The 6 Greatest Benefits of CRM Platforms

CRM platforms provide businesses with structure and organization techniques. If you haven't started working with a CRM platform, you really should. For those who have been working with one, it's almost impossible to imagine a life without one.

A CRM platform helps companies target different audiences, set scores and alerts based on an individual lead or customer’s activity, proactively work with contacts and maintain relationships. Best of all, a CRM system can be used across departments to ensure that all customer-facing teams are empowered with the right data to create incredible customer experiences.

CRM benefits a company in a variety of ways. While the benefits vary by department or industry, six benefits of CRM platforms that affect every user include:

• Trustworthy reporting
• Dashboards that visually showcase data
• Improved messaging with automation
• Proactive service
• Efficiency enhanced by automation
• Simplified collaboration

Trustworthy Reporting

Data is a necessary part of business, and it’s available from a number of resources: social media, Google Analytics, business software, apps, and CRM technology. It’s not useful, however, until it’s sorted, cleaned, analyzed, and made actionable.

Companies of all sizes use social media and rely on metrics from those platforms. Google Analytics is an important tool many business owners use, at least minimally, to monitor their website traffic. However, you can’t rely on these tools alone.

A CRM system helps you go deeper with all your data and metrics, including those from other sources. When your company is dedicated to maintaining clean data, or data free from errors, you can use your CRM platform to collate, tabulate, and organize that data, which is then easy to interpret with reporting features. This is one of the biggest benefits of a CRM system, and it trickles down to other benefits that become available once you have this usable data.

An advantage that CRM platforms have over other customer relationship management systems is that you can see who interacts with your company and how. For example, a lead successfully filled out a form on a landing page after seeing a particular ad on social media. You can also run reports to see where your opportunities are, how well you’re interacting with leads and customers, trends in your sales and customer service efforts, and more.

The best CRM systems can do more than tell you which ad a lead came from. They can show you exactly what a person clicks when you send them an email marketing message, how many times they open an email, how often they have conversations with your sales team, what they need when they contact customer service and more.

Reports are one of the most valuable benefits of CRM platforms, especially when they’re enhanced by AI. Actionable data allows you to more effectively communicate with your current audience while also making it easier to reach out to those who have shown interest in the past. These reports guide your decision-making process and are invaluable. To keep an eye on absolutely current statistics in order to make minute-by-minute or daily decisions, your company needs data visualizations at its beck and call. This is where another one of the benefits of CRM comes in: dashboards.

Dashboards that Visually Showcase Data

Using a spreadsheet to manage your company means inputting or importing data manually, figuring out what’s important, and then creating a graphical way to present this data. CRM does most of this for you. Once you’ve invested in the platform, you can take advantage of another CRM benefit, the dashboard. You can set up a dashboard for every individual in your company who has login credentials for your CRM platform.

For example, a director of marketing would be most interested in email marketing metrics, specifically the click-through rates of each campaign. They can set up a dashboard that immediately displays how many people a particular email was sent to, how many people opened it, what the click-through rate is, and more. A director of sales, however, would want to know how many calls are made per hour, and how many of those calls resulted in positive action, such as a future meeting or demo. Dashboards let users quickly see the data that’s most important to their workflows without having to dig, sift, sort, or run a report.

More Personalized Outreach with Automation

Because you are continually capturing data about and insights into your audience, market, and industry, you can create more relevant, personalized messaging and outreach — in both your manual efforts and your automated campaigns. This is the advantage of dynamic content and automated messaging: You can put people who have an important similarity — for example, an interest in a niche product — into different drip campaigns.

This capability is a benefit of many CRMs and lets you set up a series of automated emails that speak to that audience specifically and are triggered by specific actions. Drip campaigns can be used throughout the sales funnel.

For example, on a tour company website, if someone builds a custom itinerary for a trip to Thailand, instead of sending them generic emails about travel, you can start them on a drip campaign for people who create custom itineraries for Southeast Asia. Automation also allows you to take someone out of a drip campaign at any time based on their actions. If, for example, the person who was interested in a trip to Thailand finally books the itinerary, your platform will automatically remove them from that particular drip campaign to avoid redundant emails and confusion.

Proactive Service

In the same way that the data in your CRM platform can help automate more personalized outreach throughout the marketing funnel, it can improve a sales team’s outreach efforts or customer service’s ability to help customers. If a sales team has the knowledge of what interests a particular customer most, they or a support representative can meet the customer’s needs and solve problems more proactively.

This is a major advantage for a customer service team. With relevant data available in their dashboards and in cases, there’s no need to dig for information, so a rep can get right down to what matters. It saves everyone time and makes your potential and current customers feel important when sales and customer service are proactive and knowledgeable — plus, it can improve your bottom line through higher customer satisfaction and reduced time to resolution.

Efficiency Enhanced with Automation

Don’t make tracking and managing customer information harder than it needs to be. CRM ensures your data is in one place and can easily be updated by anyone, anytime.

Automation is an advantage CRM platforms offer users, and it can be seen throughout the company. Three examples include:

• Cutting the time it takes to email and nurture leads with drip campaigns
• Scoring leads using custom parameters you set or with built-in AI, so your teams can better prioritize which marketing qualified leads, or MQL can transition to sales qualified leads, or SQL
• Handling simple customer questions, such as the status of an order, with chatbots and other automated messaging

Marketing can spend more time creating campaigns that resonate with their audience, analyzing data, and testing different strategies based on analytics. Sales can focus on selling the right product or service to customers. Customer service agents can dedicate their time to working with customers who have questions, problems, or more complex needs. Ultimately, an efficient company can better serve its customers — that’s the greatest benefit of CRM software.

Simplified Collaboration

Your CRM serves as a record of conversations, interactions, needs, notes, and contact information. And if it’s cloud-based, it’s always up to date, and your teammates can easily look at its records to make decisions. Additionally, some CRM platforms have built-in collaboration tools that allow multiple people to work on one file simultaneously or follow the progress of a document, such as a sales quote.

Everyone who has access to your CRM can work together through this shared record. For example, when a salesperson speaks with a customer and learns more about them, they can fill in certain fields in that person’s record or make notes on their file. This helps make sure the rest of the team is working with the latest details and to the best of their ability. Marketing, sales, and customer service work together seamlessly instead of worrying about siloed information.

With a CRM platform, you'll be able to gather insights and data. Then, your team members are able to work together and provide amazing service to all of your customers. Keeping your business organized with a CRM platform is worth it.

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