The cost to acquire a new client is five times more expensive than retaining an existing one. For your professional services firm to guarantee its success, you need to have happy clients that will stick around and stay loyal to your firm as it could mean the difference between an up or a down year for your firm.
Fortunately for your business development or sales team, customer relationship management systems (CRMs) help them stay on top of their client relationships. Through analytics, integrations, and other tools, your firm’s CRM and system add-ons can help create more satisfied and happy clients.
As a CRM automation platform with client firms across several industries, we understand the unique ways CRMs can improve client happiness. Below, we explore the seven ways your firm can create happy clients with CRM technology.
1. Act on Client Insights
From identifying the lead to closing the deal, there is a lot of information your clients can provide about themselves. But for your business development team to spend time identifying, documenting, and analyzing that information would take up most of their time. In fact, HubSpot found that salespeople spend 34% percent of their time researching prospects and entering data. This leaves little to no time to act on the insights they’ve identified.
With CRM data automation, you can eliminate the mundane data entry tasks for your sales and business development teams. Through automation, they can see important transactional data, behavioral information, social contacts, and activities without needing to lift a finger. Your team can then take advantage of this data to identify new cross-selling and upselling opportunities they may have been blind to before.
2. Create Quality Communications
Communication is a key component to keeping clients happy. While good communication involves thoughtful messages and emails, it also involves reaching out in their preferred channel (phone, in-person, email, etc.) and leaving no misunderstandings.
Your CRM can help you stay on top of these items. In your system, you can set the preferred time and method of communication on a per client basis. You can also attach your client’s specific contract to their contact card so every team member is aware of the finer details and can communicate the specifics clearly. To help communicate deadlines to clients, you can also create reminders and calendar appointments from within your CRM that keep your firm and your clients up to speed.
3. Provide a Better Customer Experience
By 2020, customer experience will replace price and product as the key differentiator for brands. Offering a stellar experience for every interaction a client has with your brand will become more influential than the services or prices that you offer. You’ll be competing with your competition through how well you treat your clients and how they perceive you.
Optimizing your CRM with relationship intelligence automation can help your business development team offer a more personalized and relevant experience for clients. By understanding the services clients have purchased in the past, or where they’ve dropped off in the sales cycle, your business development team can jump right to new offerings that meet client needs instead of rehashing their past.
4. Offer Exceptional Service and Support
When a client is experiencing issues, how do you know? Are there signals? Or do they have to tell you they’re unhappy? As a sales rep who is close to the deal, it can be extremely hard to tell. Blinded by trying to develop a solid relationship with a client, it can be hard to see the signs when they’re there.
Luckily, your CRM could provide your firm with a relationship score that tells you exactly where you’re at in your client relationships. By implementing relationship analytics into your CRM, your reps can be notified of at-risk accounts so they can take immediate action to support them. In addition, the data is fully automated so you can rest assured that there is no opportunity for human error or gaps.
5. Personalize Client Interactions
The average person deletes 48% of the emails they receive every day. Truth be told, you probably cleaned out your inbox this morning as well. So how can your firm cut through the clutter and remain in a client’s email inbox? Personalizing your client communications can help you capture client attention and increase your open rates.
Because your CRM system houses all of your client data, you can easily sync your CRM and email service together to send personalized communications that generate results. In fact, Accenture found that 75% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a brand that recognizes them by name, recommends options based on past transactions, or knows their purchase history. Instead of sending each client a generic automatic email, with an optimized CRM system you can send personalized communications automatically.
6. Perfect the Follow-Up
In a Harvard Business Review survey, it was found that companies who attempt to reach leads within an hour were seven times more likely to have meaningful conversations with decision makers than those who waited. But the average response time of the companies they surveyed was 42 hours. Clients want to do business with firms who are responsive and follow-up in a timely manner, so why aren’t firms sending follow-ups right away?
Following up can be a time consuming task when you firm has countless clients and leads that need to be contacted. But through CRM data automation and email integrations, your sales team can send automatic follow-up messages to clients without a lengthy time commitment. They can also receive notifications that alert them when their window of time is closing.
For more ways you can perfect the follow-up, check out these follow-up best practices.
7. Become More Responsive
We’ve already established that clients want to work with firms that respond to their communications swiftly. As a client, it’s not an enjoyable experience to ask a question or express a concern and not hear a response back for several days. It is your responsibility to make sure your clients’ questions and concerns are addressed and communicated promptly. But it’s hard to keep track of who you owe a response to.
Through your CRM system, you can create automatic alerts that notify you when a client needs to be contacted. Once you’ve decided on an appropriate cadence, you can have the CRM system alert your firm’s sales reps or business development team when a client has gone too long without communication from you. This helps your firm become more responsive for clients, ensuring their questions and concerns are always addressed.
Ready to Boost Your Client Satisfaction?
If you’re curious as to how your firm can improve client satisfaction even more, check out how to become more client centric with an automated CRM.
Read more: