CRM (or customer relationship management) tools are powerful and easy ways to store and use your client information. Managing your contacts can be done in anything from a spreadsheet to a full ERP system, but some solutions come at a cost to your business. So, how can you know if your business can benefit from CRM.
There are a few key factories that boost the value of collecting customer data, and therefore make a CRM more useful for your business.
When your business does a lot of recurring work (or has a huge potential for recurring work) then CRM tools can make a huge difference. For example, mechanics can work on the same car many, many times so it makes sense to stay in touch with the owner. A CRM system can help them save the client information and set reminders to get in touch every six months or yearly.
You probably receive messages like this that are powered by CRM tools. For example, you may receive a bi-annual text for an eye check-up, a reminder about an upcoming appointment, or even a well-timed coupon or so after you visited a business. In a lot of cases, these are sent by, or at least organised with, the help of CRM tools and a spreadsheet can’t quite cut it without adding hours of admin to your team’s day.
In order to make CRM tools pay for themselves, your customers would ideally be high-value repeat customers. This means either customers with many low value, repeat purchases or high value, continuous clients that are on retainer or work on larger projects with you. These groups benefit the most from CRM because they have a high customer lifetime value and you’re team can generate more revenue by contacting them for new work.
When your customers have the potential to keep coming back, then the potential for the total revenue they produce for your business can be huge. Keeping an eye on them, therefore, becomes much more important. Tracking the lifetime value of these customers is much easier with a CRM system that shows you what projects you’ve worked on in the past. It helps you see what work you’ve done, and can give you insights into how frequently projects occur. You can set reminders to follow up with your customers, or use your data to share new deals and products with your customers.
In a retail environment, it's not always necessary for the salesperson to know who the customer is, what their relationship to the business is and what they’ve purchased before. However, in some cases it could save time and provide a better experience.
Going back to the mechanic example, with the right CRM the team could look up the vehicle rego and see the previous work done, and advise a customer on other services they should add to their service. So, a customer might call for an oil change, but your team can see it's been a year or so since the brakes were changed and can offer to take a look. In this way, your sales rep could upsell to your customers in a much more effective way because they understand their needs.
CRM tools can help you manage customisations and special agreements much easier. For example, WorkGuru.io offers custom pricing tiers that let you set different pricing to honour agreements made with clients. Watch this video to learn more.
WorkGuru.io has inbuilt CRM tools that can help you intuitively collect information about your clients. Whenever a project or asset is linked to a client, the history is saved against that client. You can set custom pricing tiers for customers, record contact details and use custom fields to record any information you need.
You can click here to learn more about our CRM tools or reach out to the team for a free demo.