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3 Excellent Customer Relationship Management Examples

Written by Ringy | Feb 24, 2023 6:22:00 PM

Are you tired of haphazardly managing customer relationships? Do you want a foolproof method to improve your company's performance?

Most business owners' answer would be a resounding yes!

It's time to up your game to knock the socks off your customers and competition.

This customer relationship management examples article explores the importance of a solid CRM strategy, the key processes and elements involved and provides some real-life examples of customer relationship management in action.

So, put on your thinking and start building a CRM strategy to ensure your customers stick around for the long haul.

Importance of Customer Relationship Management Strategy

Looking after the customer is the primary focus of companies. With CRM software, organizations can effectively manage and maintain client relationships.

A CRM strategy is a plan that outlines how a business will serve and interact with its customers, with the primary objective being to improve customer loyalty and satisfaction. Companies gain a competitive edge, improve customer retention, and increase revenue with an effective CRM strategy.

By placing the customers' needs and preferences first, businesses can personalize their services and products to differentiate themselves from competitors while meeting client requirements. With a solid CRM strategy, companies can collect detailed, in-depth customer data and utilize it to streamline communications and general business practices. This helps to serve the customer better and empowers all parts of the business, including:

  • Customer support
  • Management
  • Sales
  • Marketing
  • Other Departments

Customer relationship management strategies allow enterprises to automate tasks, such as sales or marketing, and streamline their operations. This saves employees time on tedious activities like data entry, responding to new lead emails, or generating reports while providing valuable insight into customer preferences and behavior.

Developing a CRM strategy involves identifying key customer segments, analyzing client data, and implementing software and processes to support it. The customer relationship management examples we'll show you later in this article highlight a few of these implementations.

Organizations of all sizes can benefit tremendously from a CRM strategy because it allows them to identify the customer's pain points and devise a solution. With the invaluable information provided to users by CRM software, it is no wonder more businesses are starting to adopt the technology.

5 Customer Relationship Management Strategies

Now that you understand the importance of customer relationship management strategies, this section teaches you how to create and run one for your organization. Businesses can adopt several customer relationship management strategies to manage their sales pipeline, catch and nurture leads, set up better marketing campaigns, and run custom reports.

Let's dive into five common customer relationship management strategies.

Run an Audit

The initial step is to perform a complete audit of the company.

Studying the market, reviewing internal and external processes, conducting a SWOT analysis, and analyzing the competition are vital tasks during this process. It also involves checking whether the organization has all the resources required to implement the CRM platform, such as budget, available team members for testing the CRM, and time constraints.

The table below highlights the importance of running an audit.

Importance of Running an Audit During a CRM Strategy

Explanation

Identify weakness

Companies that perform audits locate areas in their CRM strategy where they aren't performing and can take steps to improve based on the data received.

Monitor progress

Monitoring the implementation process allows organizations to determine the effectiveness of their CRM strategy.

Identify opportunities for improvement

Audits can reveal potential improvements to the CRM strategy while increasing revenue, loyalty, and customer satisfaction

Budgeting

Business can identify any inefficiencies or unnecessary expenses in the CRM strategy by auditing, which is then used to make informed budgeting decisions

Compliance

Data privacy laws and regulations are often tough roads to navigate. Auditing helps organizations remain aligned with legal expectations.

Keep data accurate

Effective personalizations and segmentations are crucial to successful marketing. Regular auditing helps keep customer data up-to-date and accurate.

The time set aside for the audit should include time for other actionable processes and a plan to incorporate them to improve the CRM platform. With a robust CRM system like Ringy, users can perform all necessary activities within the software, such as communicating on the fly, tracking progress, and assigning tasks.

Regularly running audits help keep up with market trends and customer needs while giving you the foundation required to update the strategy.

Outline the Sales Process

Identifying the different stages of the sales pipeline prospects move through can help businesses map their customer's buying journey. This is the time to set clearly defined responsibilities for sales and marketing teams.

CRM software helps visualize current company processes from initial client interactions, follow-up emails, and customer acquisition. A plethora of information can be stored, tracked, and managed thoroughly, meaning data can be as detailed as required.

With this information, sales and marketing teams filter or sort by size to get real-time feedback on the time it takes to close a deal, any client concerns, and preferences.

Follow these five steps when outlining your sales process:

  1. Determine critical sales metrics - What are the vital KPIs in the business? Is it the conversion rate, sales cycle length, customer acquisition cost, or something else? These figures help monitor sales process success and provide insights when things aren't working.
  2. Identify critical stakeholders - Any key players in the sales process must be identified to provide organization proprietors with a clear picture of who's involved and how to collaborate with teams to augment the sales process.
  3. Map the ideal process - Once roles have been identified and assigned, it's time to map out the sale process. Creating a roadmap of all activities included in nurturing a client from lead to closing the deal.
  4. Define each step - Define the core steps of the sale process, including prospect generation, lead qualification, and closing the sale.
  5. Track and monitor progress - Regularly revising the sales process keeps teams on top of their performance. After revisions, it recommended bringing employees in for feedback during each session.

