Chapter #2
CRM Benefits
Let’s have a closer look at CRM Benefits that can bring to your business and how other businesses have transformed with customer relationships management systems to become more competitive, efficient, and reduce costs.
Chapters:
Contents
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1. Centralized Data from Different Departments
Many organizations already understand the value of having a complete view of customer data to make informed decisions, improve outcomes and customer experiences. In fact, Forbes found that 78 percent of organizations already have or are developing some type of separate customer data platform to centralize customer data.
However, only very few companies can leverage customer data to their own benefit. According to Forbes, 87% of executives are not highly confident they are leveraging all available customer data.
And one of the reasons why it is so difficult to leverage customer data is that in most cases, departments are using different tools to manage day-to-day tasks. Often this not only causes a departmental disconnection but also between individuals in the same department as well.
And one of the top benefits of a CRM system is that it helps you to remove the number of applications each department uses which helps to keep your data in one place.
Also, it creates a centralized hub of your marketing, sales, field service, and customer service data that pulls data from second and third-party tools which enables you to get a 360-degree view of your customer data.
With data in one place, team members have real-time visibility into whatever they need at the time they need it.
CRM system like Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM applications provides the full range of CRM capabilities through a series of seamlessly integrated apps enabling companies to track every interaction and manage their entire front-office activities.
2. Improve Collaboration Across Departments
Another great benefit of a CRM system is that it improves collaboration across departments.
Collaboration across departments is crucial for company success, especially when it comes to your customers, as it can negatively affect the customer experience and the performance of your employees.
In fact, studies show that companies that collaborate are at least 36% more productive than those that don’t.
Collaboration can also increase your sales performance as well. According to data from Frost Sullivan, a company’s collaboration index increases sales by 27% and improves customer satisfaction ratings by 41%. The study also proved that collaboration improves product quality by 34% and improves product development by 30%.
Therefore, work collaboration is very important for companies and CRM systems enhance team collaboration across departments by providing ease to store, share and update data with teammates.
Using a CRM system your company will benefit from streamlined sales, marketing, and customer service processes resulting in enhanced collaboration and company-wide communication.
Not only that, but this also improves your customer satisfaction. Just remember the time when you had to repeat your problem to a different customer rep when you were transferred.
3. Easily Track Customer Interactions
Understanding how customers became customers helps companies make better acquisition decisions. Before your customer bought your product or service, they went through what we call a customer journey.
Now, you can find a lot of templates and examples of customer journeys from all sorts of industries. However, all these are not exactly how strangers, become prospects and prospects become customers in your case.
And before you understand how your customers interact with your brand, you are only guessing what works and what doesn’t.
Tracking your customer interaction from the first touchpoint all the way to the end of the customer lifecycle allows you to learn a lot about how you are actually driving new customers, what channels are the most effective, and how you should navigate potential leads down the funnel so they can become customers.
And CRM system allows you to easily track customer touchpoints across channels and analyze those data to create your own, personalized customer journey.
This enables companies to start focusing on what’s really working for them by attracting the right leads from the right channels and driving the best customers for the company.
Not only that, it allows you to segment your customers to create a more personalized approach and customer journey which is an essential part of your conversion rate optimization. This helps with understanding what customers are the right ones and which ones are driving the most revenue for your company.
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4. Sales Spend Less Time on Administrative Tasks
Another great benefit of using a CRM system is salespeople spend less time on administrative tasks and more on selling.
Administration tasks are a necessary evil for every salesperson so important data can be recorded and use to make decisions that positively impact the business bottom line.
In fact, two-thirds (64.8%) of reps’ time, on average, is spent in non-revenue-generating activities, leaving only 35.2% for functions related to selling.
And that’s where CRM can help free some of the time from non-selling and administration activities, so the salespeople can more focus on selling and nurturing relationships with their customers.
CRM can help salespeople spend less time on non-sales tasks like data entry, creating reports, sharing information, providing intelligent notification, and creating workflows that essential ease the burden of administrative tasks.
It also helps standardize a lot of your sales processes and then create automation and workflow to simplify or reduce any manual works such as sending follows up, demo requests, or product information.
5. Get Intelligent Notification and Reminders from AI
With guidance that shows you where to focus, you’ll be able to identify the top priorities and have confidence your team is making the best of their time and efforts.
Focus on what matters most with AI and built-in intelligence, helping you identify which leads are ready to hand off, or which customers need follow-up.
Modern CRM systems like Dynamics 365 Sales help Streamline sales cycles through suggested next best actions, focusing on the highest-priority activity with the best propensity to close.
CRM system can also notify your salespeople when get notified about deals that are stalled or at risk to help increase closure rates and ensure your sales team stays on top of the game.
Your sales team must focus on high-velocity selling. The sellers who are part of these sales teams spend valuable time identifying the best customer in their customer list, navigating across multiple sources to identify who they need to engage with, when, and how.
And CRM systems can help overcome this challenge by providing intelligent notification and tailored experience using AI and machine learning technologies.
6. Standardize Your Data and Processes
Have you ever tried to create a report from data scattered across different systems, only to find out that data doesn’t match, it needs to be reprocessed and you actually don’t have any idea what data the other departments just sent you?
Data standardization is an important part of your reporting and forecasting and a lack of standardization results in low-quality data. Companies lose 12% of their potential revenue, on average, due to bad data.
However modern CRM system allows companies to organize all the data in a systematic and standardized way that the system, so the people will understand the data.
It helps you to sorts raw, non-uniform data and transform it into a consistent, predictable, and unified format used by AI and humans to make predictions, reports, etc.
This enables you to share data across departments and be sure that they can understand and use the data immediately without coming back and forth explaining what each column in excel means.
