Harnessing your CRM to make data-driven decisions

Just under half of the businesses in the UK say their CRM doesn’t meet their business needs or objectives, and it’s no surprise that these businesses also don’t have a clear, robust CRM strategy.

Your CRM is your connection to your users and customers, not just a tool that manages pipelines, sends emails and stores your customer data. It’s the key to increasing customer loyalty, retention, and acquisition and improving their overall digital experience.

In this article, we’re going to focus on the ‘R’ from CRM, relationship. Because this is what your CRM system should be helping you build with your customers.??

Why does my business need a data-led CRM strategy??

As your business grows, so does your database. But it can become more and more difficult to manage, maximise the data and streamline your communications with your customers.

There are so many benefits to having a data-led CRM strategy within your business, here are the top benefits to your business and customers:

1. ?Higher customer engagement, retention and loyalty - your CRM strategy will help you use data to carefully segment and target your users and customers at the right time of their journey. You’ll see engagement rise along with loyalty and revenue.?
2. Increased insight and knowledge of your customers - wouldn’t it be great to have actionable insight from your data and make decisions based on what you actually know? Your CRM can harness data and create a 360 view of your users and customers.?
3. Tailored, targeted communication that delivers - personalisation doesn’t just mean the first name anymore, it’s about sending relevant messages, at the right time, to the right customers. The only way you can do this is through a CRM strategy that is focused on maximising the data you already have and creating new opportunities for your users and customers.
4. Sharper stakeholder reporting - what’s the use of having all the data if you can’t present it in a way that’s digestible and actionable? Utilising your CRM’s reporting capability will help give greater clarity into the areas of the business that are excelling but also where they may need attention.
5. Time and money saved through automation - how many of your business processes and customer journeys are automated? Using automation and business process flows, you can spend more time on business development and understanding the needs of your customers.
6. Better data quality - poor data is also another issue lots of businesses face. As part of your CRM strategy, you’ll need a data collection strategy that allows you to collect only relevant, high-quality data from your customers.
7. Employee empowerment and autonomy - empower your teams and colleagues with a CRM system that delivers, saves them time and allows them to take control of their processes and operations.?

How do you build a CRM strategy???

Before you dive into creating a CRM strategy, there are a number of steps you should take to ensure your intentions and goals are aligned.

First, revisit your overall business strategy and high-level business objectives. Create a vision of what you want to achieve from the CRM strategy and think about how you want this to contribute to the success of your business.

Increased customer loyalty, higher productivity and efficiency, and decreasing customer churn rates are all examples of common CRM strategy goals. Remember, your CRM strategy is not an end in itself. It exists to drive business goals. So you need to integrate it into the overall strategy of the business.

To build and maintain strong customer relationships and attract quality leads, you need to understand exactly who your customer is and why they purchase from you. Create different personas that represent the key segments of your customer base and make them as detailed as possible.

Key information you must include, for example, demographic and behavioural characteristics, as well as interests, challenges, and aspirations. Having a clearly defined buyer profile is essential to becoming a customer-centric business. It’s key to ensuring your teams and marketing are focused on the true needs and expectations of your customers.

?To master customer relationship management, you need to know every step of the customer journey. Then you need to ensure an excellent customer experience at each of those touchpoints.

Start at the beginning, and map every single customer interaction from the moment they first discover your brand. It might be through paid ads, email marketing, direct contact with team members, or other channels.

This mapping exercise will allow you to find opportunities, and red flags and start to shape your strategy.

When mapping each stage of the buyer journey, ask yourself things like;

• How can these interactions be improved?
• What’s the customer trying to achieve?
• Is there a better way to communicate the message with the customer?

Your CRM strategy planning so far should have highlighted the areas that need improvement as well as opportunities for growth.

Now it’s time to look at the structure of your internal processes. Do you have the resources in place to provide a 360-degree customer experience? Start with an audit of roles and responsibilities to check all the necessary bases are being covered.

An example of an area to optimise processes would be pre-purchase, have you got the right tools, systems and in-house skills to analyse customer needs and understand customer decision-making and behaviour?

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Do you know how your organisation matches up against your direct and indirect competitors? Review your competitors and how they collect data, what communications they automate, and how well they utilise their customer data. This will help identify opportunities where competitors do it well and gaps where they aren’t collecting data/providing value and give you a competitive advantage.

Now you’ve looked at competitors you need to review your own data and data collection strategy. By doing this you’ll understand the quality of your current data in your CRM, this may alert some internal training issues or data mapping issues, but these can all be worked into your roadmap.

Review your online data collection points which include your data design, data validation and required fields. Once you’ve done this you can fully understand the work required to create a robust data collection strategy.

So many organisations don’t know why they collect specific data from their customers. Ask yourself, when was the last time you reviewed your online forms or sign-up points?

Start with identifying the data you need to collect to fuel your CRM strategy and locate the most suitable places to collect this data. Make sure you prioritise your data collection points based on business objectives and user/customer experience. Ensure to link these data collection points with the customer journeys you’ve already identified, ask yourself, are you collecting the right data at the right touchpoint of the digital journey?

Each persona and each customer journey will have different needs, which means different processes and communications are required. Start to map out what that CRM flows look like aligned to each customer journey. Your CRM flows will constantly change and need to adapt, but you need to create the foundations.

An example of a CRM flow would be your onboarding/welcome journey, mapping out all the touchpoints and triggers required to build this CRM flow.

So how do you measure the success of your CRM strategy? Do you know what metrics you’ll use to measure it?

Reporting on your CRM flows and data analytics will be critical to your strategy, it means you can adapt and keep driving it forward.

Start with mapping out key metrics you want to measure and build on them. An example of a KPI for your CRM strategy would be engagement. There are so many ways to measure this but you could build engagement scoring into your CRM. For each customer segment, you’ll see engagement rise after a period of time that the CRM flows have been live if you’ve got it right.

The final step is to create your CRM roadmap. Start by plotting what you need to achieve your strategy including

• How long will it take and when you expect to achieve each milestone
• Budget required
• Resources needed
• Skills, knowledge and expertise

What next?

Building a CRM strategy is a lot of work, so that’s where I come in. If you’re an in-house team or an agency, finding the time, resources and expertise to even think about a project like this can be daunting. Work with me as an extension of your team to assist you in the creation & delivery of your CRM strategy.

I want to hear about your CRM journey so far and find out how we can help drive your business forward. Drop me an email or give me a call on 07713993623 and let's get talking!

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