The sales process is like a living organism. It's constantly evolving, so adapting to its changes is crucial. With a mapped-out sales process and knowledge of the activities involved, sales teams can spend less time worrying about mundane tasks and more time closing deals.

Define CRM Objectives

Setting objectives before a CRM strategy is vital as it keeps employees focused on the company's goals. Establishing SMART goals for the CRM for everyone using the software must be done before looking for a new platform.

SMART stands for:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Achievable
  • Relevant
  • Time-bound

A few customer relationship management examples of SMART goals may include but are not limited to:

  • Increasing social media followers by 65% by December 1
  • Achieving 90% client satisfaction by July 1
  • Improving email marketing click rates by 35% by year-end

The sales process retrieves information on reasonable goals and KPIs to utilize in a CRM strategy. With clearly defined goals and objectives, a business can accomplish positive results because everyone is on the same page.

Audit Your Data

The success of your CRM strategy hinges on the quality of your data. A data audit in CRM ensures your information is clean and up-to-date.

Here's why clean data is essential for effective customer relationship management:

  • Eliminates Duplicate Efforts: Clean data ensures each customer has a single, accurate profile, preventing frustrating situations like sending duplicate emails to a single client.
  • Personalized Interactions: CRM thrives on personalization. By having complete and accurate customer data, such as names, preferences, and purchase history, you can tailor your interactions to each individual.
  • Improved Decision-Making: CRM systems often generate reports and analytics based on customer data. If the data is flawed, these reports will be misleading and could lead to poor business decisions. A data audit ensures your reports and insights are based on reliable information, empowering you to make strategic choices that benefit your customers and your business.

By auditing your data and ensuring its cleanliness and completeness, you're laying the groundwork for a successful CRM strategy.

Set Clear CRM Goals and KPIs

Once your data is in order, you need to define your CRM goals. These are the specific objectives you aim to achieve through your customer relationship management efforts. Here's why setting clear goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is crucial:

  • Provides Direction: Clear goals give your CRM strategy focus and direction. They help you determine which tactics to prioritize and how to measure your progress.
  • Tracks Progress and Identifies Success: KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, are quantifiable metrics that track your progress toward your CRM goals. Common CRM KPIs include customer satisfaction scores, lead conversion rates, and customer lifetime value. By monitoring these KPIs, you can gauge the effectiveness of your CRM strategy and identify areas for improvement.
  • Improves Team Alignment: When everyone on your team is aware of the CRM goals and KPIs, it fosters alignment and collaboration. Sales, marketing, and customer service teams can work together towards shared objectives, ensuring a consistent and positive customer experience across all touchpoints.

Customer Relationship Management Processes

B2B companies rely on digital technology to connect with customers and prospects. CRM software is developed to assist businesses in managing the customer relationship cycle and forecast opportunities.

Sales and marketing teams also gain insights, ensuring that each client interaction is meaningful and relevant. Here are the steps involved in the customer relationship management process.

Generate Brand Awareness

Creating awareness about your brand or company is the first step to obtaining more clients. The more familiar customers and prospects are with a brand, the higher chance of them trusting it.

Follow the steps below to start generating brand awareness:

  1. Define your target audience - Identify the demographics, interests, and behavior patterns of the people you want to reach.
  2. Develop a unique value proposition - Clearly communicate the unique benefits and value of your brand.
  3. Create a consistent brand image - Develop a consistent visual identity and messaging across all channels and platforms.
  4. Utilize multiple marketing channels - Use a combination of channels such as social media, email marketing, content marketing, and PR to reach your target audience.
  5. Engage with your audience - Build relationships with your audience by responding to comments, messages, and reviews and by hosting events and contests.
  6. Measure and analyze your results - Use analytics and metrics to measure the success of your brand awareness efforts and adjust your strategy accordingly.
  7. Continuously improve - Keep experimenting and testing new ways to improve your brand awareness.

Brand awareness tactics are utilized to provoke an audience response and give marketers clues about what the target market prefers. These clues are gathered in the CRM platform and used to create customized prospect experiences, beginning from the initial point of contact.

Acquire Leads

Introducing a business to new prospects is only the start. Brands need to convert this awareness into engagement to motivate users to take action.

When clients communicate with a brand, each interaction extradites data stored on the CRM platform and utilized to ameliorate customer touch points later. Understanding prospects gives businesses the information required to provide superior experiences and meet customer expectations.

