While expanding your customer base is an essential aspect of your business growth, you should never underestimate the power of customer retention. The Pareto Principle emphasizes that 80% of your company’s profits come from just 20% of your customers. In other words, by building relationships with the top 20% of your consumers, you will enhance their loyalty, upsell faster, and encourage repeat purchases. Above all, you will transform them into brand advocates to attract leads with similar needs.

However, just because a customer purchased from you once does not mean they will keep coming back. Another study claims that 77% of brands could disappear and, yet, no one would care. It is crucial to maintain a healthy relationship with customers.

With a CRM solution, you will collect relevant customer data across multiple online channels and keep it in a central location. CRM allows you to create comprehensive customer accounts and makes them available to every member of your team.

Here is how a CRM system improves customer retention.

Keeping Customer Service User-Oriented

Research studies found that 52% of customers made an additional purchase from a brand after a positive customer service experience. In today’s hyperconnected era, customers use multiple online and offline channels to interact with brands. Unsurprisingly, they expect your business to provide attentive customer service.

With a CRM solution, you can unify your customer support channels, such as your email, call center, live chat, and social media support. You can manage service tickets from a single location and make sure that no customer inquiry is lost, irrespective of the support channel a customer uses.

Let’s take the example of email support. SuperOffice found that the average response time is more than 12 hours, while 62% of companies do not respond to customer support emails at all. When integrating CRM with your email software, you can create email templates to respond to common customer questions directly from your CRM platform. If you receive too many customer inquiries to resolve, you can also send automated emails to inform a user that you received their support ticket and that you will respond to it fast.

Creating Personalized Customer Experiences

Hyper-personalization has changed the way customers interact with brands. Studies back me up on that. Namely, 84% of customers want brands to treat them like unique persons, not numbers. They expect you to understand their specific needs, pain points, expectations, and fears.

That is where, again, your CRM system helps. As mentioned above, customers connect with your company via multiple channels. A CRM tool captures customer data from each digital channel you use, classifies it, and keeps it in a central location. That way, it makes customer data available to your entire organization, including your marketing, sales, customer support, and product development teams.

With the help of CRM software, your marketing team will make more informed and user-centric campaigns. Using the insights from a CRM system, they can segment your customer base into narrower groups. That allows them to deliver more personalized marketing campaigns to each customer group to enhance sales and inspire brand loyalty.

The same applies to your customer service strategy. For instance, your call center agents need to browse through a lengthy customer base to know the details about the caller. CRM integrations with VoIP business phone systems automate this process and save your agents’ time. Once a customer calls, your CRM tool automatically finds their previous touchpoints with your brand and sends this data directly to your call center reps. They will answer phone calls more confidently, knowing they can deliver highly individualized customer experiences.

Rewarding Loyal Customers

According to recent studies, 72% of adults in the US belong to at least one loyalty program. The reason for that is simple – your customers expect you to recognize and reward their loyalty. Moreover, 75% of customers want brands to incentivize them beyond the purchase.

With CRM software, you can identify the most profitable accounts. Knowing who brings you revenue helps you focus on those customers and enhance their satisfaction.

For example, you can create a VIP online community for your returning customers. Or, you can provide them with exclusive deals to upsell and cross-sell your products.

Optimizing Your Sales Funnel

Another significant benefit of using CRM to collect customer information is that it helps you dig deeper into customers’ interactions with your brand. The raw data you gather is not enough to deliver personalized customer experiences. The goal is to use this data to map out customer journeys.

That way, you can create detailed buyer personas and segment your audiences based on their needs and preferences. By knowing customers’ needs at every touchpoint, you will be able to offer relevant and personalized offers at every stage of the sales funnel and inspire future purchases.

Driving Repeat Purchases

Researchers found that the likelihood of selling to a new lead is only 5–20%. On the other hand, the probability of selling to your repeat customers is 60–70%. Once a customer buys from you for the first time, you need to keep engaging them and building relationships. A reliable CRM system helps your sales strategy in multiple ways:

• It identifies leads that are more likely to convert. CRM systems identify engaged customers and help you choose the right time to reach out.
• With CRM software, you can monitor customer behaviors and find customers that are eager to spend more. By tailoring your sales and marketing tactics to their experiences, you will create new upselling and cross-selling opportunities.
• CRM systems improve the sales process and reduce time to close. By having 360-degree insights into customer accounts, you will offer individualized deals and encourage customers to purchase faster. Above all, you will build trust with your target audience and encourage them to come back.

Over to You

CRM captures every interaction between a customer with your brand. It lets you centralize your digital channels and keeps customer information in a single location. That way, you can create super-insightful customer profiles and share them with everyone in your organization. Above all, the system will monitor the activities around customer behaviors and engagement, allowing you to provide relevant and targeted customer experiences.