Why customer experience and CRM are important for your business

CRM and customer experience

Every business wants to create the best experience for their customers. And, by understanding what makes for good customer experience, how CRM can enable this, and how this benefits business, you can take more proactive steps.

What makes a good customer experience?

Customers expect their interactions with businesses to be effective, comprehensive, and timely. They want answers and responses when they provide information or seek it from the business. As the Harvard Business Review summarizes:

“[Customer experience] is the sum-totality of how customers engage with your company and brand, not just in a snapshot in time, but throughout the entire arc of being a customer.”

Related: CRM strategies businesses can’t ignore

Businesses are there to provide a service or product, true – but, in a broader sense, businesses are there to meet customer demands. Through every stage of delivering on customer experience, we should be mindful of customer relationship management (CRM). This refers to everything from practices to tech that businesses use to manage and analyze customer interactions.

Importantly, CRM also focuses on data throughout the customer life cycle. Obtaining this data means that businesses can better deliver on customer demands, thus improving the overall customer experience. We’re also able to engage with customer relationship marketing to help better boost our brand.

Better customer service is better business

It’s worth noting that customers naturally want a better experience – so much so, in fact, they’re willing to pay for it. As many have pointed out, the White House Office of Consumer Affairs found that 80% of people were willing to pay more for a product or service if it meant a better customer experience. Additionally, not only are people willing to pay more, but they’re also willing to risk more. As an American Express Survey in 2011 found, 59% of Americans are willing to try a new brand or business if it meant better customer experience.

To help deliver on this, it’s necessary to have excellent CRM – both in terms of customer relationship management and marketing).

Customer relationship marketing improves the experience

Customer relationship marketing is about building these customer relationships and, ideally, long-term loyalty through marketing activities and strategies. What makes this an effective marketing strategy is that it is so often a response to customer feedback. Through figuring out what makes for better customer experience, businesses can create strategies to enhance this as an approach to marketing.

For example, by tracking what customers purchase, businesses can create personalized messages to individual customers. Recommendations for related products can land in clients’ inboxes since businesses get more data about what interests individual clients. Feeling as though they’re being treated as an individual helps solidify loyalty.

One of the most famous companies to deliver on customer experience using data is Amazon. Here are 5 ways any business can utilize Amazon’s methods to help improve their own relationships with customers. If these will lead to better business, there’s no better time to begin implementing these strategies than today.