Strong customer relationships are the key to continued revenue growth and profitability. That’s why, according to Grand View Research, more than 90% of businesses with 10+ employees use a customer relationship management (CRM) solution that stores all customer-related information and integrates sales automation and marketing with Automation as well as customer service to help build lasting customer relationships.
CRM systems can improve business operations in many ways, from automating routine tasks to analyzing customer behavior to tracking sales performance. Here are the 20 most common CRM use cases that can drive business growth.
20 key CRM use cases worth exploring
CRM solutions help businesses increase productivity, better understand customer behavior, and provide a better customer experience through automation, among many other benefits. Use cases cover the entire customer lifecycle, from initial contact to customer support to after-sales.
1- Automate Repetitive Tasks
One of the greatest benefits of a CRM solution is that it increases the productivity of sales, marketing, and customer service teams by reducing the time and effort spent on routine tasks. CRM systems can automate repetitive tasks, such as sending routine marketing emails. By creating email templates and then setting up rules that define triggers to send those emails, you can ensure that every new prospect automatically receives a welcome email introducing your product or service.
Then, when the recipient opens or replies to the email, the CRM system can schedule a follow-up call with the designated sales representative. By automating these steps, sales reps can focus their time on more valuable and productive activities, such as: B. Conversing with prospects who are about to make a major buying decision.
One of the greatest benefits of a CRM solution is that it increases the productivity of sales, marketing, and customer service teams by reducing the time and effort spent on routine tasks. CRM systems can automate repetitive tasks, such as sending routine marketing emails. By creating email templates and then setting up rules that define triggers to send those emails, you can ensure that every new prospect automatically receives a welcome email introducing your product or service.
Then, when the recipient opens or replies to the email, the CRM system can schedule a follow-up call with the designated sales representative. By automating these steps, sales reps can focus their time on more valuable and productive activities, such as: B. Conversing with prospects who are about to make a major buying decision.
2- Build an Omni channel Customer Experience
With consumers able to design their own coffee drinks and ringtones, it’s no wonder they also want to choose how they interact with the companies they do business with. Customers often interact through multiple channels: they can shop online, return goods in brick-and-mortar stores, and contact customer service via live chat. CRM can help create a consistent customer experience across all of these channels. For example, you can support customers through their preferred channels: email, text, chat, social media, or even face-to-face meetings. CRM can also track all of these interactions, allowing you to keep a complete record of every contact with your customers.
It is important that the system provides a seamless experience for customers. Without careful design, customers risk receiving different messages through different channels or having to repeat the same message over and over again. An integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) software suite that supports CRM, e-commerce, and other business functions can help companies deliver a unified customer experience. This approach helped Altex Computers & Electronics create a comprehensive omnichannel system for digital and brick-and-mortar sales, with unified payment processing and an engaging online shopping experience.
3- Personalize Customer Experiences
Personalized communications can help customers feel valued—and make them more likely to increase their interactions with the company. CRM solutions can gather information from customer records and their past interactions to add relevant content to texts, chats, social media or emails. For example, they can send a special offer for a customer’s birthday or suggest other products to complement a customer’s previous purchase. Avid home cooks who’ve been browsing high-end blenders may find great deals on add-ons like special blades.
4- Prioritize Leads
There is no one-size-fits-all code for how to convert leads into paying customers, but prioritizing and targeting the right leads will definitely increase your odds of success. CRM systems can help with lead scoring, a process of ranking prospects based on their potential value to the business.
CRM does this by assigning points to each lead based on predefined rules you choose. Lead Scoring helps sales reps identify the strongest leads. In its simplest form, lead scoring assigns points based on demographic data, such as: B. The lead’s industry or job title. However, scoring is most effective when interactions between prospects and your business dynamically drive scoring. For example, if your company runs a promotional email campaign, all prospects who open the email will get points, and those who click on the link in the email to your website will get more points.
5- Develop Sales Prospects
While quality products, reasonable prices, and knowledgeable salespeople are all important, at the end of the day, sales is a numbers game. The more leads you have at the beginning, the more customers you end up with. These leads don’t come out of nowhere: creating a large number of leads can take a lot of time and labor.
CRM systems can speed up this process by automating data entry and other time-consuming steps. Instead of manually entering the name and address of each lead at a sales event or trade show, you can import the list into your CRM and automatically create a separate record for each lead. A CRM can also capture the email addresses that potential customers enter on your website so you can target them in your marketing campaigns.
6- Conduct Sales Outreach
After you’ve identified your prospects and prospects, it’s time to introduce them to your product or service. CRM solutions can help automate outreach and track and analyze progress. For example, a CRM can personalize outreach efforts, such as email messages, based on a prospect’s history. It tracks every attempt to reach a prospect and records if and how they respond. Even after someone becomes a customer, it’s still important to make a connection. A CRM system can flag customers whose contracts are about to expire and send them reminders or prompt sales to contact them.
