CRMs - One Size Doesn't Fit All!

Would you like to increase engagement and sales for your business? One option for your company to consider would be utilizing a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) that is tailored to your company’s specific needs.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a marketing strategy adopted by businesses to engage current and prospective customers by analyzing data trends across different communication channels. Having a centralized hub makes it easy to manage and analyze customer interactions and information from your company website, phone calls, email marketing, surveys, social media sites, etc. Data collected can provide detailed information about your customer’s purchasing history, buying preferences, as well as concerns. Information collected and stored in a CRM systems allows businesses to cater their marketing efforts towards the preferences of their clients and allows for automation of workflow processes. 

There are many different CRM options for businesses to choose from. In many cases, off-the-shelf CRMs are difficult to implement, come with inflated costs, and often don’t include features that accurately reflect certain business’ marketing campaigns. Businesses may also end up choosing a CRM that includes many features that they will never use, or is a minimalistic CRM system that doesn’t reach all channels of their marketing efforts. Because of the lack of customization for many off-the-shelf CRMs, our clients have come to us to develop CRMs specifically tailored to their business needs that fully integrate with their website, web applications, and align with their marketing strategy.

Integration Into Your Daily Workflow

Companies should have a CRM that fits their current business needs and be scalable for future needs. Custom reporting and engagement features should reflect the company’s business identity and reiterate the business’ nomenclature to ensure these features make sense to staff, as well as  prospective or current customers; many off-the-shelf solutions do not allow for this type of flexibility.  

AVIBE conducts discovery meetings that can help tailor a CRM to best fit your business. Some factors we consider are:

• Appropriate nomenclature that makes sense to you and your staff
• Addressing the different sources of engagement from outreach calls to inquiries from your website
• Strategizing on best response practices and leveraging cross marketing tactics
• Managing campaigns
• Utilizing data reporting, graphs and charts to learn more about your customers
• Statuses and notices for customer follow-ups
• Contact information for specific individuals related to a conversion opportunity
• Scheduling repeated events
• Searching and reporting

TIP: CRMs can be very valuable for custom reporting. The data collected can be used to identify customer pain points. For example, if your CRM is syncing with your website, you can leverage customer feedback to discover areas of improvement regarding the user experience (UX) of your website or services.

We created a CRM for one of our clients that handles lead management, data visualization, marketing efforts, and much more.  All of the CRM’s features have been integrated into the Website Administration System that we had previously built. They are able to manage all business processes from accounting, correspondence, sales management, and registration processes from start to finish; as well as update the content on their website at any time through this system. Last but not least, their CRM reflects the look of their current Administration and Content Management System so it is recognizable and intuitive for all team members, thus reducing time needed for training on new features.

Lastly, keeping track of your customers will allow you to correspond with them regularly and help to maintain positive relationships with them. Regular correspondence is paramount in providing quality customer service and customer retention. Although it is wonderful how technology has evolved our communication channels with customers, it is important to remember that word of mouth conversations will never go out of style; human interactions convey the highest amount of trust to customers.

If you are interested in learning more about AVIBE’s CRM capabilities to determine if a custom-built CRM is a good fit for your business, we would love to chat! Contact us for a free consultation.