Here’s 5 tips on how to use CRM platforms for customer retention
1: Email marketing
A great way to stay in touch with customers is to send them regular emails about products or relevant news about your company that they may find of interest. Many leading CRM systems such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 enable you to send marketing emails to specified clients lists and offer basic performance metrics. However, if you are looking to step this up a notch, you can also look at integrating industry standard email marketing software such as Mailchimp, DotMailer and Click Dimensions within your CRM platform. Integrations enable the clever functionality and enhanced performance metrics that these specialist platforms offer but allow you to keep the data within one central place – your CRM. Our top tip – Send one email a month to existing customers to remind them of your business and the additional services it provides. Remember to check they have opted in to receive marketing emails first.
2: Manage customer renewals in CRM
CRM platforms can be setup to automatically send out reminders to customers about contracts, licence renewals and other agreements. Not only is this a great in terms of delivering excellent customer service but also retaining customers and encouraging the renewal of contracts. Our top tip – Auto schedule a follow up call with the customers account manager on the day of these notifications to maximise uptake and as a timely interaction with the customer.
3: Prevent account neglect
As soon as a customer feels neglected they’ll start to look elsewhere. With most leading CRM platforms particularly Microsoft Dynamics 365, you can setup custom alerts that can be sent to core team members such as Managers. These alerts can be customised and setup to automatically activate when an account has had little or no activity within any given timeframe.
4: Review customer service performance
CRM dashboards which are available in all leading CRM platforms, can be setup to review the response times given to customers, the delivery timescales and customer feedback scores etc. Dashboards enable businesses to identify areas for improvement and also give a top level performance overview to senior management teams. Infinity Group use these on a daily basis within our business to ensure we are meeting customer SLAs and maintaining our customer service levels, you can also filter dashboards to view specific teams/individual employees data as required. Our top tip – Invest some time in getting a suite of useful dashboards setup to monitor performance related to customer retention. If you get the right data pulled in and analyse it regularly you should be able to retain more customers.
5: Setup customer centric integrations with your CRM
Do you have a customer portal or use a customer review engine such as Feefo or Trustpilot? If so, you can integrate the data submitted within these to your CRM platform. This builds each customers persona within the CRM platform that providing you with an accurate picture of each customer. What do they frequently experience problems with? How can you help to alleviate that? How do they score your business online?
There are many other features within Microsoft Dynamics 365 that enhance customer retention such as the Microsoft Dynamics for Customer Service application. Please get in touch for more information.
