Customer relationship management or CRM, is a system that helps businesses manage their relationships with their clients and customers. These systems use technology to organize customer data, synchronize sales, and personalize marketing. CRM systems are a valuable tool that is being improved more and more each day. Every advancement made brings an even more streamlined customer relations experience.
Keep reading to learn about CRM emerging trends and technologies.
Hyper-Personalization
The personalization within CRM systems is what makes them such effective tools. They allow you to individualize interactions based on data that has been collected throughout your client-customer relationship. This means you have access to customer preferences, payment history, previous conversations, and more. Your ability to have this information at your fingertips at all times creates strong and trustworthy relationships.
The future of CRM is bringing a hyper-personalized experience that will only further improve interactions, marketing, and sales. One way CRM systems are improving is by integrating emotional intelligence algorithms, which will help companies understand and respond to a customer’s sentiments based on emotional cues.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the future, and soon, any company not taking advantage of it will fall behind. Many CRM providers understand this and are making its integration a high priority.
AI does more than answer questions and populate unique images and ideas. Artificial intelligence can be used to automate repetitive tasks, predict outcomes, auto-organize demographics, and has features like 24/7 chatbots and voice recognition.
With artificial intelligence, conducting business is not only easier but more accurate.
Increased Security
Data breaches are swiftly becoming a major concern in every industry. One small data breach can destroy a company’s reputation and the wallets of millions. To make matters worse, most hackers are not just going after money anymore, they are focusing on personal information such as social security numbers, passwords, addresses, phone numbers, and anything else they can find.
Needless to say, cybersecurity is of the utmost importance which is why it is important to choose a CRM system that uses top-of-the-line technologies to secure your data.
Performance Monitoring
CRM is a great performance monitoring tool because of how well it tracks data on every front. Whether you would like to review customer interaction performance, lead capturing, or sales growth, your CRM can give you a detailed report of where you stand.
Some examples of useful reports include:
Pipeline reports: Pipeline reports summarize sales opportunities at various stages. This type of report provides insight into the progress of the sales process.
Customer service reports: These reports track metrics such as resolution rate, response time, and customer satisfaction.
Profitability reports: With profitability reports, you can analyze revenue, profit margins, and expenses, and obtain insight on financial performance and viability of business operations.
Here, you can find a CRM that offers all of these reports in addition to many more that help with performance monitoring.
Self-Service Portals
Self-service portals offer customers the ability to troubleshoot issues, find answers to frequently asked questions, and access knowledge bases on their own time. This is an especially valuable tool for customers who prefer to find answers on their own and avoid the task of contacting your business.
Through these portals, customers can view their account details, payment history, and bills, update their personal information, track orders, and submit support tickets.
In this day and age, not having a self-service portal is seen as a hindrance to customers.
Mobile Accessibility
Mobile accessibility is an often overlooked feature when considering a CRM. However, having access to your work from your phone or tablet can make a world of difference for those in need of flexibility.
With this feature, leads can be input or updated in minutes, representatives can review client information before going into meetings, service tickets can be viewed while in the field and activities can be logged from anywhere.
Mobile accessibility also offers open communication and team collaboration that would otherwise be limited to the office.
Many CRM systems are beginning to lean toward a mobile-first design to ensure all representatives and employees have access to essential information regardless of their location. Of course, when you hear about mobile accessibility, the issue of security may come to mind. However, with these new platform integrations comes enhanced security measures such as encryption and remote wipes to ensure all customer and business data remains safe.