With the global outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic and social distancing becoming the new norm, finding prospects, providing superior customer experience, and retaining them has become difficult. Companies are left with the only option to rely on the customer relationship management (CRM) system to ensure their sales, marketing, and service teams function with equal proficiency even while working remotely.
Though CRM software is not new in the market, it’s acceptability has manifold among the organizations that are serious about taking up every measure to protect their business from losing customers.
So, what would be the CRM software trends in 2021? Is post-COVID era going to create new standards for managing customer relationships? Let’s find out.
Types of Customers
Business requires dealing with two major types of customers on a day-to-day basis - clients and prospects. Regardless of their type, you would need an efficient team to serve them and a software solution to ensure that all their requirements are fulfilled with no customer or client left unattended.
Furthermore, understanding customer behavior leads to better resource allocation to serve and sell your products or services to them. A well-equipped CRM system helps you identify and segment client and customer data appropriately and equip your teams with every information they need to generate higher profits like never before.
Why CRM is Needed?
At its core, customer relationship management requires planning efficient strategies and instilling workflows to support healthy interactions with current and potential customers. CRM software helps you attain this. It includes a set of powerful tools that can collect data from all possible sources and help your sales, marketing, and service teams recognize customer requirements, reach out to them, and communicate with them in a scalable way through a simple user interface.
A CRM system offers you a 360-degree view of your customer transactions to help you provide a better experience and build a long-lasting relationship with them. This, in turn, creates more loyal customers, and an increase in sales and business revenues.
In the COVID-19 era, when remote working is inevitable, advanced capabilities of CRM system is needed more than ever. There are three major reasons why CRM software is needed for business success, these are:
Increase team collaboration
CRM software can integrate information on a centralized database, thus bringing together disparate information from across the organization, increasing team collaboration, and empowering them to improve customer service.
Enhance productivity
Cloud CRM platform allows you to access data in real-time, via any device, and from any location. This enables your team to easily view, share, and use information from their dashboards and remain productive irrespective of where they are.
Improve customer experience
CRM system helps you to adapt to the changing business conditions quickly. It equips you with new capabilities needed by your organization to support your service team in dealing with the customers and enhance their experience.
Top CRM Software Trends in Post-COVID Era
One of the original ideas behind designing CRM software is understanding and strengthening your relationships with your customers and leveraging their preferences to create new business opportunities. The system also provides valuable assistance to your sales, marketing, and service teams to work remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Here are the major trends of CRM software in post-COVID-19 era:
Harness the power of AI technology
With the ongoing COVID-19 crisis continuing to emanate issues, businesses these days are keener to create openings for many technology innovations, and artificial intelligence or AI is chief among them.
CRM platform equipped with AI-enabled chatbots provides some of the much-needed relief in handling a high volume of service tickets. It frees up your staff’s workloads and enables them to focus on more complicated requests. Pursuing this capability is key to steer your business in the direction that your existing and prospective customers can trust.
Inclusion of voice and conversational UI
Conversational features in CRM software has the potential to push your teams’ limits. It helps them execute the best action while handling multiple queries through voice-based commands. It has the power to change the way you reach out to your prospects and engage with them while maintaining a relationship with your clients.
With the help of advanced voice technology, you get access to data faster. You get support in better managing marketing, sales, and services operations, which gives your business a distinct edge over your competitors.
Data-powered analytic
Data analytic enables you to identify challenges and find solutions to eradicate them. This can be achieved with the help of an advanced analytical tool in CRM software. The system provides real-time insights into sales pipelines, lead generation, and customer satisfaction data through a unified dashboard. As a result, planning marketing strategies, acquiring prospective customers, and retaining clients become data-driven and accurate.
Extensive process automation
CRM software automates time-consuming manual tasks performed by the marketing, sales, and service team. This contributes to an increase in the efficiency of your employees.
The necessity for remote working has increased the acceptance of digitization among businesses, thereby bringing process automation. With its help, you can generate better-qualified leads, provide high-quality customer services, and experience more sales conversion while optimizing operational costs.
Social CRM is on the rise
Social media plays a powerful role in reaching the right audience for your business.
The integration of social media channels into the CRM system helps you to gain an extensive overview and a clearer understanding of what people think about your brand. This predictably enables you to create better one-to-one interaction with prospective customers. You can even provide your clients with quicker thoughtful answers to resolve the misunderstandings as and when they arise.
Overall, social CRM helps generate leads and attract and maintain clients. So, CRM trends would continue to root into social networking.
Hyper-personalization continues to rule
More than ever, now, customers expect services tailored to their preferences.
The CRM system plays a significant role in collecting information related to the customers' transactions, history, context, and intent. Your team can retrieve this data to know your customers better and fuel one-to-one conversations.
Mobile CRM gains momentum
Advancements in mobile technology have redefined the way business operations are conducted. CRM systems have evolved to keep up with the change in technology trends.
When work from home became the necessary measure to stop COVID-19 virus from spreading, the need for establishing constant connectivity with the customers and clients has pushed the CRM platform to include mobile functionalities.
Thus, the new-age CRM system provides you with complete functionality without compromising the benefits when accessed through smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices with internet connections.
To Sum it Up
While CRM software always offered reliable solutions to engage prospective customers and provide a superior experience to the clients. Fortunately, since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, CRM trends have evolved further, making a difference in the ways it supports your mission-critical business operations against the ongoing odds.
We offer the best CRM software in UAE that can help you reduce the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on your business productivity.