On top of that, CRM allows users to standardize common processes such as lead management and lead qualification, follows-up and closing deals, providing customer service and so much more.
CRM system helps you to standardize your data and processes which results in better collaboration, easier to scale and onboard new people and keep company standards high.
7. Scale Your Processes as Company Grows
Another great benefit of a CRM system is it allows you to scale your processes as your company grows.
As your company grows, hiring more people, targeting across more channels and increasing campaign budgets there needs to be a way for your workforce to effectively work and do more with less.
The goal of a modern CRM system is to be your process management tool that allows you to create workflows and automate tedious and repetitive tasks while keeping consistency in delivery and quality.
It also works as a centralized database and allows you to integrate your CRM system with second and third-party tools to streamline data across the tools.
And as already mentioned, the CRM system reduces some of the administrative tasks so your employees can focus on what they do the best.
Lastly, I want to mention, the CRM system helps you to effectively manage your growing list of customers by allowing you to effectively manage multiple channels at once, respond to your customers’ inquiries faster, and provide the tools so your employees can live up to the expectations.
And of course, there are many more ways how CRM systems can help your growing business to scale some of your processes and if you want to learn more about how Dynamics 365 CRM Apps can help your Malaysian business, please contact us.
8. Improve Your Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction has been arguably one of the most important topics in every business industry. Almost all businesses have acknowledged the importance of happy customers, happy business.
At times, when customers are having plenty of choices to choose from, we are living in a world, where a customer is in charge of our business success. Therefore customer satisfaction has become ever more important.
A CRM system with the right strategies will help you to unlock more customer-centric, streamlined processes and insights that lead to higher customer satisfaction.
It helps you to respond faster to customer inquiries, create a more personalized approach, keep customer service standards high in a friendly manner, and even helps employees to better manage their workload in busy times.
CRM system helps boost team efficiency by eliminating repetitive tasks, letting your team focus on high-impact activities.
It also includes features to help you track engagement across various customer touchpoints and Insight into behavior throughout the customer journey helps surface opportunities for optimization—and lets you know what’s working well.
CRM system also helps you to connect with your customer wherever they are, whether it is live chat, calls, email, or social media, CRM system helps you to connect across platforms.
Lastly, I want to mention, CRM solutions help you offer great customer service—helping build the trust and loyalty that keeps your customers coming back.
9. Protect Your Data & Business from Hackers and Regulation
The next great benefit of using a CRM system is that it helps you to protect your data against hackers and data breaches.
A report from IBM shows that Data breach costs rose from USD 3.86 million to USD 4.24 million, the highest average total cost in the 17-year history of this report.
And the main factor of increased data breaches was due to COVID-19 and remote work. The average cost was USD 1.07 million higher in breaches where remote work was a factor in causing the breach, compared to those where remote work was not a factor.
Modern CRM systems like Microsoft Dynamics 365 provide robust enterprise-level security for all their customers ensuring your data are well-protected.
Microsoft invests over $1B each year into cybersecurity research and development and with over 3,500 cybersecurity experts who work 24x7x365, they protect, detect, and respond to threats in real-time.
Also, Microsoft Dynamics 365 is committed to helping its customers meet their privacy and personal data requirements, as well as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Lastly, Microsoft provides strong security roles ensuring your data flow across your organization safely and only the right employees can access your valuable data.
10. Reduce Human Errors
And the least CRM benefit I want to mention is that it reduces human errors.
CRM system provides multiple ways how you can capture and record leads into your system. This helps to reduce manual data entry, thereby saving your employees valuable time.
Most CRM has a daily task manager to help you keep your work on schedule. It helps you maintain your calendar with every detail about your planned date for a task, meetings, contact with customers, etc. You can keep track of your schedule for days, weeks, and months.
It helps you to also manage your inventory level and make decisions based on data and prediction to ensure, you are having the right amount of stock at the right time, or it’s not lost.
It also helps minimize the risk of duplication, thus ensuring that your data is error-free and accurate manner.
And CRM helps with reducing manual human errors by many folds. This saves a lot of money and time wasted on minor mistakes that we could make.
Final Words
CRM system brings many benefits for your company and it’s one of the main investment companies made at the beginning.
However, as much as the system can be great, it always comes down to the management and how your employees are using the system.
If the employees aren’t using the system how is meant to be used, the system will ultimately fail regardless. Therefore, it’s important to ensure you have a proper change management plan for your new CRM system, you provide proper training, so your employees don’t fall back to the old way of doing business.
So, if you want to benefit from a CRM system, you must make sure, everybody uses it in the way it was intended and they see the value of using it for themselves and your company.
Learn more about Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM Applications
Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM Applications are standalone business apps developed to help companies manage customer data, attract new customers, retain current customers, and improve business efficiencies. Microsoft CRM applications cover business processes including Marketing, Customer Service, Sales, and Field Service. Together with AI, you will get a 360-degree view in real-time of your customers and prospects.
Is Sales Management & Sales Force Automation CRM system that enables salespeople to build strong relationships with their customers, take actions based on insights, and close sales faster with actionable insights and a personalized approach.
Is a marketing-automation application that helps manage multi-channel campaigns and turn prospects into business relationships. The app is easy to use, works seamlessly with Dynamics 365 Sales, and has built-in business intelligence.
Is Customer Automation and Customer Management system. Differentiate your brand by taking advantage of built-in intelligence to deliver faster, more personalized service and add value to every customer interaction.
Provides complete field Service Management including service agreements, predictive maintenance, preventative maintenance, work order management, resource management, product inventory, scheduling and dispatch, mobility, collaboration, customer billing, and analytics.
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