Future Proofing Sales with CRM Innovations

Customers have always been the most important aspect of a business. The pursuit of improving your customer experience and having a higher level of customer satisfaction is becoming as competitive as it can get. With ever-changing customer expectations, the needs must be met with a wider range of channels and technology than ever before.

Businesses can store and manage all of their customers’ data by using customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. Gleaning insights from the data, automating sales processes and forecasting future sales are some of the benefits of using a CRM platform.

Every lead and customer are represented in one single spot with an integrated CRM system, providing a unified view of every customer for everyone in the organization.

CRM innovations not only provides employees with the data they need to succeed, but also facilitates a more customized experience for customers on their journey.

CRM innovations

Every touchpoint and transaction in the consumer journey is a part of an expanding ecosystem for CRM. As importance of providing a better customer service increases day-by-day, it becomes essential for businesses to be aware of CRM innovations.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence will undoubtedly be central to CRM innovations in future. AI integrated CRM platforms can enable businesses with automating data input and precise analytics from the data gathered. AI and ML technologies can analyze vast consumer datasets for behavioral forecasting and future trends prediction. AI enabled CRM platforms can also supports smart chatbots that can assist the consumers on every touchpoint, can offer them solutions and alternatives, and even automatically store notes and feedbacks, elevating their experience.

Automation

Automation is always the key to achieve increased productivity and reduced costs. Without automation, it is nearly impossible to create an effective system for handling clients and tasks. Automation solutions are improving CRM ability to help businesses stay organized. Automation helps businesses to streamline the client classification procedure. By automating manual tasks and processes related to email campaigns, social media management, and marketing campaigns, automation improves overall CRM functionality by automating multiple processes in the workflow.

Predictive analytics

Analytics can provide real time insights from the data gathered for sales, performance, and consumer interaction. This can help businesses to take data driven decisions regarding future customer behavior that can lead to optimized resource allocation and increased revenues. It can also help businesses identify problems, opportunities and even behavioral anomalies and take informed judgements for the same.

Social CRM

The integration of social media channels and platforms in CRM platforms is called social CRM. Businesses’ hold and understanding on important metrics like brand sentiment and consumer perception can increase significantly with the help of social CRM. It also helps in streamlining and improving a business’ engagement ratio (ER). Social CRM helps an organization understand an organization’s current market positioning, strengthen customer relationships, and increase their visibility.

Mobile CRM

Mobile CRM empowers salespeople and marketing personnel with unrestricted access to the CRM platform from anywhere and anytime. The necessity of being glued to the desktops gets completely eliminated with the integration of mobile CRM platforms. This in turn allows salespeople to be more productive with their time. With enhanced accessibility to data and tools required by the salespeople, mobile CRM boosts efficiency, improves communication and overall management of sales teams.

IoT

IoT has the potential to remarkably enhance CRM platforms. By using IoT devices such as cyber security devices, smart home devices and smart health wearable monitors, IoT empowered CRM platforms can give data into consumer behavior that can improve customer service and create more targeted marketing campaigns. Businesses can significantly improve their consumer journey by using IoT enabled CRM platforms.

Self-service

Though self-service CRM is not a new innovation, with technological advancement its capabilities and importance has increased remarkably. A self-service CRM platform enables consumers to solve their queries end-to-end by themselves without the need of help from an executive. This frees salespeople from manual tasks such as contact management, opening new accounts, paying bills, and solving problems as the CRM platforms are becoming efficient and capable enough of handling it by themselves. Self-service CRM solutions can automatically lead prospective consumers through the sales and marketing funnels. A research said that 65% of customers use self-service channels for simple matters.

Conclusion

In an increasingly competitive corporate environment, having a strong customer relationship management (CRM) system may help businesses to achieve higher visibility and have a higher consumer retention. CRM software can help you save customer data and streamline your sales and marketing activities. As the importance of providing a better customer service increases day-by-day, it becomes essential for businesses to be aware of CRM trends.