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Customer Acquisition or Customer retention?
There has always been a great debate on which is a better strategy for businesses: Customer acquisition or customer retention. But did you know, that customer retention can be a lot cheaper than acquisition and can be beneficial in the long run cause loyal customers tend to make repeat purchases and refer you to their connections?
If you believe customer retention to be a powerful strategy for your business, you must know about CRM automation which can make it even better.
This article covers all about how you can automate CRM for customer retention maximization.
Let’s begin.
CRM Automation: How It’s Done?
CRM automation is the process of shifting your manual CRM tasks to software that can handle the job on its own, leading to a more streamlined business process. The tasks that can be automated in the CRM systems include,
- Data entry
- Lead management
- Follow-ups
- Customer & internal communication
- Reporting and analytics
Winner Tactics To Automate CRM For Customer Retention
When your competitors look for chances to lure your customers, you need strong reasons to convince them to stay with you for a long period. This can be made easy through CRM automation that can help you deliver faster and more seamless services to your customers. Here are some of the winning tactics that have proven to maximize customer retention with CRM automation.
Personalized email
Whether you want to make your customers feel warm about choosing your business by sending them a welcome email or a personalized product suggestion email to remind them of it, CRM automation can make it happen. Open doors to a more personalized relationship with your customers through proper communication based on customer-driven data.
Automated Lead Data Entry and Scoring
Don’t go around manually collecting leads from different events, forms, or signups, when you can easily automate your CRM to integrate and capture leads from all those sources. Besides automatic lead data capture and entry, you can automate your CRM to score the leads based on their activity from most potential to least potential. So that the sales team can focus on the most potential customers and achieve better conversions.
Automated Transfer of Leads to Your Pipeline
Once a customer enters into your CRM system, you have to place them into your sales pipeline based on their activities with the business. You will also have to advance the leads across the different stages of your pipeline when they show progress with your business. This can become tedious upon monitoring several leads in your pipeline. CRM automation can make your pipeline management seamless by automatically transferring the leads and advancing them in your pipeline when they meet certain predefined criteria.
Behavior-Based Triggers
Businesses can use CRM automation to track and analyze customer purchases, interests, demographics, and many other factors using which they can deliver services appropriate to them. Behavior-based triggers refer to the automated actions that follow a customer’s behavior (the trigger).
For example, when a customer purchases a product, a thank you mail can be set as an automated action for the trigger. Similarly, various actions can be automated in your CRM system for each trigger, increasing your timeliness and efficiency.
Proactive Customer Support
It is always better to stay one step ahead of your customer. Offering customer support proactively to address their concerns before they arise, helps to boost customers’ reliability on the business. Using the data insights about your customers, you can automate follow-up emails, renewal reminders for subscriptions, latest updates notifications, and related product suggestions through CRM automation.
Collecting Customer Feedback
Everyone wants to be heard and seen. Don’t you think your customers will like that too? Of course, they will! When you offer a chance for your customers to provide their feedback, they’ll feel valued and at the same time, you can gain valuable insights to improve your business. Voila! Two birds with one stone.
Automate your CRM to send customer feedback surveys regularly to stay updated on your customers’ opinions and pain points.
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Milestone Celebrations
Milestone celebrations are another best use of automated CRM for customer retention. Give reasons for your customers to celebrate and make them feel valued by acknowledging their key moments with your business. CRM automation helps you keep track of customer journeys with your business and can be used for sending exclusive offers, personalized messages, and discounts to commemorate their anniversaries with the brand, usage-based achievements, loyalty program milestones, or their birthdays.
Automated Reporting and Analysis
CRM automation helps you to know your customers and your business. You can effortlessly generate reports and perform analysis using the humongous integrated data collected by your automated CRM systems. Stay informed of customer trends, patterns, and behaviors as well as your business’ performance and competitor’s activities through accurate data and reports.
Challenges and Risks in CRM Automation
Though CRM automation can work wonders for your customer retention strategy, certain factors need consideration before implementation.
Data Quality Issues
Outdated and erroneous data can cause you a severe loss due to the ineffectual campaigns and the confusion caused among your customers. Poor data quality can be a significant threat to the effectiveness of CRM for customer retention.
Data Privacy Concerns
CRM deals with a whole lot of data and mostly these data correspond to the customers. So, concerns regarding the safety of their personal information arise. Since these data are stored in systems, the risks of cyber-attacks and data breaches are also high.
Lack of Human Touch
Another issue with any automation is the lack of a humane approach. Robots are just machines and not humans. Indeed there will be differences in the approaches between a machine and a human. Customers may not always prefer a robotic response to their genuine concerns and queries even though they are the fastest. Such instances require some human intervention.
Integration issues
Businesses tend to use multiple systems and software across their different CRM processes. It can be a major issue to Integrate data and the systems with each other. Before implementing CRM automation, it is necessary to address any kind of integration issues that persist.
Resistance to Change
Besides all technical issues, another important challenge for businesses switching over to CRM automation is the resistance they face from customers and employees to change. Employees may resist the change due to the fear of being replaced by technology. On the other hand, customers resist change as they are used to the existing systems or they are worried about their data security.
Overcoming Challenges
Here are some valuable tips to help you overcome the challenges of automating CRM for customer retention.
- Consistent updation – Ensure data quality by constantly updating your data and checking out for errors. Integrate validation rules and perform thorough data cleaning to remove duplicate or invalid data. This process might require a minimum of manual monitoring.
- Encryption and Compliance – To securely maintain sensitive customer information, prevent unauthorized access, and make sure to encrypt all data properly. It is also important to guarantee your customers that your automated systems comply with the data security laws and ensure them that their private data is respected and safe.
- Watch out for over-automation – Businesses should always try to maintain a balance between manual work and automation. Instead of solely relying on bots to deal with human customers, an addition of human touch can be included where required.
- Integration compatibility – To overcome the integration issues, invest in tools that are compatible with your existing systems or you can even develop custom integrations and prevent data synchronization issues.
- Awareness and training – It is natural for people to resist change. But it can be easily dealt with by creating awareness among your employees that these automation technologies are not to replace them and among the customers that these changes are meant for better performance. Offering training to employees is crucial to help them handle and work with the technology more effectively.
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Final Thoughts
On the whole, businesses aim to achieve the satisfaction of their customers as satisfied customers stay loyal to the business over time. It may sound complex to hear ‘achieving customer satisfaction’ but it has now become simple as you can automate your CRM to deliver personalized attention to your customers without wasting much of your manual labor.
Hope this article helped you understand how you can revolutionize your business with CRM automation. Build stronger and longer relationships with your customers by implementing CRM for customer retention and reversing your customer churn rate.
