Your CRM is more powerful than you realize. You know you can track prospects, log customer touches, send mass emails, track communication, and empower collaboration between teams. Not to mention, there’s even more that your CRM can accomplish! Here are five things you can do with your CRM that you’ll wish you knew about before.
Track Customer and User Metrics Automatically
Attach your CRM to your analytics suite to capture complete data about your users, deanonymize, and attach data to real people. Now your sales reps have an impressive tool at their disposal. They can see every interaction a prospect has with your service, not just the ones that a person logged. You can segment customers based on interest and activity, qualified automatically by your CRM.
Pre-Qualify Your Leads
Qualifying leads is often the largest part of a salesperson’s job. However, it hardly requires their talents, which generally lie outside data analysis. Let your computer do what it’s good at and crunch the numbers for you. With the proper setup, you’ll be able to produce lists of pre-qualified leads that your salespeople can use to begin prospecting immediately.
Assign Tasks Based on Workload, Skills, and Priorities
The automation tools in your CRM might be relatively rudimentary compared to a custom-built API, but they’re also available without thousands of dollars of investment and years of development time. Despite their limitations, these tools can do more than you think.
If you use your CRM for workflow management and task assignment (which you should!), then you can automatically assign tasks to your team based on their current workload and the attributes of the task itself. Does the customer speak Spanish? Automatically assign it to your least-busy Spanish-speaking associate. Do they need high-level tech support? Assign them to your savviest specialist.
Monitor and Control Social Media Channels
For some Facebook and Twitter accounts are where a significant segment of your customer base interacts with your brand. Most users observe passively, but some will communicate about or with your brand accounts directly. Whether they tag you directly or simply mention your name, you’ll want to know what people are saying. This is often the fastest way to get ahead of a customer service issue or technical glitch, and proactive social media monitoring has saved more than one major organization’s bad PR. Set your CRM to monitor your social media channels to locate these mentions before they become problems that go viral.
Automate Customer Communications
Your CRM can send emails, sure, but so can a smart fridge. The CRM does one better: it can communicate with customers automatically, sending the appropriate message and the appropriate time in accordance with your marketing strategy, lead status, and a thousand other variables. You can create static and dynamic email autoresponders that will get your message into your customers’ inboxes, whether through email or social media. These messages can be fired off automatically based on an impressive array of factors, including last purchase, cart status, last contact activity, and much more.