7- Follow Up on Leads
The good news is that when you contact a prospect, they respond. Bad news: Manually filtering, organizing, and tracking these responses is time-consuming. If you have a CRM, you can use it to do a lot of the heavy lifting. For example, some CRM systems can automatically schedule a follow-up call for anyone who responds within the first few days, while sending a follow-up email to anyone who doesn’t respond at all. Given that there are often multiple contacts with prospects before making a purchase, automating these steps can save a lot of time.
8- Manage Sales Processes
A CRM system can help create efficient and consistent sales processes tailored to specific products and markets. Suppose you sell high-end personal care products with one product line for businesses and another for consumers. It doesn’t make sense to create a single process for both, as companies often do lengthy evaluations before buying in bulk, while consumers often buy individual items quickly. A CRM can help define different processes for each market and track them separately. For example, you can do the following:
- Define transaction stages, automate each step, and track each transaction as it moves through the process.
- Create custom fields to store the unique information needed for each process—not just names, email addresses, and phone.
- Automatically assign leads to the appropriate salesperson or team.
9- Manage Salespeople More Effectively
CRM systems provide sales leaders with insight into the performance of their sales teams and help them manage their teams more effectively. Real-time dashboards allow managers to monitor individual and team-level performance and track metrics such as total sales, percentage of quota met, average deal size, and lead conversion rates. Leading CRM systems allow companies to personalize dashboards for each seller, which can help them stay motivated and track progress toward their goals.
10- Analyze Sales Cycles
By consistently recording and tracking all steps in the sales process, a CRM system enables detailed analysis of the sales cycle. This helps companies find bottlenecks and take action to eliminate them. These insights are especially useful for companies that sell to other companies and have long sales cycles. For example, if it takes so long to create a bid that potential customers choose a competitor instead of waiting, you might want to simplify bid generation. You can also analyze whether there are differences in the time each salesperson takes to complete different stages of the cycle so you can troubleshoot individual team members.
11- Onboard New Clients
Once you’ve successfully converted leads into customers, an efficient onboarding process can help ensure a smooth customer experience and encourage customer engagement with your product. CRM can automate onboarding workflows and reduce the time required, especially when CRM is combined with other business applications and tools, such as B. Robot-controlled process automation. For example, the information in the CRM can be used to automatically fill in the forms required to open customer accounts and to verify customer information.
12- Analyze Customer Behavior
A deep understanding of customer behavior is critical to retaining customers and attracting new ones. CRM contains a wealth of information about how customers behave. You can use this knowledge to improve customer retention, promote add-ons or other products, and personalize service. For example, a CRM can help analyze:
•How you acquired the customer.
Customers who have visited every page of your website and had an in-depth conversation with your seller likely know a lot about your product and may be more willing to engage with it. Conversely, people who buy quickly but don’t interact with your business may need to resell over time.
•How the customer is using your product.
Your customer purchased a 35mm digital camera. They may be more likely to become loyal customers if they ask customer service how to use state-of-the-art features and order additional lenses and other accessories. Some CRM systems can generate engagement scores, so you can reward core customers or reach out to less engaged customers to promote additional features, provide product training, and more.
•How the customer interacts with you.
Do customers read specific marketing or training materials, such as blog posts? How often do they visit your site – what products are they looking at? A CRM can track these interactions and target marketing and sales efforts accordingly.
13- Monitor Your Competition
Your CRM can help you track performance compared to your key competitors – and take action to win back lost customers. For example, you might be able to record information about which deals were lost to which competitors, allowing you to analyze common factors that might explain why. You can then create campaigns targeting those lost leads and highlight the new differentiators you developed.
14- Track Your Churn Rate
Every company wants to be able to say it will never lose a customer – but zero churn is often unrealistic. Churn rate is usually calculated as the percentage of customers who churn over a given period, although other formulas can be used. CRM can help businesses automatically measure and analyze customer churn so they can focus on investigating the root cause and identifying actions to minimize it. An increasing churn rate can be a symptom of serious problems.
15- Engage in Strategic, Proactive Management
Because CRM collects a lot of data about your interactions with customers, it can be an important tool to support decision making. Analyzing data in CRM can help you spot trends and problems early so you can make decisions and take proactive action to seize opportunities and prevent small problems from turning into serious challenges. For example, you can analyze factors associated with declining lead generation or declining customer retention. You can analyze the most common issues reported to customer service and prioritize resources to resolve them.
