How to personalise your CX approach with CRM

Six key tips to help you use CRM to personalise your CX

1) Keep the customer at the heart

You must ensure that your whole business is working together to provide positive customer experiences at all times.

Consider developing a customer experience-focused role or department of Customer Success Managers within your business. This will mean you have a dedicated spokesperson for the customer which will help you truly keep the customer at the heart of everything. It will also help focus the development of processes that have the customer in mind that are both efficient and effective.

If you aren’t able to create a dedicated role or department, instead think about entrenching customer success responsibilities and understanding throughout the business. That way, everyone is working together to manage customer experience and increase customer satisfaction and retention.

2) Make communication easy and provide a choice

Whatever industry you’re in, it’s vital that your customers can contact you, and be contacted by you. Even more important is that they can do this using their preferred methods, such as email, telephone, or live chat. However, with so many options available, keeping track of everyone’s preferences can be tricky. That is unless you have a CRM that you can log their preferences in.  

Another way to improve communication with your customers is to track everything that comes in from them. Your CRM system should be able to collate all of this correspondence into one, central view within that customer’s record which is then visible to the whole team. Having this information tracked and visible in a CRM can provide key relationship information when you need it most. As a result, no matter who on your team last spoke with the customer, the next person they speak to can quickly catch up on those previous conversations. This is vital as it stops your customer from having to repeat themselves.

Having a presence on the social media platforms most popular with your customer base is an absolute must! For instance, because I have a number of customer contacts who prefer to get in touch with me via LinkedIn, I make sure that I am active and present on the platform. If you’re not making the most of social media, I can guarantee that your competitors will be. Don’t let them reap the benefits unchallenged. To help, I’ve written an eBook dedicated to Social Selling, how to get started, and how you can use it to your advantage.

3) Know your customer

A CRM system can ensure that not only are all the communications in a single location visible to all but all the key information to manage your relationship is also easy to access. For instance, we work with our customers to configure and customise the data that is important to them. This ensures that the data they’re tracking in their CRM going forward can be easily used for segmentation, personalisation and reporting to inform KPIs and SLAs. 

Another area where a CRM can help you personalise your CX is when it comes to customer success calls. We find these calls are a fantastic opportunity to inform, advise and provide guidance to our customers that is unique to their business and experiences. It also helps to establish our Customer Success Managers as reliable points of contact for those customers.

We have implemented a simple process using our CRM for these calls. It provides guidance on areas to discuss and key tips for information to review, including:

• Key contacts – with social media profiles and Contact Role details
• Buying process
• Current products or services plus interest areas and opportunities
• Marketing preferences

Ahead of your call, it is also worth using an integrated marketing solution to check if they have opened your most recent marketing communications and clicked on specific product pages or shown an interest in a particular service. Also, keep an eye on their LinkedIn and Twitter posts. These provide insights into their business and key projects.

Ultimately, all of this will provide you with not only key areas for discussion but also enable you to understand any challenges or interests your customer may have. These insights can then all be stored within your CRM!

4) Service consistency

Your CRM solution is also the perfect tool to help you track the journey your customer goes on (from lead to customer onboarding and ultimately customer success and support). Especially if it provides you with intelligent automation and workflow tools to help your teams work smarter, not harder.

For instance, you can use your CRM to capture all of your support or service-related customer communications and touch points. This enables you to track the journey of the enquiry or issue. As a result, you’ll be able to clearly understand where the issue came from, how it was resolved, and how long it took to resolve. These valuable insights will assist efforts to better serve future customers who may face the same or very similar issues, ensuring that the experience you provide is always improving.

I would also highly recommend using templates and workflow automation to provide an additional level of seamless customer experience. This is particularly helpful in onboarding or support scenarios. For example, at Gold-Vision we have set up workflows within our CRM that trigger specific emails to send when the status changes against a support ticket. As a result, our customer support team have peace of mind knowing that the system is keeping the customer up to date with the progress of the ticket.

5) Personalise with marketing automation

As I’ve already touched on, capturing key data in your CRM solution gives you the ability to segment your data and makes personalisation simple. When you combine this with marketing automation functionality you can say goodbye to the days of marketing the same message to everyone on your database. Instead, you have the power to enhance your customers’ experience by tailoring your messages so that they reach the right people at the right time.

For example, you may want your initial communication to go out to a wide audience to capture interest – such as a promotion of a particular feature or service. With a marketing automation tool that is fully integrated with your CRM, you could then create a rule that captures every contact who clicked a particular link in your mailshot or viewed a specific product on your website. You then have the ability to send a more detailed follow-up email to just those contacts. Simultaneously, an activity is set up for the account manager to do a follow-up call the next day to check in.

6) Feedback

Before a customer ever reaches out to your sales team, they are checking you out on various channels. This includes reading the reviews and comments of others. Therefore, if you can nurture positive experiences then you will yield positive feedback. This, in turn, can be used to attract and convince new customers – and so the cycle continues.

This brings us once again to the role of Customer Success Managers. They are fundamental to ensuring your customers are having positive experiences at every step. You want them to be regularly monitoring touch points, interactions and other activities and ensuring the feedback loop is consistent and current. As a result, they are often the best placed to ask your customers for feedback without fear.

We find that the simplest ways to gather this feedback are via review sites such as Capterra and social media. However. you may have other options more relevant to your industry that are worth exploring. When it comes to sharing that feedback social media is undeniably the place to go. A well-crafted social post will help to promote both yours and your customer’s service while providing insight for other customers or prospects. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.

It’s also a great idea to keep a record of this feedback within your CRM. This will provide content for the marketing team that they can use for collateral like the website, brochures and events.

In summary

Personalising your CX approach is essential if you want your business to succeed. And utilising the power of your CRM solution means can truly deliver on your intentions of providing CX that will set you apart from your competitors.

I hope that the steps I’ve shared in this blog will help you feel confident in achieving this. If we can help to guide you in any way please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Before you go, here are some other quick reads we think you’ll enjoy:

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  3 real-world scenarios made super easy with marketing automation
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  5 vital CRM integrations to help your business succeed
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  6 steps to personalising your customer experience approach with CRM