When customers have a query, they expect quick and efficient resolution from support teams. If they are not satisfied, they will quickly turn to competitors. A CRM or customer relationship management system's primary function is to help businesses manage their interactions with customers, streamline processes, and build long-term relationships. And guess what, CRM can really improve your customer support! Keep reading to know more.
Table of Contents
- Understand Your Customers Better
- Leverage Self-service
- Collaborate with Teams and Agents
- Monitor Performance and Improve Your Customer Support
- Use Automation to Your Advantage
- Conclusion
Understand Your Customers Better
CRM, when it's complete and accurate, provides a 360-degree view of your customers. Thus you can track their purchase history and activity across various channels so that agents can personalize interactions and provide tailored support. And when a customer comes with a query, agents can easily access their previous activity or past interactions and provide them with an informed resolution.
But keep in mind, for everything to work this way, make sure that each customer’s information is entered into your CRM system. Also the necessary fields must be created, grouped and filled in, tags placed, and contacts segmented. Some interactions the CRM documents automatically. However, if your agent gets new customer-related data "in manual mode", they should immediately enter it in the CRM.
Leverage Self-service
First things first, what is self-service? In customer support, self-service means giving customers the tools and information to solve their own problems or answer their own questions. This could be through FAQ sections, online tutorials, user manuals, or automated chatbots that can provide immediate answers to frequent queries. The goal is to let customers find solutions on their own time and at their own pace, without having to wait for a response from a customer service representative.
Implementing self-service can dramatically reduce your customer support team workload. But how does this relate to CRM?
Well, since a CRM system can help better understand your customers, therefore it allows you to create tailored self-service resources. Additionally, customer journey analytics provides important insight into the types of questions customers are asking, allowing you to build a knowledge base and offer more comprehensive self-service solutions.
For example, let's say you sell various stuff — from clothes to home decor. Given the vast range of items, customers often have questions about product details, shipping, returns, and more. One day, you notice that many customers interested in clothes ask about the size.
Using this insight from the CRM, you can enhance your self-service resources: create a comprehensive size guide for their clothing items, including measurements and fit advice. Plus, shootshot a series of short videos demonstrating how to measure oneself for the best fit.Furthermore, you can add a chatbot on your website that can answer common questions about sizing, as well as other topics like shipping and returns. Nice, right?
Collaborate with Teams and Agents
Being a centralized place where all customer information is stored, CRM allows agents to collaborate. So, if a customer contacts support again, any agent can pick up where the last one left off, offering a seamless experience for the customer. Agents can leave notes and updates about an interaction, allowing other agents to access this information if they ever handle that customer’s request.
CRM also enables agents to collaborate with other teams responsible for sales, marketing, product, etc. This way, they can access relevant information and expertise from different sources and provide better solutions to customers.
Monitor Performance and Improve Your Customer Support
Every interaction between a customer and a business presents an opportunity to learn and improve. To identify areas for improvement you can assess metrics such as response time, resolution time, and on-hold time. But you can also let customers rate your agents and thus get insights into customer satisfaction levels. Plus, such ratings can foster a spirit of healthy competition and collaboration among them.
For new agents, a CRM system can serve as a training tool. By reviewing past customer interactions, they can learn how to handle different types of issues.
Use Automation to Your Advantage
Another great feature of a CRM system is its ability to automate workflows using custom rules. This type of automation can speed up repetitive and time-consuming tasks, especially data entry. This automation improves overall productivity, enabling agents to focus on more complicated customer queries that require a human touch.
The simplest example is a contact form on your website where customers can submit their issues. The form asks for details like their name, email address, phone number, and a description of their problem or question. Once submitted, the information from the form is automatically logged into the CRM system. This process creates a new ticket or case in the system. So, when a customer service agent sees a new case appear in the CRM and can start working on it they already have all the information and the details right there in the CRM.
Conclusion
Now you know that a CRM system can transform the way your support team interacts with customers. It can give you a better understanding of your customers and help create self-service resources. It allows your agents and teams to work together using one database and monitor their performance. And thanks to automation you really speed up data entry and other time-consuming tasks.
CRM is a great tool that lets you track your customer's journey, helps support relationships and build new ones, brings together different teams, and automates workflow. And all these things eventually lead to increased sales.
Our TruVISIBILITY CRM application is just an example of such a CRM for small businesses. Alongside Chat, Messaging, and Sites it's an integral part of TruVISIBILITY All-in-One Marketing Suite and thus plays a role of a center that collects all the data from other apps.
Register a freemium TruVISIBILITY account and get unlimited access to fully functional marketing software free of cost!
As your business grows, you only pay for what you use without any contract. A freemium TruVISIBILITY account allows you to:
- Create a chatbot that can conduct up to 100 conversations per month
- Launch email blasts, start drip campaign, etc with 1000 free emails sent monthly
- Send 1000 SMS texts per month
- Build 1 website including a blog
- 1 GB of storage usage
- 1 SSL certificate
- Unlimited API usage
The pricing is based on usage over the free monthly allotment. Thus it is extremely affordable for small to medium businesses. You can adjust the number of conversations your chatbots can have, the number of emails and SMS that can be sent per month, the number of websites you can deploy, and the capacity of your cloud storage. Simple and flexible!
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