Convert Leads into Customers by Leveraging CRM Data

After potential prospects are successfully engaged, the next step is converting those leads into paying clients. Leads who are interested but haven't bought anything yet can be added to the CRM, and the engagement data can be leveraged to help create personalized offers that will nurture them toward the purchase and build trust.

Lead scoring can also be utilized to concentrate on the correct leads while determining winning opportunities.

Build Strong Customer Relationships

It's not the end of the road once leads convert to clients. To promote ongoing success, in-depth customer knowledge must support loyal relationships beyond closing the deal. That means learning as much as possible about the customer, so that content can be tailored to be applicable.

At the same time, the customer relationship engagement process increases retention by exceeding customer expectations and personalizing experiences.

Sell More to Current Clients

Past sales data captured in a CRM platform can assist in tempting existing customers with enticing offers, generating quantifiable economic impacts on the company's performance. It helps identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities based on historical purchase or behavioral data, such as what they have bought before or after a new product has been launched.

Data-driven customer relationship management strategies show organizations that client interactions matter and which valuable prospects to concentrate on.

Analyze Results and Make Improvements

CRM isn't a static process. Strategic customer relationship management involves continuously analyzing data to assess the effectiveness of your CRM efforts. This includes tracking key metrics such as customer satisfaction scores, lead conversion rates, and customer churn.

By identifying areas for improvement, you can refine your CRM strategy and ensure it aligns with your overall business goals.

Examples of Customer Relationship Management

Customers form the foundation of all organizations. Maintaining a solid client relationship with prospects and consumers can sustain an enterprise's performance regardless of good or bad times.

Whether it's trade events, online event companies, or remote sales organizations, maintaining customer relationships is becoming more critical than ever. Build solid client connections and market your company to set better customer relationship management examples.

Customer relationship management focuses on these critical areas:

  1. High level of customer satisfaction - When businesses go above customer expectations, it not only improves satisfaction levels but boosts the probability of the client returning to the establishment.
  2. Results in a superior customer experience - CRM concentrates on developing meaningful relationships with clients while providing them with a positive experience when interacting with the business.
  3. Increased customer retention rates - Positive experiences fuel customer retention—prospects who show loyalty toward a brand transform into brand ambassadors.

Let's look at some real-life customer relationship management examples in action:

Boost Customer Engagement by Delivering Live Assistance

Research shows an annual improvement in customer effort scores and an 83% yearly increase in annual revenue for organizations that utilize visual engagement tools.

Live chat assistance makes interactions more accessible and is quickly gaining popularity as a primary communication channel for many enterprises, including eCommerce businesses, online healthcare, real estate, and banks. It increases customer satisfaction while becoming a significant part of the client journey.

With visual tools like co-browsing and video chat, companies can carry out critical interactions like helping customers troubleshoot technical issues or opening a bank account. Customers gain quick access to in-person engagement and move quickly through the sales funnel.

Here are a few advantages of using live assistance tools:

  1. Boosts customer satisfaction and trust
  2. Reduces the number of contacts required for assistance
  3. Gives agents the ability to deliver a personalized experience

Customer relationship management examples, like the Commercial Bank of Kuwait, offer live assistance to their clients. With live chat software, financial institutions increase customer engagement while helping more patrons with their problems.

The Commercial Bank of Kuwait noticed their clients' touch points required live support to provide a unique customer experience and better resolution.

Automated Customer Support

Delayed responses leave businesses at risk of their competitor and are the top reasons for customer decline. Fast responses make clients satisfied and happy.

A study highlights that over 20% of consumers prefer using chatbots to contact a company. Improve customer interests, engagements, and response times by automating client support with live chatbots. Retaining current relationships with prospects and customers is an invaluable real-time service.

The table below highlights the advantages and disadvantages of using a live chat bot to handle customer requests.

Advantages of a Live Chat Bot

Disadvantages of a Live Chat Bot

Live chatbots free up human customer service agents because they can handle repetitive tasks.

Chatbots can come across as impersonal if they contain mediocre artificial intelligence

Can assist in saving the cost of human customer representatives

May require a significant amount of effort and cost to establish and maintain

High volume of customer inquiries handled autonomously

Some clients prefer to interact with a human

Provides efficient and quick assistance

May not be able to personalized responses

Multiple customer interactions can be handled simultaneously

The live chatbot may not understand natural languages as well as a person

Can provide 24/7 customer support

May struggle to handle complicated inquiries

Chatbots also reduce the number of support tickets raised by clients by directing the customer to the answers they require. Training and feeding chatbots with general FAQs allow them to learn the best pattern to help prospective customers in the interim.

Well-known travel platform, Hipmunk, created a chatbot using AI technology to engage their customers. The software helps the enterprise's clients reserve or search for the travel activity they desire.

