How to Use CRM for Customer Engagement

Key Takeaways
When everyone in your organization is working from the same information, employees can work together more effectively, avoid misunderstandings or conflicts, and simplify workflows.
When you’re using a CRM for customer engagement, this heightened employee experience ensures customers receive a consistent customer experience.
There’s no doubt that customer satisfaction is a major priority, especially for marketers, sales, and business development professionals. Digital transformation and data management efforts — like introducing a CRM for customer engagement — make it easier than ever to connect with your customers.

However, while managing leads and existing customer relationships often leads businesses to adopt CRM software, most organizations aren’t leveraging their CRM as effectively as they could be.

According to Deloitte, 80% of companies aren’t taking advantage of everything their tools are capable of. In fact, many CRM users have never considered how they can use their software to enhance customer engagement. Your CRM is much more powerful than you think! With the right workflows in place, you can easily use this valuable tool to boost customer engagement and satisfaction.

Here are five ways you can start using your CRM to improve customer engagement today.

In this article…

5 Ways to Use CRM for Customer Engagement
Respond to Customer Inquiries Rapidly
Track Important Customer Details
Automate Outreach to Strengthen Relationships
Discover the Voice of Your Customer
Improve the Employee Experience
Finding the Right CRM to Strengthen Customer Engagement
5 Ways to Use CRM for Customer Engagement
Respond to Customer Inquiries Rapidly
Many companies look to a CRM to streamline their sales outreach processes, but they may not consider how useful a CRM is for customer communications. Further, many companies overlook using their CRM for managing other customer communications past the initial sale.

Now that 83% of customers expect immediate service when they reach out to a company, it’s more important than ever to respond to lead inquiries and customer questions quickly.

A collaborative CRM can track every communication you have with a customer, from that first outreach call to the tenth renewal, and every conversation in between. By using a platform like Really Simple Systems CRM across your business, you can maintain detailed notes on customer chats via your website, records of support tickets for your customers’ needs, and transcripts of support phone calls, too.

By keeping all this customer data in one place, your teams can quickly respond to incoming communication with all the context they need to best serve your customer.

Track Important Customer Details
Sales teams know that building rapport is all about becoming deeply related to your customers. But, remembering a prospect’s daughter’s name or their passion for golf isn’t the type of information that’s helpful to other teams. Still, there are many data points marketing and operations teams may find useful to capture in a CRM.

Understanding customer demographics helps marketers more effectively target new customers and design campaigns that convert. A CRM like Oracle Netsuite, Zoho, or SugarCRM can house demographic data and make it easy for marketers to identify patterns across different users. By adding tags to each customer, marketing teams can develop stronger customer segments, personalize outreach, and address the customer’s needs.

Customer service can identify common complaints, assigning a tag to alert product design, IT, or operations.

Operations teams can benefit from filtering information in a CRM, too. When customer service identifies a common customer complaint, assigning a tag can alert product design, IT, or operations of when to add a new feature or fix a bug.

For example, details stored in your CRM can offer insight on issues like where customers get stuck during an implementation, or which delivery partners are causing shipping delays. This information helps teams prioritize the most important operations issues by finding patterns in the customer data.

Automate Outreach to Strengthen Relationships
Maintaining regular contact with your customers is essential to extend more offers and ensure peak customer service. But you can’t always anticipate what customers are open and receptive to more attention. Automation can help customers feel supported with less manual effort from sales and marketing teams.

Automation can help customers feel supported with less manual effort from sales and marketing teams.

CRMs like Nutshell can help your team automate every stage of engagement, from touching base with a warm lead, to following up on implementation success, to preparing for the renewal process. For example, AI tools allow your team to provide a constant, reliable customer experience. Using a CRM for customer engagement allows companies to leverage automation and get more done without adding headcount to their teams.

Discover the Voice of Your Customer
Understanding how your customer communicates is essential to master your marketing and strengthen your sales pitch. By recording your conversations and interactions within your CRM system, you gain valuable insight into the language your customer uses to describe themselves and their pain points. Then, you can use this information to strengthen your brand voice and increase conversion success.

By recording conversations within your CRM, you gain valuable insight into the language your customer uses to describe themselves.

Establishing the voice of the customer doesn’t just help with marketing; it can improve operations and product development, too. Positioning plays a big role in product success, and repositioning a feature with the customer’s language can boost performance.

Plus, operations can recognize customer satisfaction earlier and preemptively address potential issues by tracking the voice of the customer.

Improve the Employee Experience
While it may seem counterintuitive, improving your employee experience can make a big difference on customer engagement. According to Forbes and Salesforce, 70% of executives found that focusing on improving employee experience directly improved the customer experience, so it benefits your organization to make your employees’ jobs easier.

70% of executives found that focusing on improving employee experience directly improved the customer experience.

Employee-friendly CRMs like HubSpot or Less Annoying CRM make it easy to automate omnichannel marketing and sales campaigns, leaving your team more time to focus on high value actions and campaigns.

A CRM also improves the employee experience by streamlining collaboration and communication. When everyone in your organization is working from the same information, employees can work together more effectively, avoid misunderstandings or conflicts, and simplify workflows. When you’re using a CRM for customer engagement, this heightened employee experience ensures customers receive a consistent customer experience.

Finding the Right CRM to Strengthen Customer Engagement
Investing in a CRM is a major decision for most organizations. The decision can seem even more challenging when businesses aren’t aware of everything their new tool is capable of. Even when organizations discover how powerful a CRM can be, examining all the features to select the right CRM for your organization can feel daunting.

Thankfully, picking the right CRM for customer engagement doesn’t have to be difficult. Here at TechnologyAdvice, we specialize in helping you find the best software and tools to support your organization’s unique needs. Use the CRM Software Guide to browse and compare other CRM solutions to find the right fit for your business’s unique needs.