Marketing Automation
Enhancing a CRM with operational data, making new customer onboarding frictionless.
The early stages of a consumer's relationship with a business are crucial. Think of how many products or services you've given up on as a consumer because they were inconvenient or confusing. Those products or services might have been beneficial to you, but because your early relationship with them was filled with friction, you never got to the payoff.
The ability to make a positive first impression is one of the strong suites of small business. Providing personalized service comes naturally when a small staff deals with a select group of customers. Personal relationships can form organically, which typically leads to a great customer experience.
But as a business grows, maintaining a level of personal connection can be difficult. More employees work with more customers, discussing more products and services. It becomes extremely difficult for staff and customers to organically build nuanced relationships when there are so many different dimensions to deal with. Thankfully, software and systems have been developed to facilitate connections, and maintain positive early customer experiences.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are a wonderful option to keep your staff customer-focused and enable personalization at scale. The name basically explains it all. CRMs are databases that make viewing and editing customer data frictionless. They often also contain the ability to build workflows and communications using this data. For example, you could notify a customer service representative whenever a customer leaves a voicemail, and provide that representative with the information needed to craft an effective reply.
One of the most powerful features of a CRM is the ability to integrate with the systems that power a business's operations. A developer could connect an ecommerce system to a CRM to automate the entry of customer order history. This frees staff from worrying about data entry, and instead allows them to focus on building connections with customers using the data they already have.
An Intero partner, Canine to Five, had been leveraging a CRM for years to facilitate a frictionless onboarding process for their prospective clients. The system had done wonders for creating a positive customer experience, but it required Canine to Five staff to manually copy customer data from their reservation system into their CRM. The time spent on data entry was adding up, and Canine to Five knew that an experienced technology partner would be able to reduce that burden. Intero Analytics and Automation built a custom data pipeline from Canine to Five's reservation system into their CRM, replacing hours of data entry with a fully automated process. Canine to Five’s service team is now free to spend more time building relationships with their prospective customers, leading to a consistently excellent first impression.Interested in Learning More?