Why CRM is needed to inspire customers

Customer experience checklist

Inspiring customers and prospects is more important today than ever before. It would appear that customer experience is the all-important success factor. Those who fail to provide potential and existing customers with positive experiences on an ongoing basis will lose out in the race against the competition. The following checklist shows why a customer relationship management system (CRM) is the key basis for inspiring customers and prospects in B2B.

1. Seek contact with customers and prospects.

We all know it from our private lives: before we contact a provider, we research on the Internet, compare different companies and their offers and only buy once we have obtained comprehensive information from various channels. It's no different in B2B. Every single contact with a potential buyer influences their subsequent decisions. If you repeatedly leave a prospective customer with positive emotions during their buyer journey, you have a good chance of being awarded the contract. Likewise, a single negative experience can be enough to damage an existing or budding business relationship. To counteract this, companies need to proactively keep customers and prospects up to date: via newsletters, personalized sales campaigns and customer satisfaction surveys. The CRM system provides the necessary database. It not only allows a wide variety of marketing campaigns to be carried out, tracked and evaluated in compliance with the GDPR, but also allows the right customers to be identified for each measure.

For example, metadata stored in the CRM supports the planning and tracking of marketing campaigns: Which target group does a campaign address? When should it take place? By assigning corresponding contacts to the metadata, topic-specific mailings can be sent to suitable addressees in a targeted manner. CRM tools also offer valuable support for tracking: companies can track which and how many recipients have opened a piece of content - the basis for continuously optimizing mailings.

2. Understand the needs of your customers and prospects.

Advancing digitalization goes hand in hand with great transparency. Consumers can often compare products and services down to the smallest detail - and come to the conclusion that there is little or no difference between them: Products and services have become interchangeable. This is why companies need to radically rethink. They need to focus their thoughts and actions on the customer and understand their needs. To develop a feeling for customers and potential customers, companies can make use of various channels. Many consumers describe their experiences with a provider on various social media channels and on special review platforms. The totality of posts and reviews provides a pretty good picture of the mood. Companies can also use standardized surveys to determine the satisfaction of their customers. Such surveys can be created in the CRM system and sent to relevant customers based on accurate segmentation. Companies also receive valuable feedback by obtaining the opinions of their customers by email or directly, i.e. in person or by telephone. It is important that all relevant information from all channels flows into the CRM and is automatically assigned to the respective contact. This makes it possible to respond quickly to any complaints and continuously improve your own products and services.

3. Get a picture of your customers and prospects.

Once you have understood the needs of your customers, you can go one step further and derive realistic buyer personas from the knowledge you have acquired. A CRM tool documents buyer and prospect behavior from the first contact across all channels. Once all contacts have been recorded in the CRM system, a meaningful picture of each individual customer is created. The existing database therefore forms a reliable basis for the persona definition. In addition to demographic attributes, a CRM system also provides the real behavioral data and personal preferences of the contacts as well as current figures from sales and marketing. It makes it possible to consolidate the mass of very inhomogeneous and difficult-to-understand data, combine it intelligently and analyze it.

4. Bind your customers to your company.

Supporting customer loyalty is the core function of a CRM tool. While it used to be about documenting customer history, companies are now required to build a unique relationship with their customers by addressing them in a personalized and emotional way. To this end, the CRM system provides all the information that companies need to strengthen their customers' loyalty. In addition to the complete contact history, any returns or complaints are also available in the CRM solution across all internal hierarchy levels. This means that every employee - whether from sales, marketing or service - can proactively approach the respective customer and emotionally bind them to the company with every further contact.

5. Keep an eye on the customer journey.

In order to accompany customers and prospects throughout their journey and provide them with relevant information at the appropriate touchpoint, every contact should be documented transparently in the CRM system. If companies have their CRM database under control and maintain it on an ongoing basis, they have an up-to-date 360-degree view of customers and prospects at all times. Depending on which phase of the decision-making or purchasing process they are in, they need a different type of support: an informative white paper, a checklist to help them make a decision or an on-site sales meeting. Every single experience must be as positive as possible in order to win and retain customers in the long term. A CRM solution not only provides all the information needed to deal with customers and prospects in the best possible way. It also shows which department is responsible for lead generation and subsequent customer care. The CRM tool thus forms the essential prerequisite for being able to act in a customer-focused and cross-departmental manner.

Author: Dario Waechter