What is CRM experience? Create more delightful customer experiences

Positive customer experiences differentiate your business from competitors. Consistently creating those experiences can be challenging, especially given the other priorities and responsibilities you and your team face every day.

The good news is that if you’re using a CRM platform, you already have the means to enhance the customer experience.

This article will look at the exact meaning of CRM experience and six practical ways your CRM can help improve the customer journey.

What is CRM experience?

CRM experience refers to harnessing a customer relationship management (CRM) tool to deliver customers the best possible experience at every touchpoint.

CRM encompasses all the processes a business uses to track, manage and maintain relationships with its contacts. Usually, these will be contacts in the sales funnel, whether they’re prospects, new customers or loyal advocates.

While you can use a spreadsheet (or even pen and paper) for your CRM, using dedicated CRM software makes it easier to build those customer relationships and track them throughout the sales process.

Your CRM is a treasure trove of information on your customers, their activity and their preferences – data you can use to tailor your service and continuously improve the customer experience.

The connection between customer experience and revenue

A top-tier customer experience supports happy customers and the bottom line.

Today’s businesses face an ever-increasing number of competitors, both locally and globally. In the MarTech space alone, there are over 15,000 tools. Even if you create a truly unique product, it won’t be long before other companies offer a solution with similar functionality.

While most features can be replicated, and competing on price can easily turn into a race to the bottom, it’s not as easy to copy how you treat your customers or how you make them feel.

Offering excellent customer support is a good start, but this limits your opportunities for positive interactions to when things are already going wrong.

Customer service teams take a more proactive approach to this, but typically only come into play with existing customers, not prospects, in the early stages of the sales process.

The solution is customer experience. According to Harald Fanderl, senior partner at McKinsey, this means looking at all of the interactions a customer has with your company:

Improving your customer experience can help you:

• Achieve greater customer satisfaction. According to a Genesys report, 82% of consumers say a company is only as good as its service.

• Boost your sales revenue. McKinsey research suggests that improving the customer experience increases sales revenues by 2 to 7 percent and profitability by 1 to 2 percent.

• Decrease churn rates and maintain loyalty. 53% of bad experiences result in customers cutting spend, according to Qualtrics research.

Optimizing the customer lifecycle often involves simplifying business processes and eliminating unnecessary touchpoints. As a result, better CRM customer experience management can help reduce overall costs.

For some purchases, especially B2B transactions or expensive products, the customer journey may be weeks or even months.

B2B CRM software helps you manage and track customer relationships throughout their journey, so you’re more likely to identify positive experience opportunities.

How to improve customer experience with CRM software in 6 steps

CRM software offers plenty of benefits for businesses and their teams, helping them become more productive and efficient.

The right CRM can also positively impact the customer experience. Here’s how to do that in six specific ways.

1. Build meaningful relationships

Customer relationship management experience is more than just tracking names and sales metrics – the primary objective is to build and maintain relationships.

The key to any relationship is communication. As businesses grow, these conversations become harder to track manually. Communication happens over multiple channels, meaning important details can slip through the cracks.

As part of a relationship selling strategy, your CRM strategy can help you build personal connections with potential customers and track those conversations. A good CRM solution should also record all of your past interactions, whether that’s an email, a phone call or an order.

Before your sales rep jumps on a call with a prospect, they can take a look in your CRM at a visual history of every email, call and activity related to that person.

With Pipedrive’s notes feature, you can record specific details from sales calls:

If your prospect said they were going on holiday, your reps could ask them about it. If they were considering another potential solution, your rep could ask how the trial went.

Your reps could then ask relevant follow-up questions to learn more about the customer and provide a personalized experience.

Along with basic contact management (such as a customer’s name, email, phone number and social media accounts), your CRM can also record additional information for personalization. Relevant information might be a customer’s position in the company, how long they’ve worked there and any other connections to your network.

For details that don’t fit neatly into any existing box, Pipedrive’s custom fields can record anything that helps you understand your customer.

When the prospect becomes a customer, your CRM can prompt you to follow up and ensure they’re getting the most out of the purchase. Demonstrating a genuine interest in their success can lead to cross-selling and up-selling opportunities.

2. Segment for more relevant service

Even with buyer personas in place, you’ll inevitably learn more about your customers as you start recording data in your CRM.

As patterns and trends emerge, dividing your customers into different categories makes it easier to offer a more relevant service and a better experience. Depending on your goals, you could segment customers in your CRM based on a combination of:

• Demographics, such as location and job title

• Firmographics, such as industry and company activity

• Technographics, such as complementary or competitor solutions

• Activity, such as downloads and purchase history

• Pipeline stage, such as prospecting or post-purchase

You could also use behavioral segmentation to understand and analyze customer journeys, providing deeper insights into what your customers might need.

For example, you could set up a custom field in your CRM that records the specific pain points or critical issues they face.

