By Damian Hanson, Co-Founder & Director of CircleLoop

There is no denying that companies cannot survive without customers. Customers should be at the heart of everything we do in business, especially for startups trying to establish themselves as progressive and forward-thinking. The customer experience should be prioritised to ensure you’re creating the best end-to-end journey for your clients that enhances your sales success.

CRM is one of the most popular tools available for businesses today and for good reason. In fact, according to Gartner, the CRM software market is expected to grow over 14% through 2025. CRM tools ultimately optimise your business and help overcome common pain points around building and maintaining customer relationships.

Recurring issues surrounding customer experience

Numerous times, we’ve seen the common issues that arise around customer communication and relationships, all of which are solvable with CRM. Here are a few noteworthy examples from startups:

Disorganised customer data

Dealing with masses of disorganised data can be one of the largest issues for businesses when it comes to customer relationship management. Searching through multiple different sources and platforms to get critical sales information is inefficient and means your business is more likely to miss a crucial insight. Implementing a CRM system means all of your data will be centrally located which will make it simpler for you to discover what you need, exactly when you need it.

Inefficient customer communication

Once you’ve finally found the insights and data you need, do you have the right contact details to hand? Do you know if your customer is more receptive to phone calls or emails? When was the last time you contacted them? With CRM tools you can instantly phone, text, or email your contacts, all from one platform. You can easily access a record of all your prior communications with that person, or you can look up a customer’s past purchases to respond to any queries or issues they may have. This removes some inefficiency for your sales team and helps to personalise the experience for your customer.

Reports without purpose

The sale is successfully closed, but reporting on your success is just as important. Manually creating reports is time consuming and quickly becomes out of date as your sales & marketing teams continue to drive leads and secure new customers. So how can you keep on top of this key data without wasting valuable time? Real-time reports based on your sales and marketing data are available from CRM software systems that stay as up to date as the data you input. Custom reports can be easily produced with charts, graphs, and other visual aids showing key insights that will benefit your sales team in the future and show its impact on revenue.

CRM tools are not only an effective way to solve the issues above but they can also support wider business goals. Revenue and growth becomes easier to track and create strategy for thanks to the valuable sales insights CRM can offer.

Increasing sales with integrated CRM

To take your CRM one step further and ensure maximum value from these tools, businesses should consider integrating it with their communications system. By integrating CRM tools with cloud-based phone systems you’ll have easier access to all customer data including ages, locations, genders, hobbies and interests which all helps to design more cost-efficient marketing campaigns and target particular customers for sales.  

Roughly 62% of marketers even use built-in marketing or CRM software for marketing reporting. These reports essentially provide a convenient way of communicating important information necessary to improve sales performance.

By integrating CRM into your phone system, you can keep track of all communications with clients, whether they take place over the phone, in writing, or on social media. CRM integration makes it easier for your team to share key information internally and with other parties like distributors and suppliers. This enables you to work together on strategy and implement best practices throughout your organisation in all interactions with customers.

An example of a CRM software integration done well is with Utility Rentals. Previously using traditional handsets in the office and finding these came with a fair share of constraints, Utility Rentals worked with CircleLoop to integrate their CRM software Pipedrive into a cloud-based phone system instead. The easy to use features of this integration include the click to call functionality from within Pipedrive; helping the business to increase productivity, eliminate any misdials and circumvent the old problems of traditional office phones.

CRM tools are a must-have for any growing business

CRM platforms have all the capabilities needed to help organisations grow. To put it simply they are a must-have for startup and scaling businesses, who wish to operate with a customer-centric approach.

The competitive edge gained by efficiently analysing and utilising customer data is undeniable. Now integrate those capabilities directly into your communication system and suddenly your business is fully optimised and operating on a whole other level.

Increasingly customers want businesses to know them, understand their needs and deliver them an efficient and personalised experience to match that. A challenging task to say the least but not impossible. Yet, it’s no longer enough to simply implement a siloed CRM tool -.  integrated CRM and cloud-based phone systems are the only way to deliver next level customer experience going forward.