Where are you currently?

Consistently great customer experience doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a journey. But it’s a journey you definitely want to be taking.

How do we know? Because each stage you reach on the CRM maturity journey directly impacts your revenue. We’ve helped companies like yours do this time and time again. Whatever stage they’ve started at.

See where you are now, and where could you be.

You can’t be sure if your customer is getting a consistent experience. There are too many variables: which area of the business the customer connects with, the person they connect with, the time of day, how busy they are etc. You are getting customer interactions across many platforms. E.g. emails, phone call, Facebook messages, tweet etc. But you are not sure they all get a similar response.

You may hear this in the office: ‘Nobody click save on the sales excel doc for the next 10 minutes. I don’t want another conflicted document’. 

Your customer contacts are in different places. Some are in your email program, some are on business cards, some are on your phone, and some never got captured. While things seem to be functioning now, if the business grows there is no way of scaling processes.

Targeted marketing happens sporadically. When you do run a campaign, somebody has to import email addresses manually. If you outsource your marketing, you aren’t getting meaningful data back. Sales may go up after spending money on a campaign, but you don’t know which elements were the impactful ones.

You know that things ought to be better, but you are not quite sure how.

You have strategies and systems in place to connect with customers. And they are working. Your sales teams track prospects on a sales management program. Your marketing team creates mailers with things like Mailchimp. Your inventory is on an ERP etc. But these systems are spread across the business. They don’t talk to each other.

Because of this, you are wasting many hours collecting duplicate customer information. Worse still, you aren’t sure which information, in which system, is the most up to date. You wish there was a way to have a single, accurate customer record – right across your business.

You may be hearing this in your office. ‘Everyone! If you don’t send me your customer information today, they won’t be invited to the event.’ 

You want to be able to learn from all the data you collect, but you can’t. If you do get insights, they are only at a departmental level. They are not available to the rest of the company. And because of this, you are missing out on many up-selling and cross-selling opportunities. Your customer service could also be better.

You have one over-arching system that coordinates customer interaction across your business. Good job.

You are beginning to be confident that a customer will get a consistent experience. Marketing, sales, fulfilment and service can all see the complete record on a customer.  Not only that, you are tracking customer information across your business. Emails, calls, appointments, comments, surveys can all be seen in one place. Data from your ERP, marketing software, etc. all links up in one portal.

Every interaction is acted upon. E.g. Somebody tweets about a service issue. This gets logged by the marketing team and flagged with the service department. Because you have an over-arching system, this sort of co-ordination between departments is easy. The resultant customer experience doesn’t feel disjointed, but consistent.

You may hear this in the office: ‘Score! I just came back from the call-out and sold them a new machine!’ Because your CRM system prompts servicing engineers with upgrade opportunities, your up-sell numbers are increasing. Invoices are generated instantly. And because stock levels are accessible remotely, the customer gets realistic delivery dates.

As your system matures, you are able automate more of you processes and reporting. Staff spend more time on the things that matter and you have a better handle on what’s happening. This increased efficiency has a beneficial knock-on effect on your bottom line.

Because of advanced analytics and machine learning, your business processes are evolving daily. You are seeing the impact of changes in real-time. And the information is visible to everybody who needs it. Your competitors are sweating. But they can’t work out how you are accelerating away from them.

You can see the experiences a customer has in different departments. And when things go wrong, you have processes in place to intervene. When customers show certain buying patterns, promotional campaigns trigger automatically.

Accurate sales forecasting has reduced your inventory costs considerably. You are hearing things like this in your office:

‘Maximum revenue occurs when we offer these promotions, targeted at that set of customers’. 

Even though your business is large, it still feels very agile. Your processes are more efficient and your opportunities are increasing. Your bottom line is improving significantly. You wonder how businesses operate in any other way.