Hipmunk's live chatbot determines the prospect's location, then bundles and promotes travel package discounts or deals. The platform also integrates with various chat applications, such as Skype and Facebook, to make customer communication more fluent.

Using Social Media for Customer Support

Customer relationship management has begun to use social media as a crucial touchpoint in maintaining connections or resolving problems. Whether negative or positive, customers expect an immediate response after sharing their experiences over social media.

Organizations with bad social response etiquette see churn increase by up to 15%.

Here are a few benefits of utilizing social media to support your customers:

  1. Feedback and insights - Teams can gain insights and feedback from customers and use this information to improve services or products.
  2. Cost effective - Social media customer support is often less expensive than traditional support channels, such as phone or email.
  3. Increased brand loyalty - By showing that a company values and cares about its customers, it can increase brand loyalty and customer retention.
  4. Faster response times - Social media allows for real-time communication, enabling businesses to respond to customer inquiries and complaints more quickly.
  5. Improved customer satisfaction - By providing prompt and personalized responses, companies can improve customer satisfaction and build stronger relationships with their customers.

Popular social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook are not just for promoting organizations. Most clients expect brands to assist them when reaching out on social media. Building good customer service on social media networks makes clients feel connected to a brand and improve relationships.

For example, Nike's marketing strategy focuses on customers by engaging with them on social media. Instead of the customer resolving the issues themselves, Nike is there to support them every step of the way.

Focus on making customers happy after interacting with the business, and they'll be sure to post a positive review.

Creating Customer Categories for More Focused Customer Service

Effective CRM strategies involve segmenting your customer base into distinct categories. This customer segmentation allows you to tailor your approach and provide more focused customer service.

With segmentation, you can create targeted drip campaigns specifically designed for different customer segments. For instance, you could send emails highlighting new products to customers who have shown interest in a particular category or offer loyalty rewards to high-value customers. This targeted approach increases engagement and ultimately drives sales.

That's not all. Customers are bombarded with marketing messages every day. Segmentation ensures they receive relevant communication that aligns with their needs and interests. This personalized touch increases the likelihood of customers opening your emails, clicking on your offers, and ultimately converting into loyal patrons.

360-Degree Customer View

Imagine having a complete picture of every customer interaction at your fingertips. This is precisely what Ringy CRM offers with its comprehensive customer dashboard. This dashboard provides a 360-degree customer view, giving you a holistic understanding of each customer's relationship with your brand.

Here's how Ringy CRM empowers you with a unified customer view:

  • Centralized Information: Ringy CRM acts as a central repository for all customer data, including purchase history, recent interactions (phone calls, emails, etc.), service tickets, and even customer notes. This eliminates the need to search through scattered records and ensures all customer information is readily accessible.
  • Data-Driven Decisions: With a complete customer profile in front of you, you can make informed decisions about how to best serve each individual.
  • Improved Collaboration: By providing a shared platform for all customer data, Ringy CRM fosters collaboration across different teams. Marketing teams can gain insights into customer preferences to develop targeted campaigns. Sales teams can leverage customer purchase history to identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

Ringy CRM's 360-degree customer view empowers you to understand your customers on a deeper level, personalize interactions, and ultimately build stronger, more profitable customer relationships.

Customer Relationship Management Examples - FAQs

What Is the Ultimate Aim of Customer Relationship Management?

Improving the customer experience is the fundamental purpose of a CRM platform. Working towards this goal is the easiest way to produce positive results.

When customer satisfaction is the primary goal for CRM implementation, all other objectives amalgamate to support this goal. Customer relationship management combines technology, strategies, and practices to analyze and manage client data and interactions throughout the client lifecycle. The customer relationship management examples shared in this article show how the practice should be done.

What Is a CRM Strategy?

A customer relationship management strategy aims to improve customer service and boost sales through software, actions, and processes. It generally involves customer service, marketing, and sales divisions.

Why is it Important to have Comprehensive Customer Relationship Management Processes?

Comprehensive CRM processes are crucial because they ensure you have clean data, target the right customers, and gain a holistic customer view. This leads to better service, stronger relationships, and ultimately, more sales and loyal customers.

Customer Relationship Management Examples - Conclusion

Effective customer relationship management is essential for any business looking to establish and maintain strong, long-lasting customer relationships.

The customer relationship examples discussed in this report demonstrate how companies can use CRM tools to improve communication, increase sales, and drive business growth.

Whether through social media, email marketing, or data analysis, the key is always to put the customer first and stay agile in your approach. So don't be afraid to think outside the box and try something new - after all, the customer is always right (even when they're wrong).

With Ringy, companies can ensure optimal customer satisfaction levels while keeping track of all client and employee interactions. The software makes communication easier by offering a single dashboard to manage all business processes.

Request a demo to discover how Ringy changes the customer relationship management game.