A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is software that stores all your customers’ details in an organised and user-friendly database that anyone in your business can access. An effective CRM can improve customer retention by up to 27%, according to customer intelligence company Infiniti Research. That’s a big potential from a tool that offers many benefits - let’s look at a few...
A CRM can give you a complete picture of your customer, their buying habits, and their communications with your business. This is essential to building and maintaining a strong relationship with the people who form the core of your business’s success - of course the value you get out of the system reflects the value you put in.
The benefits of relationship-building go beyond the customer - it can also foster cohesion and productivity within your workforce by having everybody working from the same platform, allowing your team to access everything they need.
For instance, every customer and potential lead gets a dedicated record and a full history of every interaction including emails, phone calls, sales visits and so on. For instance, if a customer needs a remortgage renewal, the CRM will send their broker an automated reminder months before the renewal date. The broker will effortlessly pick up where they left the last conversation and the customer will feel much more positive about the experience.
A major bugbear for customers is a lack of communication between your teams. A CRM solution allows you to assign tasks and see how those tasks fit into the bigger picture. The common interface then lets everyone access the same information, thus empowering staff to work collaboratively by sharing leads, solutions, issues and insights. This is especially handy when staff are off due to sickness or holidays, as you don’t risk ignoring customers.
Gone are the days of pulling together spreadsheets that everyone either dreads or has different understandings on how to use, particularly with data. Instead, CRMs offer a centralised platform that makes tracking and reporting a lot simpler. Also gone are the days of sifting through inboxes to find archived conversations with customers who have suddenly resurfaced when their fixed rate has expired and are expecting a better rate as soon as possible.
By gaining more, and richer, customer data in this way, upsell and cross-sell opportunities present themselves. It’s also possible to better understand customers’ needs and to craft the right pitch to them next time, as perhaps the data shows another lender would be a better fit. Capturing the full history of interactions also gives you a thoroughly well-rounded view of the customer.
Customer contact and advice has been developing quickly in the UK, especially through the provision of online advice and chatbots which provide quick and easily accessible answers to customer queries to help smooth the process. Some lenders now offer video conferencing with mortgage advisers, which can help improve the productivity of these members of staff and provide the potential to develop more sophisticated customer relationship management systems.
Remember before you start, be clear about what data you want your CRM to capture and how you will use it so that you get the best possible return on your investment.
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