Being aware of your customer demands plays a huge role in delivering products and services that satisfy expectations. This is particularly important in the digital world where the growing e-commerce market relies heavily on business intelligence. The range and quality of the products you offer on your website are important, but the overall customer experience is simply at the top of the food chain.
As per Gartner, the relationship you have with your customers is now regarded as one of the most important aspects of e-commerce success. By curating positive relationships with both, existing and prospective customers, you can offer a better customer experience, differentiate yourself from competitors and drive growth.
E-commerce and customer relationship management
Customer loyalty is becoming increasingly hard in e-commerce. For every online store selling a product, there will be another with slightly lower prices. This can become a race to the bottom, with competitors trying to undercut each other to drive growth.
Rather than lowering the floor to attract customers, you should instead aim to raise the ceiling. In this case, the ceiling is the quality of your customer relationship management endeavors. As explored in research by Salesforce, around 67% of consumers and 74% of enterprises would be happy to pay more, if they get a better customer experience. This means that an effective CRM can attract more prospective customers and justify a higher product or service price, both of which will act as a catalyst for business growth.
How CRM drives business growth
Many people know what excellent customer experience looks like but emulating that experience within your own business can be a daunting task. Popular CRM platforms like Salesforce offer a range of benefits, helping you to curate memorable customer experiences that increase both, retention and satisfaction.
Some ways in which a CRM system can drive growth include:
Increased consumer visibility and understanding – The basic premise of a modern CRM system is to provide transparent, 360-degree visibility into every business transaction (BT) between you and your customers. It enables tracking of individual users as they navigate from an advert through to your website, right down to which buttons they are clicking, so you can identify the positive and negative aspects of your service.
Understanding the effectiveness of your landing pages, advertising and email marketing can help you give a better first impression to customers. The fewer reasons you offer, the greater is the probability that you can retain a customer's attention long enough to spark interest in your product or service.
Maintaining regular communication – Regardless of whether your customers are prospective or returning, maintaining regular communications is a great way to retain an interest in the long-term.
Imagine a customer who just bought a brand-new coffee machine. It’s a perfect opportunity for your business to upsell other consumable products like coffee beans, descaler and coffee cups to this customer. One of the ways you can do this is through a follow-up email with product suggestions relating to the customer's previous purchase. This shows you are attentive to serving the customer better and offering them a reason to return to you. If they continue shopping at your store, you’ve secured a high-value short-term sale and the promise of long-term low-value sales, which provide a recurring source of revenue for your business.
Time is money – As the popular aphorism goes, time is money. Traditionally, this time is usually spent on repetitive administrative tasks, reducing the amount of time dedicated to selling products or services to customers.
A CRM system can automate your repetitive workloads, allowing your sales team to focus on more essential tasks like converting prospective customers. The Salesforce Einstein AI takes this even further, automating actions according to specific triggers based around the customer journey. This could include a reminder email for existing customers containing their shopping basket, automating a key follow up process that would typically be executed by an employee.
Improved analytics and reporting – With a traditional operating model, you would likely find segregated software tools and datasets across departments. When dealing with a customer inquiry, this creates unnecessary hurdles in the support journey.
With a CRM system, your data is held in a central location for easy access. This removes barriers to information access and increases the validity of your datasets by working from a single-source-of-truth (SSOT). When insight can be easily generated from a SSOT, every member of staff becomes an analyst for your business, improving the overall breadth and depth of your business insights.
Blaze new trails with Salesforce and Trianz
Trianz is a leading customer relationship management consulting firm with decades of experience helping clients to find and retain customers with the assistance of CRM platforms like Salesforce. Through our close partnership with Salesforce, we offer comprehensive assessment and integration services that maximize both, customer attraction and retention.
Get in touch with our customer relationship management consultants and start delivering industry-leading customer experiences with Trianz and Salesforce today.
