How CRM, Marketing Automation, and Business Analytics can Boost your Customer Experience and Bottom Line

Many businesses have some level of understanding regarding the relationship between a positive customer experience and a successful organization. How different businesses measure, record, and track customer experiences can vary widely. From direct feedback stored in a database or Excel spreadsheet to automated emails and surveys, everyone seems to have their own method.

Ultimately, it all comes down to this question: Why should I prioritize customer experience? Before we answer that, let’s define customer experience. A recent Qualtrics study defines customer experience as how your customers view your brand, based on their involvement with you. Going back to our initial question of why customer experience should be a priority, we should review a few statistics from the aforementioned Qualtrics study.

• On average, brands risk losing 9.5% of their revenue because of bad customer experiences.
• More than half of customers say they are likely to decrease or stop spending with a brand after a bad customer experience.
• Annually, $35.3B is lost by US businesses whose customers left due to a bad experience.

Those numbers alone are big indicators of how much customer experience can drive your bottom line. If you are anything like most businesses out there, you know common barriers to improving your customer experience include the time it takes to gather feedback, followed by organizing the information promptly. How can CRM, marketing automation, and business analytics help with these things?

CRM: Accurate and centralized customer data is something that is core to delivering a superior customer experience. CRM software, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, Zoho, Salesforce, and HubSpot, can improve data integrity and give you access to important information related to your customer's experience – things like remembering birthdays, anticipating recurring orders, and following up appropriately on the date and time promised. With this data being entered and updated in real-time, it helps your team connect with prospects and customers in a timely manner with relevant content.

Marketing automation: Capturing the data in your CRM is step one in seeing an increase in customer experience ratings. Step two is ensuring communication with your customers can be done efficiently without the need for extensive manual data entry regularly. With marketing automation tools, which can be integrated into your CRM, the time spent on typing up personalized communications and sending them to your customers can be cut down significantly. Using things like scheduling automation, marketing campaigns, merge fields, and more can guarantee a better customer experience with less of a burden on your team.

Business analytics: Step three comes once you have your database in use and have been utilizing marketing automation tools. Let’s say you have a list of customers from 2021 to whom you would like to send a thank you email that includes a 2022 feedback survey. With business analytics software, such as Microsoft Power BI, you can collect the information from that survey to easily manipulate and view your customer's feedback. Then, your team can take action on improving the customer experience. Once set up, Power BI dashboards and reports can be utilized on an ongoing basis without the need to continually run and rebuild reports to analyze your business's information.

TopLine Results specializes in consulting with your business to see which CRM, marketing automation, and business analytics tools meet your needs and budget. Looking to get started but not sure where to begin? Let TopLine help! Whether it’s implementing a CRM, or all three platforms mentioned above, now is the perfect time to begin looking into these powerful solutions. Give us a call at 1-800-880-1960 or email info@toplineresults.com for a free consultation.