There’s a famous saying among the IT industry that, “A CRM System is only as good as its accompanying data.” Many customer strategists understand this very well, however, a larger proportion of customer service professionals are not taking up the requisite steps to ensure valuable data fed into CRM systems that can actually aid in improving customer engagement rates.

From miscalculations and misinterpretations to lack of required detail, bad data can consume much of the CRM system space very easily, resulting in disappointments for even the most efficient CRM users. Hence, picking up the best CRM solution and ensuring its proper integration with the right approach can save your business from numerous CRM nightmares.

CRM platforms give businesses an opportunity to monitor every possible relation in the customer’s personal data and gather critical information from their interaction with the organization. Collecting and organizing information from social media, emails, surveys, website visits, and conversions give an insight into customer behavior and their buying patterns.

This further assists in designing a targeted marketing campaign to accelerate the sales process. Below are the factors that are driving the need for CRM systems which thus enables organizations with various capabilities to enhance customer service experience.

#1. Accelerating Sales Pipeline

Sales pros can accelerate their sales cycle by letting information flow into the CRM system from multiple sources and respond to customers’ concerns using email, phone, text or any other such communication medium. This way it creates multiple opportunities for collaboration across multiple platforms, and also creates avenues where sales data can be gathered in real-time to filter and identify authentic qualified leads.

The applications mostly used by sales reps include calendar, email, and documents – but updating and using these applications simultaneously is a big hassle. However, with an intelligent and proper implementation of a CRM system, the need to use multiple applications is eliminated as all functions can now be catered for by a single and efficient system. This opens up new business avenues by providing information right at the fingertips of sales reps over the same platform. This also streamlines the communication aspect of customer relations and enables sales representatives to deliver the required information to the customers quicker.

Taking into account the customer’s convenience and the rising expectations for fast and quick responses, businesses now have started to implement a one-stop solution to improve customer engagement rates and reduce the numerous headaches associated with the sales process. With the advent of cloud and VoIP solutions, it is now possible to extract maximum output out of the CRM investment.

Advancements in cloud computing have made it easier to harness the power of mobile CRM solutions and utilize data mobility solutions that lead to a quicker and more efficient sales process. It speeds up the sale’s workflow right from processing customers’ data, making phone calls, to scheduling meetings and follow-ups.

#2. Building Brand Loyalty

As business critical information right from the customer’s initial purchase to recent call logs gets stored in one centralized location, it becomes easy for the sales reps to deliver a personalized experience to the customers. This is because all relevant customer info is available to them in a concise and orderly manner within the CRM system. CRM systems also reflect the entire conversational history to the sales pros while they are communicating with the customers so, they can disseminate the right information timely.

This gives away an impression that the business is very well aware of the customer’s issues and are not just categorizing them as part of their spreadsheet. This helps create a reliable and professional business image, resulting in a more satisfied and loyal customer base.

Recognizing the loyal customers is easy with CRM systems as every detail associated with the said loyal customer is recorded in individual accounts. This makes dealing with the aftermath when employees leave an organization easier and hassle free, as new employees can easily fetch the same information about the above mentioned ‘loyal customers’. This enables even new employees to provide the same level of personalized interaction and helps businesses improve their client retention rate.

In other words properly implementing a CRM systems only helps to gradually enhance customer loyalty and retention rate which in turn helps build a credible brand image. The numerous customizations possible with CRM software allow companies to maximize the efficiency of its offerings by optimizing orders and improve the speed of sales processing.

#3. Simplified Data Entry Process

In the case of faulty CRM implementation, huge volumes of data that roll out every minute in any business environment become completely worthless, and processing such huge volumes if data becomes very expensive and absolutely rubbish.

Modern technological developments like Voice recognition software when integrated with CRM systems can resolve such issues and streamline the entire data entry aspect of businesses to quite an extent. This advanced technology is also able to automate the customer or client identification process, where words and phrases spoken by either the sales rep or the customer are automatically converted into a machine readable format. This data can then be used to automatically fill the respective CRM system’s data fields, to eliminate another data entry aspect of a business.

With the numerous benefits of CRM systems which add tremendous business value, it can very well be considered to be an ultimate solution for the call center environment. Not only does it offers quick access to data but also speeds up the cumbersome data entry aspect of a business. Speech recognition systems integrated with CRM systems help sales pros gain unprecedented levels of efficiency as it automates 40-85 percent of incoming customer calls which further leads to enhancement in customer service quality.