Why Does the Right CRM Make a Difference

If you run a business that relies on customer experience to grow, then chances are that you have probably heard about CRMs multiple times in your life. If you haven’t and this is the first time you have heard of it, then you’re in luck! In this post, I’m going to talk all about what a CRM is, its importance as well as explore some of the most popular CRM solutions in the market, and also tell you which one of these you should definitely use to enhance customer experience.

What is a CRM?

For those who don’t know, CRM stands for customer relationship management. As its name suggests, it is one of the most (if not, the most) efficient method for maintaining a strong relationship with your customers. It helps create a strong, healthy, personal relationship with your clients and can even help form brand loyalty.

This is why a CRM is very important for your business. A CRM allows you to monitor and analyze your interactions with your customers. This helps the team understand more clearly what customers are looking for.

Additionally, by using CRM, as a company, you’re able to understand what your clients want rather than what you think they want. This is actually a really good way of doing business as you’re looking to satisfying your clients completely- this will build customer loyalty in the long run, something which is very important in today’s very competitive market.

In order to understand what the client wants the CRM will use a number of ways to collect data regarding the customer’s preference. This may be in the form of a survey or a series of pop-up questions that come as the customer browses your website. By filling in what they’d like to see, or what they didn’t like, on your website, the CRM system collects this information and provides raw, accurate data for analysis. When the analysis is complete, you’ll be able to tell exactly what your customers want and then provide it to them. It’s a really simple concept with quite a lot of benefits.

This is why it is absolutely essential that you have the right CRM solution for your company. In order to understand why you need the right CRM solution, you must understand the benefits that come with them.

The Benefit of the Right CRM System

Every company will have a different CRM system to meet its requirements. With the right CRM solution, your company can be quite successful. In particular, the benefits will include:

An Increase in Profit Potential

This is brought about by a strong, healthy relationship with your customers. If your customers are happy with your service, you’ll find that you don’t really need to do much marketing. You can stick with your current clients and then use the money set aside for marketing for other development prospects.

You’ll be investing more in areas that need improvement instead, and you’ll know that clients will be there for you because, by meeting their needs, you will have developed a trusting relationship with them which will significantly reduce their chances of leaving your services for another’s.

An Increase in Productivity

A CRM solution is, for all intents and purposes, a computerized system. This makes the job easier for your team. Instead of allocating monitoring and analysis jobs to individuals, your team can use the CRM system to do the job.

This increases workplace productivity as less time will be spent in gathering information since it is now automated, and more time will be spent on understanding your clientele’s needs and moving in the right direction to satisfy their needs.

Enhanced Customer Experience

With a CRM solution, engaging with customers in real time takes place a lot more quickly than it would without one. Additionally, the experience also becomes as personal as possible. This enhances the chance of converting a visitor to your website into a customer by a large margin.

A CRM solution will provide links to the customer as well as showcase its social media presence to attract the customer. By doing this, and using other methods, a CRM is able to enhance the customer experience and bring in more clients to your company.

Examples of Some CRM Solutions

Of course, now that you know all about the benefits of the CRM solutions, let’s move on to inspect the best-known ones in the market.

Freshdesk

First up on our list is Freshdesk. It is a cloud-based CRM platform with the goal to allow companies, no matter how big or how small they are, to be able to provide superb customer service. It is a CRM solution which integrates traditional support systems like live chat, emails and telephone support with the new social systems like Twitter and Facebook.

Pros:

Has a built-in knowledge base
Has a self-service portal as well as multi-channel support that includes all major social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
Includes a community portal for management and sharing of ideas
It’s automatic so ticket routing is managed easily
Quick follow-up and initial response

Cons:

Reporting module has room for improvement
Premium packages (which provides excellent service) is on the costlier side.

Zendesk

Zendesk is a similar CRM solution that also supports multi-channel support and has a quality ticketing system. Furthermore, it also has a great reporting and analytics module and offers a self-service portal, much like Freshdesk.

Pros:

A flexible ticket management system
Multi-brand support system with linked accounts
Unlimited, free ‘light agents’
Public and private forums
CSS rebranding

Cons:

Does not include answers from its knowledge base app
Not enough guidelines provided in the forum for users when submitting a ticket.
Zendesk has a harder user interface.
Tickets’ workflow isn’t natural.

Salesforce

Lastly, we have Salesforce. Like the other two, it is also a cloud-based CRM solution which companies use to help manage their customer service. Salesforce was one of the first CRM solutions to come up on the internet. Truly, before this, companies had to create their own CRM solution. In a way, Salesforce paved the way for the other two CRM solutions on this list.

Pros:

It has an easy-to-navigate user interface
Multi-channel support and links to all major social media sites like Facebook.
Customizable dashboard so you can log in and check your company’s performance from a bird’s eye view.

Cons:

It is very complex and this can be problematic if you’re a small business using a CRM solution.
It is actually far more expensive than the other two CRM solutions mentioned on this list even though it has a range of different prices- the features offered are limited if you choose the cheaper options.

Ultimate Verdict: Freshdesk is the better choice!

As it might be a bit obvious for you, we personally believe that out of the three, Freshdesk is the best CRM solution.

While Salesforce delivers good service as well, you’re more inclined to use Freshdesk because of its better pricing policy. This is because Freshdesk’s features make it worth the price you’re paying whereas Salesforce limits feature according to the pricing and that is enough to put a lot of people off.

Similarly, Zendesk does not have the same number of features and user-friendly interface as Freshdesk does. As a result, Freshdesk is a CRM solution that caters to every type of business- be it big or small.

Conclusion

CRM systems are very important for your company. We hope that this article was able to help you understand why so many companies are turning towards them to help them establish a greater customer experience as well as decide which CRM solution you should use for your business.

About Author

Hutch Morzaria

I am an ITIL Expert and extremely passionate about customer service, customer experience, best practices and process improvement. I have led support, service, help desk and IT teams as well as quality and call center teams in Canada and the UK. I know how to motivate my teams to ensure that they are putting the customer first.

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