking platform directly into your CRM. Besides avoiding errors, this frees up a lot of time for sales reps so they focus more on quality lead generation.
Conclusion
Above all, be sure to have a CRM strategy to guide you right from the implementation phase. Businesses often rush headlong into CRM implementation without any predefined formula and this can be a recipe for disaster. Have a clear plan on how you’ll do it, and why you’re doing it in the first place, then lay out a step-by-step process. Whatever you do, remember to choose the right CRM partner. Our enterprise contact management platform makes an excellent companion for CRMs everywhere and ensures seamless integrations, as you can see from our enterprise page here. If you’d like to witness StayTouch in action first-hand, book a demo from the same page. Simply fill in some quickly identifiable information, tell us a little about your team and what you’d like to manage, and we’ll schedule your demo ASAP.