In a recent report by Forrester, titled Customer Success Teams Fail To Reach Their Potential Without Purpose-Built Technology, they said a purpose-built CRM Solution can help teams focus on delivering a customer experience that encourages customers to stay, attain, value, grow, and advocate.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has become an essential tool for businesses of all sizes to effectively manage their interactions with customers and prospects. A purpose-built CRM solution is specifically designed to address the unique needs of managing customer relationships, providing a robust and comprehensive platform.
redk specialises in tailored CRM solutions that streamline operations, drive customer operations, and enable business growth. We work with multiple technology partners to help businesses across the world find a CRM combination that meets their needs and wants.
In this blog post, we will explore the Forrester report further and dive into why a purpose-built CRM solution is the way to go for businesses.
A purpose-built solution can help with customer success management
Beyond just managing customer data, a CRM solution designed specifically for customer success management can provide valuable insights, enable effective customer engagement, streamline operations, and facilitate scalable growth.
This section will explore the different areas a purpose-built CRM solution can help teams manage customer success.
Customer data
Managing customer data is fundamental to any CRM system. Customer success managers can easily see where to focus their efforts without relying on multiple data sources.
A purpose-built CRM solution provides a centralised and organised database to store and manage customer information, including contact details, purchase history, communication history, and more.
This gives businesses a complete view of their customers, enabling personalised interactions and tailored marketing campaigns.
Customer insights
With the right data and insights, customer success teams can focus on customer health and turn it into a comprehensive scorecard. This includes the depth and breadth of usage, account growth across all types of interactions, and other metrics important to understanding customer behaviour.
The scorecard empowers customer success teams to spot early warning signs of risk and take proactive measures to prevent churn.
For example, Teresa Anania, SVP of Global Customer Success, renewals, and customer experience at Zendesk, shared with Forrester how their CRM solution helped them develop a health scorecard.
By aggregating all the data in one place and developing this scorecard, they could enable a more personalised digital touch motion while equipping their CSMs with better insights for high- and medium-touch experiences. This made their team more productive and resulted in a nice uplift in their gross retention rate.
Customer engagement
A purpose-built CRM solution facilitates effective customer engagement by providing tools for managing interactions across multiple channels, such as email, phone, social media, and chat. Businesses can respond promptly to customer inquiries, resolve issues efficiently, and provide exceptional customer service, leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Some of these interactions, like emails and direct messaging, can be automated with the help of AI.
Automation can streamline and optimise your entire business – not just isolated processes. The redk team can help you harness the power of intelligent automation to optimise productivity across the board.
So, as you grow and expand, your automated processes will scale with you and continue to optimise productivity. Your customer success team can focus on the more complex queries while AI covers the more frequently asked questions.
Operations and scale
A purpose-built CRM solution is designed to streamline and automate key business processes, such as lead management, sales tracking, and customer service workflows.
Joshua Weber, Senior Customer Success Manager, strategic accounts, LinkedIn
Sales Solutions told Forrester: “Successful customer success platforms take data and turn it into insights, but more importantly, they translate that into workflows and processes that help CS teams scale.”
This improves operational efficiency, reduces manual errors, and enables businesses to scale their operations without compromising customer experience.
How to find the right CRM solution for your team
Now you understand all the benefits behind a tailored CRM solution, it’s time to find the right combination for your business.
Fortunately, redk is here to help you find the right software to meet your goals and priorities. We work with multiple technology partners to help you optimise your processes and improve team productivity.
But before we jump in, here are a few things you can do to ensure you get the right CRM solution for your team.
Define a clear customer success strategy
Before selecting a CRM solution, it is important to define a clear customer success strategy that aligns with your business goals. This includes identifying key customer touchpoints, setting performance metrics, and outlining desired outcomes. Having a well-defined strategy will help you evaluate CRM solutions based on their ability to support your specific customer success goals.
It’s also important to remember that software alone does not form a successful customer success strategy. It’s essential for customer success leaders to first outline the experience they are designing for their customers.
This involves mapping out the post-sale lifecycle and determining which workflows and processes need to be standardised across the customer base and what data needs to be included.
Build the business case
Building a strong business case for implementing a CRM solution is crucial for gaining support from stakeholders. Clearly articulate the expected benefits, such as increased revenue, improved customer satisfaction, and enhanced operational efficiency. Include projected ROI and cost-benefit analysis to demonstrate the value of investing in a purpose-built CRM solution.
Audit data
Before implementing a CRM solution, you need to conduct a thorough audit of your existing data. This includes identifying data sources, cleaning up duplicate or outdated data, and ensuring data accuracy and integrity. A clean and well-organised data set will enable you to leverage the full capabilities of a CRM solution and derive meaningful insights from your customer data.
Invest time in implementation
Your implementation strategy is often the difference between a successful and unsuccessful CRM solution.
At redk, we’re experts at helping businesses implement CRM software so they can get the most out of it. We get to know your priorities and goals so we can find a CRM solution that helps you achieve them.
For example, TIME Investments is a specialist investment manager that needed a clear roadmap to how their organisation could work with a CRM solution. They wanted to build a transformation plan instead of just updating the technology without any implementation strategy.
However, this transformation exceeded the features of Salesforce, and we needed to personalise the software to grasp the needs of the business fully.
TIME Investments now uses Salesforce for B2B marketing, Salesforce Sales Cloud, and Salesforce Service Cloud. The redk team provided the technical expertise and best practise to help TIME implement new technology with speed and quality.
Target priority use cases
Identify the most critical use cases that are aligned with your customer success strategy and prioritise them during implementation.
The Forrester report recommends identifying your leading metrics, like engagement and ROI, and connecting them with your lagging metrics, such as wallet share, NRR, and churn.
Kristi Faltorusso, chief customer officer at ClientSuccess, told Forrester, “You must know the customer lifecycle and understand the leading indicators — all those points in the lifecycle that impact lagging indicators like churn and expansion.”
Focusing on priority use cases ensures that you maximise the value of the CRM solution and achieve early wins.
Drive internal adoption
A CRM solution is only effective if it is adopted and used by your team.
redk can help you provide comprehensive training and support to ensure that all users use the CRM solution proficiently. We can help you foster a culture of accountability and encourage regular usage of the CRM system by integrating it into the daily workflows of your team. Get in touch today to learn more.
