In the beginning, small businesses often find it easy to keep track of their customers. But as the company grows, it becomes harder and harder to manage both contacts and schedules. CRM software is a low-cost and easy-to-use tool that can help you stay on track and provide good customer service. It can manage almost every aspect of your interactions with your customers, from the initial contact through your advertising channels to the billing process.
What Are the Most Important Features of CRM Software?
Customer relationship management software is a versatile tool that is useful for businesses in almost every industry. If you work with customers on a regular basis, it’s important to optimize your marketing channels, keep a clear record of your leads’ personal information, track your interactions with your clientele, and have an easy quoting and billing process in place. A good software can help you with all these aspects and make sure your business runs smoothly.
Contact Management
The more contacts your business has, the more clearly they must be recorded. Customer relationship management software has the capability of saving people’s names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, and social media profile details in a searchable database. This makes it easy for you to access your contacts’ information, and it also allows you to put your customers in certain groups, so you can send targeted communications.
Scheduling Management
The larger your company gets, the more complicated your schedule becomes. At the beginning, you might only have to manage your own appointments, but when you hire other employees, you’ll also have to make sure they know what they are supposed to be doing at all times. By using a scheduling software, you can eliminate misunderstandings and missed appointments.
You and your employees can also update the schedule in real time. For example, if a customer cancels their meeting, you can update the calendar, so all your coworkers can see the change and adapt to it. That way, there are no delays, and you don’t have to waste time calling your employees to inform them of new developments. No matter where they are, they will be able to access the calendar from their mobile devices.
Interaction Tracking
While attracting new leads is important, keeping your current customers engaged and happy is even more crucial because they will keep coming back to use your business or purchase your product. To offer a more personalized service, you should always have a record of past conversations with your customers. That way, you can respond to their inquiries and questions more easily.
A good CRM program offers interaction tracking. Every time you speak or write to a customer, you can pull up the details of past communications and tailor your answer or offer to their individual situation. Interaction tracking is particularly important for businesses with multiple employees, who might all speak to the same customer.
Social Media Automation
If you want to maximize your business’s reach and improve your reputation in your community, you have to create several social media channels and keep them up to date. This can be extremely time consuming, especially since you should create a post at least once a day on networks like Twitter and Instagram. But there is an easy way to cut down on the time you have to spend on social media.
You can plan and create all your weekly posts in one go, then schedule them. For the rest of the week, your software will post to your accounts automatically, while you go about your day without having to worry about social media. Automating your posts is an extremely effective way of keeping your audience engaged without spending a lot of time on your networks.
Email and Text Message Marketing Automation
In addition to social media marketing, most businesses also have an email or text message list, which they use to alert customers to new offers and developments. Your customer relationship management software can automate the emails and texts you send out. Text message marketing works best at certain times of the day, and with an automated service, you can schedule your communications to optimize your customers’ responses.
Conversion Reports
When you run marketing campaigns online, it’s important to keep track of your conversion rate, which is the percentage of your target audience who performs the desired action. For instance, if your call to action is “sign up for our newsletter”, you should find out how many people actually provide you with their email address after reading the ad.
This is crucial because it shows you which marketing tactics are working for you and which ones are unsuccessful. You can then change your strategy by scrapping the campaigns that have a low conversion rate and increasing the frequency of the ones with a high rate. Having to use a third-party website or software to track your conversions can be a hassle, which is why many good customer relationship management programs include this feature.
Quoting and Billing
While some types of products and services are uniform, many others can be customized to the individual’s needs. If a potential customer asks you to put together a personalized item, you might have to provide them with a quote. Your software makes it easy for you to store and alter templates, so you don’t have to create each quote from scratch.
The same goes for the billing process. Once you’ve set up your CRM program, you can quickly and easily create bills for your customers. Depending on your business model, these will be one-off documents, or they could be recurring each month. Because the software can create bills automatically, you won’t have to worry about making a mistake or forgetting to invoice your customers.
As your business grows, it will become harder for you to keep track of all your marketing strategies, leads, quotes, bills, and appointments. To make sure you provide the best customer service possible and don’t miss out on potential sales, you should use a CRM software to help you stay on top of things. Call or message us now at Anthem Software to find out more about our product and to schedule your virtual tour.
