3 Simple Ways a Modern CRM System Can Help Increase Quality Customer Interactions

Increasingly, we are seeing data and integrations drive key business decisions to ensure that marketing and other activities are suitably, responsibly, and effectively targeted. For most organisations, including charities, this means combining information held on current and potential 'customers' or volunteers to understand better how and when to communicate and what impact this has on campaign success. At first, these concepts and how to achieve them can seem overwhelming, especially when legacy systems can often make these processes manual and long-winded. But it really doesn't have to be.

Below are some simple ways and examples that a modern CRM system can help to increase the quality of the interactions you have with your customers.

1 - DATA QUALITY

There is an often-quoted need when implementing a CRM system referred to as a "360-degree view" of customer data. Having all the information about your customers in one system is, of course, key, but making sure it is of the desired quality and detail is probably even more important. It is always worth asking questions such as 'Do we need this?' or 'What would we use this for?' whenever considering what information to hold and how long to hold it for. This will aid with practical things such as limiting storage space requirements and reducing the complexity of data structures, but will also help simplify compliance.

Consider that your data drives any intelligent marketing action you are able to perform - it is significantly more valuable to hold less high-quality data than lots of data which is potentially inaccurate or outdated.

2 - SEGMENTATION

Once you have the data in your system, you now need a way to query it. This is usually referred to as segmentation - fitting people into groups who share characteristics. A modern CRM system will allow for advanced querying to split customers into these brackets. With better data and better querying abilities, your segments can be more specific and tailored to a particular subset of people. Even better - these segments can be dynamic to ensure people are added or removed from the segments as they meet, or stop meeting, the criteria.

It is always worth bearing in mind that having higher-quality data and more advanced querying should mean you can contact your customers less often because you have a better understanding of who to communicate with and when.

3 - INTEGRATION

Having a CRM system which integrates directly with others, such as a marketing platform and your website, has clear advantages. This will allow the rich segmentation discussed above to drive marketing campaigns directly without relying on cumbersome and potentially error-strewn manual processes. In addition, most marketing platforms can feed back information on marketing campaign success - at campaign and contact level - to better understand what has worked best before and inform future decisions. These differences in success can be tracked from campaign to campaign or via A/B testing whereby you run two versions of a campaign in parallel and can immediately start to appreciate which is getting a more positive response.

In addition to marketing, the advantages of full integration between your CRM system and your website are fairly obvious. This rich understanding of who a user is can drive a more tailored experience for users on the web via conditional content or web notifications. While high-level analytics are great, many marketing suites can also allow for embedded tracking scripts to be placed on strategic areas of a website to understand an individual's web journey as well as overall website performance.

Combining all of this data can then be part of a positive feedback cycle to, in turn, drive more advanced and targeted segmentation.