If you know a large percentage of prospects are currently struggling with a complex product, you can record that information under the custom field. You can then filter your leads by these pain points and tailor your messaging to address their biggest concerns first.

By creating and delivering messaging that meets customer needs, you can help them progress down your sales funnel with minimal friction.

3. Use automation for low-touch activities

When you’re treated like a person rather than an account number, it contributes to a great customer experience.

While individual, white-glove service might be possible for a small business serving a handful of customers, it quickly becomes difficult as your business grows.

Today’s CRM systems can automate a wide range of tasks, helping your sales and marketing teams so that nothing slips through the cracks.

Before you decide what to automate, you’ll first need to understand your workflows. What tasks do your sales reps and marketers have to deal with?

Pipedrive’s State of Sales and Marketing Report found that salespeople have more than just sales to handle, with 16% saying they spend most of their day on administrative support.

What do you spend most of your workday on?

Many of these activities are repetitive and time-consuming, especially when salespeople need to do them several times a day.

You can set up automations for many of them, saving time and money while also removing the risk of human error.

Use your CRM tools to automate data entry for all your customer interactions, such as phone calls, emails and chatbot transcripts.

You can also use the information from your CRM to create templates and automate personalized email marketing campaigns without having to manually write each message from scratch.

Here are some other manual tasks you can automate with Pipedrive:

• Schedule follow-up activities based on the sales pipeline stage

• Trigger personalized emails to prospects and customers

• Send updates over Slack when a deal is added or closed

• Request e-signatures for your proposals and contracts

• Update your project management apps as deals move through the pipeline

Automating low-value tasks will free up your team’s time for higher-touch activities that improve the customer experience.

4. Build a single source of truth for your team

CRM software is an ideal “single source of truth”, holding all the information everyone on your customer-facing teams could need to best serve the customer.

Throughout the customer journey, customers will interact with people from various teams. Each interaction will affect the customer’s overall experience. To ensure a consistent experience, everyone needs access to the same information.

Salespeople are used to tracking and managing their sales activities in the CRM. Although marketers don’t typically work directly with the CRM, many of the tools they use can integrate with Pipedrive.

Centralizing your data helps align sales and marketing efforts , resulting in a win-win situation for your business and your customers.

Your CRM can only serve as a shared source of truth if the customer data it holds is accurate. Ensure everyone who uses the CRM is properly trained and appreciates the importance of keeping it up to date.

You can use automation to update the CRM with all relevant information after each customer engagement, helping avoid human error and missed details. Likewise, integrating your CRM with your other tools ensures information is synchronized in real time for all team members.

5. Create customer-focused processes

Using data from your CRM, you can switch the focus to creating the best possible experience for your customer – one that’s easy for them and makes their needs and convenience a priority.

An effective CRM experience project will impact all customer-related processes across the business, as well as the people and software associated with them. By using your CRM to monitor customer journeys, you’ll soon see any dips in engagement or friction points.

For example, you can build a custom pipeline in Pipedrive with stages that reflect the customer journey. Map each stage to a key customer interaction to spot friction points and improve the experience step by step.

Review those processes and experiment with ways to make them better for the customer. Making improvements doesn’t necessarily mean rewriting every process. Sometimes, small adjustments can have a big impact on customer experience management.

For example, by tracking which communication channel your customer prefers, you can reach out there.

If your CRM includes a tool for scheduling appointments, let customers pick a time to chat that suits them rather than putting them through back-and-forth email chains.

Likewise, tracking interactions and conversations enables true omnichannel communication. Rather than making your customer repeat themselves to a different rep or when using a different channel, a glance at your CRM will give you all the customer information you need.

6. Gain greater insights into your customers

Your CRM contains vital information and data that are vital to growing your business and improving the customer experience.

Unfortunately, decoding that CRM data and using it to generate meaningful insights isn’t always straightforward.

Pipedrive’s Insights feature provides easily-understood sales reports and customer activity summaries for your main metrics and KPIs. These can reveal what your customers are up to, which products are most popular and who on your team is getting the best results.

If you’re more of a visual thinker, sales dashboards make it easier to see where customers are in the pipeline, so you can take any necessary actions to help them proceed and improve their experience.

You can also add insights from your marketing platforms to your CRM, allowing you to see which messaging is more effective for each segment and making it easier to optimize future campaigns.

Final thoughts

As businesses face greater competition, an outstanding customer experience is a key differentiator. With the information and insights in your CRM, you can provide that experience.

When your CRM is the single source of truth for all your customer-facing teams, you can gain a better understanding of your customers and their journey. In turn, this empowers you to build stronger customer relationships, get better insights into their behaviors and streamline processes.

Pipedrive CRM combines pipeline management, automation and real-time insights to help your team stay organized and deliver better customer experiences at scale. Try it free for 14 days.

CRM experience FAQs