The Role of CRM in Personalizing Customer Experiences

How can a CRM help in Personalizing Customer Experience?

Customer relationship management (CRM) software helps tackle all your obstacles to customer experience personalization by providing multiple features on one platform.

As discussed previously, you need data to get started with personalization. This can be in the form of customer buying habits, demographic details, website visits, etc.

The problem does not lie with the availability of data. It is more of a quality issue than a quantity one. Companies have large amounts of data gathered through multiple interactions throughout the customer journey. What they often lack is a system to organize that data and make it easily accessible when needed. 

This often results in data fragmentation across departments and leads to organizational silo - another obstacle to the customer experience personalization undertaking.

CRM software helps gather and manage all customer-related data in one place. It also comes with dashboards that provide insights by analyzing this data.

Below are some ways you can make the best use of your CRM tools to create a more personalized customer experience. 

Address Your Clients by Name

Let’s take a look at two email subject lines.

Option 1: We have a new offer for you!

Option 2: Hello Sameer, we have a new offer for you!

The difference between these options is that the second, one has two extra words. That makes all the difference!

Addressing someone by their name automatically establishes a close connection and adds more value to the communication. It symbolizes that you know your customers by name and have taken the extra effort to not just address a generic, faceless crowd.

That practice keeps one coming back to the conversion and builds brand loyalty. With the help of the customer data in the CRM, you can easily automate this personalization tactic while sending out bulk emails, SMS, or messages over other channels. 

Keep Note of Important Dates

Holidays, anniversaries, and founding days - are all important dates to bank on when it comes to further strengthening your customer relationship efforts. Use the data from the CRM to automate outgoing messages for festivals. 

Prepare special offers to commemorate customers who have achieved certain milestones like using your product for more than a year. 

This activity shows that you make an extra effort to remember dates that are important to your customers and are equally invested in the business relationship.  

Monitor Customer Behavior

There are multiple touchpoints across the customer lifecycle that generate a large amount of data useful for strategies to deploy a positive customer experience. 

Leverage your CRM software to keep track of customer behavior across the sales funnel. You can note down the following observations

1. What time of the day and week do marketing messages perform the best?

2. What kind of emails have a good opening and click rate?

3. How many follow-up emails do you generally send to get maximum clicks?

4. How long does it take to get a response? 

By keeping track of the customer status across sales stages, you can tailor your content accordingly.

For example, customers at the top of the sales funnel are at the awareness stage and require more attention-grabbing content. 

Those at the decision-making stage would benefit from content pieces like price comparison between your product and that of a competitor. 

Make Personalized Offers

Customer churn or attrition, while unfortunate, can serve as a lesson for your next sales pitch. If you record the data of why a customer no longer wants to continue with your product, you might be able to resell with a personalized offer.

Consider a scenario where a certain customer no longer wants to continue with your product. You can set up a call with them to understand the reason. Suppose you are selling a CRM and the customer has been using it satisfactorily for a while. 

They have an on-field sales team and need a geo-tracking feature that you are not providing at present. However, it is a work-in-progress and the production team will make that feature live in another two weeks.  

Having a record that a lack of a geo-tracking feature led to this particular customer churn would enable your sales team to reach out to them again a month later when the feature is live. You can wrap it in an exciting offer that your competitors do not provide. 

In this way, the details of a customer churn recorded in your CRM can help you gain back the customer through personalized offers. 

Identify Opportunities

The previous principle of taking notes and implementing them in the future can also be applied here.

Let’s take the example of a CRM product again. Consider your existing user pool. Go through the notes taken during pitches and tag them as cross-selling and reselling opportunities. 

The scenario mentioned in the above point is a good example of a resell. Use the data to identify more problems that may be solved if the customer takes a package that provides additional features. 

In this way, you can use the CRM data to identify users that can benefit from advanced functionalities. These are upselling opportunities you would not want to miss.