16- Help Agents Help Customers
With a good CRM system, agents can gain a more complete picture of a customer’s history, including all previous interactions with the company. This enables agents to provide a better customer experience. When customers call, they no longer suffer from the frustration of repeating information from previous phone calls or chat sessions, because agents have access to all previous customer support interactions. CRM can also help escalate responses when agents realize during the call that they need a manager or a more experienced representative. When an agent asks for help, the system automatically finds the right person and transfers the call.
17-Help Salespeople Manage Travel
For sales reps who need to travel to different customer locations during the day, a CRM system can ensure they take the most efficient route to get there on time. This helps improve sales efficiency while keeping customers happy. Some CRM solutions integrate sales rep calendars with mapping software, giving reps a visual representation of their daily schedule and step-by-step guidance to get to their next appointment. Mobile device support allows employees to use the software on the go.
18-Monitor Data Security
Customer information is some of the most valuable data your company has. Leaking this data can damage a company’s bottom line and reputation. When customer information is scattered across multiple spreadsheets and other documents, rather than stored in a well-designed CRM system, it becomes more vulnerable to hacking and theft. Leading CRM systems often include access controls and other security features to ensure that only authorized employees can access the system and restrict access based on the user’s role. Businesses can also monitor suspicious activity and set rules that block access at specific times.
19-Align Sales and Marketing
A CRM can help a business align sales and marketing teams to support the ultimate goal of increasing sales. By better understanding what customers buy and why from sales, marketers can adjust lead scoring criteria based on how likely they are to increase sales. They can then refine these criteria while analyzing the resulting sales. A CRM can also automate the lead routing process from marketing to sales.
20-Increase Profitability
Ultimately, CRM systems support profitability by increasing sales and increasing productivity.
CRM’s contributions include:
- Sales, marketing and customer service automation to reduce overall costs by increasing the productivity of each team.
- Higher lead conversion rates due to more targeted marketing and better understanding of customer needs.
- Facilitates more cross-selling by better understanding what customers are buying and what complementary products they may be interested in.
- Longer customer relationships, driven by better customer experiences throughout the on boarding journey.
CRM Use Case Template
Building a library of use cases helps organizations define all the ways that employees use CRM. This is useful when determining the business value of CRM, evaluating and implementing solutions, and conducting training. Use case templates help you quickly build libraries in a consistent format.
Choosing the Right CRM for Your Business
Since CRM plays such an important role in business, it is important to take the time to choose the right solution for your needs. A key step is to bring everyone involved together and create a detailed list of what you want to achieve with the system. Key issues to consider include:
- What problem do you want to solve? Prioritize company goals, whether they’re increasing sales efficiency, attracting better leads, or improving customer service.
- How much can you afford? You need to have a realistic idea of the actual cost and budget of the system.
- What technical support do you have? Cloud-based solutions require less IT expertise than on-premises systems.
- How big is your company? Consider whether the system will support your future growth plans and your current needs.
- What makes your company unique? Find products with the specific features you need and suppliers with customers in your industry.
- How will you access the CRM? If employees need to access the system at home or on the go, a cloud-based system with mobile support may be the best solution.
- Should the system be integrated with other software? Some CRM solutions integrate well with business systems that handle financial, inventory, and e-commerce applications.
Net Suite CRM is a cloud-based solution that supports sales force automation, customer service, and marketing automation, with additional features like partner relationship management. As part of the ERP suite, NetSuite CRM is tightly integrated with financial, inventory and e-commerce applications to help organizations manage the entire customer lifecycle. NetSuite CRM provides insight into all customer interactions, supporting improved sales performance and customer satisfaction.
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CRM Use Cases FAQs
What is a CRM use case?
A use case describes how a user interacts with a CRM system for a specific purpose. The focus is on the application, not the system design or structure. A complete set of use cases defines how a company will use CRM. Together, these use cases define the overall behavior required by CRM.
What is an example of a CRM?
A comprehensive CRM system that combines sales automation, marketing automation, and customer service. Some integrate with other applications; others focus on specific subsets of these skills. For example, some products are primarily sales automation tools, while others are primarily designed for customer support.
How is a CRM used?
A CRM provides a central location for storing information about prospects and customers, tools for analyzing data in the system, and applications that support sales, marketing, and customer service. CRM is used to automate routine tasks, personalize customer interactions, identify business trends, and otherwise improve business operations and outcomes.
What is CRM, with examples?
A CRM helps manage all of a company’s interactions with customers and prospects. For example, a CRM can track a customer’s purchase and browsing history, and then use this data to personalize marketing. It can send customers product recommendations based on their purchase or browsing history. CRM solutions integrated with e-commerce and inventory systems also support unified procurement and support processes.