If you want to have a thriving business in the B2B sector, customer success must be a top priority. Ensuring your customers are happy and getting the most out of your products or services is essential. Just consider these stats from an article by Outbound Engine:
- Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer.
- Increasing customer retention by 5% can increase profits from 25-95%.
- The success rate of selling to a customer you already have is 60-70%, while the success rate of selling to a new customer is 5-20%.
While the importance of customer success is easy to see, maintaining a strong base of successful customers is challenging. You need to understand the unique requirements of each and every customer and be proactive in helping meet those needs. Fortunately, CRM can help.
Check out our list of the top 10 CRM benefits for customer success.
What is CRM?
A CRM (customer relationship management) platform is a software toolset that assists businesses with managing their people (customers and employees), work processes, products, and projects on a day-to-day basis.
Once thought of primarily as a customer engagement tool for the sales team, modern CRM software has evolved to address the needs of many different business aspects, including marketing, customer support, customer success, and HR.
Through the use of advanced automations tools and data centralization, a CRM system can help businesses improve communication (both internal and external), work more efficiently, and track performance.
Top 10 CRM benefits for customer success
- Personalized interactions- CRM platforms are centralized repositories for customer data, capturing all sales, marketing, and customer support interactions.
This comprehensive view enables customer success teams to personalize their interactions in accordance with each customer’s preferences, including preferred contact times and channels.
- Timely engagement- Real-time alerts and notifications enable customer success agents to respond quickly to customer requests. Combined with CRM automation features, CS managers can create workflows and communication cadences that surpass industry standards and exceed customer expectations.
- 360 degree context- CRM systems enable customer success teams to see all purchases, notes, support tickets, activities and interactions related to a customer or account.
This enables customer success reps to tailor solutions and offers to the specific needs of the customer, improving positioning for better results with upselling and expansion.
- Process alignment- With CRM, organizations can standardize all their customer-related processes and workflows, from lead qualification to renewal. This helps teams across the organization set proper expectations with customers, improving outcomes and building trust.
- Cross-team collaboration- CRM platforms enable teams to communicate, share information, and collaborate on customer-related activities in real-time, from anywhere.
The sales teams can provide insights on customer needs and preferences to the customer success team, while the customer support team can flag recurring issues or challenges for follow-up by the product team. And the leadership team has visibility into all of it.
- Workflow automation- CRM systems can automate routine tasks and processes such as welcome emails and renewal reminders. This ensures these important steps are never missed and gives customer success agents more time to focus on high-value activities.
- Real-time reporting and analytics- CRM provides customer success teams with comprehensive customer health monitoring capabilities. Product and service usage can be tracked. Support tickets and knowledge base queries can be collected and stored. Customer feedback data can be transformed into charts and reports that reveal trends and sentiment.
These metrics can inform real-time dashboards that provide a 360 degree view into each customer’s health status, allowing CS reps to identify at-risk customers early.
- Scalability- As your business grows, a CRM can help your CS team accommodate more customers without sacrificing quality of service. What’s more, as the needs of your customers increases you can quickly and easily implement new processes and workflows to meet these demands.
Additionally, many modern CRMs offer scalable payment packages that allow you to add features, users, and services as you need them, helping you grow at your own pace while maintaining a high ROI.
- Integration capability- A modern CRM platform can integrate with email automation services, customer support portals, survey and feedback tools, project management software, and more to create an all-in-one work management platform.
This can improve operational efficiency, increase cross-team alignment and ultimately help your customer success teams create a better customer experience.
- Return on investment- The biggest benefit of CRM for any team or business is the very high ROI that CRM provides. According to a report by Nucleus Research, CRM has a return of $8.71 USD for every dollar spent.
FreeAgent CRM is the best CRM for customer success
FreeAgent CRM is a modern work management platform that provides top-of-field software tools for organizations of all sizes and technical proficiency.
FreeAgent is the best CRM for customer success because FreeAgent is:
- Easy to use- FreeAgent’s modern user interface is quick to learn and easy to use, encouraging teams to work within the platform. This enables you to maintain a comprehensive catalog of every sale, support ticket, and customer interaction.
- User-configurable- With FreeAgent, the power is in your hands. You can customize and personalize FreeAgent to fit the specific needs of your business and teams without external support.
Plus, FreeAgent offers:
- Robust integration- FreeAgent’s flexible toolset and extensive integration library support teams and businesses of all types and structures.
- A mobile CRM tool- FreeAgent’s mobile app allows team members to access the FreeAgent platform from anywhere, at any time.
- Generative AI- Uplift your work with Generative AI-powered features. With FreeAgent, you can access AI across any app, allowing you to get the information you need faster.
With FreeAgent, it’s really that simple.
To see FreeAgent in action, get a demo, and discover for yourself how we are leading the way to a better workday.