CRM Strategy & The Changing Nature of Customer Relationships
Maintaining proper customer relations is indeed an imperative part of any business growth. When you are planning to expand your business you will require to set a certain benchmark to achieve the things you want for your business. And to reach that benchmark we need to follow a comprehensive CRM strategy.
But without maintaining the right kind of relationship with your leads or customers it will be impossible for any business to achieve the goals they have set for them. And the change of in customer relationship has also seen a drastic shift over the past few decades. And here we are about to know that change and the effective strategies to maintain a healthy relationship with customers.
The Transformation In Customer Relationship Nature
In this social media-oriented world, customer relationship has seen a major change in nature over the last one decade or so. It has taken a dramatic shift in dynamics once the business people realized that there is a huge engagement opportunity for the customers through social media that can be utilized.
If any customers go through any bad experience with any product or service, nowadays they can very easily get vocal in the social media to hamper the goodwill and image of that company. This threat of spoiling the brand image has led the companies to take the customer relationship matter very seriously.
This has lead to a massive increase in the interactions between customer & companies through social media. After all, any bad consumer report may cause that company to have a substantial loss and a company can’t just sit back and let that happen.
With the frictionless nature of social media, customers are always more encouraged to raise their voice in it. And so when a customer receives any bad response from the support team of any company, they directly go after the easiest medium to raise awareness or to share their experience.
So in order to minimize the damage to the customer relationship, the company’s involves themselves more often by interacting with them publicly in social media. By acknowledging the problems and assuring them to resolve their issues as soon as possible help redeem their lost reputations and grows a solid relationship with customers.
CRM Strategy That We Must Follow
Set A Definite Goal
When you want to achieve something, the first thing you need to do is set a clear goal for yourself and the company. Where do you want to see yourself in the next 5-10 years? What do you want to achieve in those years for yourself and company? These are the goals you need set before you actually look to accomplish something.
And CRM is something that should help you achieve your personal goal as well as your company’s. But for the CRM strategy to take effect, you will need to identify those goals first. As soon as you can know what you can achieve along with the things you are wanting to establish, that is when you should determine how you must proceed with the plan to reach your objectives.
It is always a good idea to break the goals you have set into smaller but achievable objectives. Map out what would be the easiest but best way for you to execute the steps of your plan while you keep it easily revisable and flexible in the process.
Always Keep Communicating With Co-Workers
In a company, constant & effective communication between co-workers helps them resolve critical issues on many occasions. It is probably one of the best ways to get rid of the company problem. As it creates a communicating bridge between co-workers.
But it is always your staffs that are responsible to make sure that you are able to achieve the target of your company. It is important to have a communicating funnel that ensures that all information that is being shared reaching all the responsible individuals in the company. And CRM is designed to handle a large amount of information which can easily facilitate communication between various work-groups.
You need to involve your staffs in all the important steps of your CRM strategic process. Always make sure they are up to date with the data that you are referring to. This will not only help them have a clear idea about the objectives but will also give them enough time to prioritize the work and the decision that the company takes. Involved co-workers will be able to pitch in their ideas and point out better ways to get the job done by integrating policies and technologies that would benefit the company in many ways.
Sway The Changes
Any sudden change in a company may cause panic among the team members. Trying to coup up with this change may also waste a lot of valuable time. The wise thing to do in such situations would be to accept it as a challenge. And also make everyone aware of the changes the company is planning to go through.
When any section of your business isn’t working according to your expectations, you will tend to implement new strategy and technologies in an effort to make it work again. This would mean the company will go through changes that might not go well with many. This could certainly have a negative impact on your staff’s productivity.
But to handle it better, having the mentality to accept any kind of changes would be very important. But more importantly, these changes in CRM strategy needs to be done gradually, so that it is easier for them to get used to the new CRM policies introduced by the company.
Target Customers Wisely
In a failure to target your customer better may never help you improve your business revenue. It is essential for a company to treat all their customers equally. But you need to keep in mind that the business world is not a place for democracy. In order to become a successful business company, you will be needing to target customer wisely enough to help generate profits for the company.
Each company may have their own way to prioritize their customers. But we often get to hear that the returning customer is the more valuable customer of all. As they tend to spend much more than the new customer spends.
So from a CRM strategical point of view, identifying those valuable customers to target them intelligently can prove to be really fruitful for your business. So in the CRM system, a proper segmentation of such targeted customers will be a great strategy to follow to lift up growing business.
Keep Track Of Your Customers Interest
Keeping a detailed trail of your customer’s interest is an effective way to close sales for your company. The CRM system already has a framework that can store information of customers interest in every stage of the customer journey in your site.
Even after that many companies fail to properly utilize the CRM system. It is highly important to prepare for the initial contact with your lead by analyzing the kind of things they share or likes across the social media networking channels.
This will indeed give you the advantage of knowing your customer better. As it will let you know about their needs, expectations and the things they likely to fancy in the future. So this strategy of keeping a track of the customer’s current & future needs can certainly prove to be an effective plan to close more deals in the future.
Synchronize Everything To CRM
A lot of CRMs have their own built-in programs that simulate the functionality of other frequently used applications. In such a scenario, it is easy to synchronize with the system. As any data or appointments that anybody establishes are automatically tracked down by the rest of CRM.
Also in case of any necessary external applications, make sure to sync them with your CRM with any such program that is being worked on. Any conventional CRM will import appointments related to the client of your calendar. It will also update any cancellations and other relevant changes automatically sending out notification wherever necessary.
Synchronizing everything together will help ensure that you are using your CRM at its maximum capacity. This from the strategical aspect of CRM will prove much productive in practice than it sounds like in paper.
Proper Evaluation & Improvisations
Each company has its own challenges. And no CRM strategy – no matter how precise they may be- will be able to take into account all its possible eventualities correctly. So you need to prepare yourself to accept this fact while re-evaluating your approach if it becomes obvious that something is not working as well as it could be.
Knowing what is inefficient can often be as valuable as knowing what is useful, so be thankful for every chance you have to identify weaknesses in your system after a proper evaluation.
Improvise on the things that you can improve in your CRM system. Keep evaluating the lackings in the system to identify the scope of improvement. This strategy will undoubtedly get you some positive results in the long run.
Final Words
It is quite evident that companies are too much concerned about being able to maintain healthy customer relationships. In order to better maintain the customer relationship, implementation of a CRM system also plays a big role. Along with CRM strategy benefits mentioned above, a proper implementation of CRM can boosts business growth at a quick rate.
So if you are a WordPress user and someone who is looking to manage customer better or want to maintain a strong customer relationship, then getting a complete CRM system in your company is a must. And in case you are wondering which WordPress CRM system would be best for your company, well we can certainly recommend you to try WP ERP once.
WP ERP is a WordPress plugin that can manage and takes care of all your CRM, HRM & Accounting needs efficiently. You can optimize your small to medium size business with its comprehensive inbuilt HRM, CRM & Accounting module. You can also easily integrate a number of popular and useful extension with WP ERP. And it will certainly give you a much better customer relationship management experience.
So are you looking for a highly customizable open source CRM system solution plugin for WordPress to take your business to the next level? Then surely WP ERP is something you are looking for. Here, try out the
And if you enjoy it so far, you may want to use the complete plugin getting it from the link below:
Also for any queries related to WP ERP, you can contact our support team.
If you are already using any WordPress CRM system then do share your experience and leave us a comment below.
Also, feel free to let us know your suggestions. As we are constantly trying to add many new and innovative features in our flagship plugin WP ERP. So your feedback and suggestion would certainly help us create better things for the future.