There’s no denying it:

Customer experience is critical to the future success of your business.

But what is CX, and what makes it so vital?

Customer experience is the catch-all term for the overall brand experience your customers can expect when they interact with your company at any stage of their journey with you - across marketing, sales, support, success, and service.

Having good CX offers your company a 17% higher chance of growing year-on-year, which hasn’t gone unnoticed.

More than 60% of companies compete primarily on the basis of customer experience, while 81% see CX as a competitive differentiator.

On top of this, 73% of customers believe that the quality of customer experience you provide is a deciding factor when it comes to making purchase decisions.

Not only do customers appreciate high-quality customer experience, and companies recognize its importance as a competitive advantage, but it also offers significant financial returns, too.

This is because it’s thought that as much as 5.7X more revenue is driven by brands with outstanding customer experience compared to those that don’t.

One of the key reasons for this is that customers will increase their spending by as much as 140% after receiving a positive customer experience.

So, as you can see - focusing on customer experience is a key mechanism for growth within any business.

But how can you provide your customers with a great experience, and how can a CRM help you do this?

To help you get to grips with how CRM and CX make the perfect team, we’ve put together a guide outlining 4 winning ways to deliver a great customer experience using CRM software.

First up, we’ll look at personalized experiences. 

Create Personalized Experiences 

As the old saying goes, ‘the customer is always right’.

So. it’ll come as no surprise to you that your customers believe they’re unique and that their needs matter above all others.

In fact, 84% of B2B buyers say that being treated like a person with unique needs - rather than just a ‘number’ - is very important to winning their business.

To help you meet those needs and reinforce the fact that your customers deserve special treatment, you can use a technique known as personalization.

You may have heard of personalization before and be under the impression that it’s little more than adding your customer’s name to an email - but you’d be wrong.

Personalization gives you the opportunity to enhance experiences across the customer journey, making sure that everything from marketing and sales to service and support is tweaked and adjusted to be as relevant to each individual customer as possible.

But why does this matter?

Put simply, personalization is a highly effective way to provide a great customer experience that has huge positive knock-on effects on both revenue and conversion.

This is because not only does personalization help to drive better customer outcomes, but as a result, it boosts conversion rates by 8% - and the fastest-growing companies drive 40% more revenue through the use of personalization.

Personalization examples

So, by now, you can see that giving your customers the ‘personal touch’ is a key aspect of providing them with an exceptional experience.

But how can you create personalized experiences and strategies for your customers using a CRM?

Don’t worry, it’s not complicated, and once you’ve started on your quest to create personalized customer experiences, there’ll be no stopping you.

To help you get started, we’ve put together some examples of personalization you can implement in a CRM - like SuperOffice - across marketing, sales, and service - to ensure each part of your customer journey offers a personalized experience for your customers.

Make data-driven decisions

Another key part of creating more personal experiences that resonate with your customers is the use of data.

These personalized, data-driven, experiences could happen at any time across the customer journey through marketing, sales, and service.

But, by the time your customers are accessing your support and customer service offerings, this is the point where the data you’ve gathered is richest and most useful.

In fact, according to Gartner, 86% of B2B customers expect companies to be well-informed about their personal information during a service interaction.

So, what sort of customer data can you gather, how can you gather it, and how can you use it?

How to gather customer data 

Typically you can source data in 2 separate ways:

• Automatically - through real-time data integrations with external 3rd party systems.
• Manually - by adding data manually to a customer’s record directly in a CRM.

This data can then be surfaced and used both at an individual level as part of a 360° view of each specific customer - or as part of a more comprehensive reporting or segmentation approach across your entire customer base.

To give you a better idea of the types of data you could - and should - be collecting and how it can be used to create a better customer experience, we’ve prepared an ‘at a glance’ guide to get you started:

Centralizing this data in a CRM means that not only have you got a single source of the truth for that customer - but it means that all of your team across marketing, sales, and service can access the same data, creating a more consistent experience for your customers as a result.

Enhance the Experience with AI & Automation

AI and Automation are two of the biggest buzzwords in technology right now.

But what are the core objectives of using automation within a marketing, sales, and service context?

In a recent survey, 61% of respondents believed that lead generation was their top objective for automation, while 57% agreed that lead nurturing was also a good application for the technology.

Finally - 36% suggested that they use automation to help increase customer engagement rates.

With over a third of marketers already utilizing automation to improve customer engagement - a key part of overall CX - let’s look at how you can use CRM automation to overhaul your customer experience, too.

Language for support - thanks to advances in AI, CRM technology can now automatically detect the language a customer is contacting you in and even translate your responses.

This is an important step to creating a great experience for your international customers, with 75% indicating they would become repeat customers if a brand offered multilingual customer support.

Automations triggered based on events - because customers are becoming ever more sophisticated in terms of what they’re doing with technology and what they expect from technology, it means you need to be more proactive than ever.

Setting up automated workflows, emails, and notifications that are triggered by customer actions or events - like renewal, using a new feature, or even not logging in for a while - enables you and your team to look professional and prompt at all times, leaving a positive lasting impression on your customers as a result.

AI sentiment analysis - by using AI built into your unified CRM and service platform, you can analyze support tickets and customer emails in real time to quickly understand what they’re about and escalate them accordingly. This not only saves your service team significant time and energy, but it also enables your customers to feel instantly listened to and well looked after, helping to enhance their experience with your brand.

Automated self-serve support - 88% of customers these days now expect a self-service support option - because it’s quicker, easier, and always available.

As a result, it means that the ability to offer options like a knowledge base, chatbot, and customer portal, fully integrated with a CRM and all driven by automation and AI, has become a critical part of the overall customer experience for many.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to creative ways to leverage automation and AI to improve the customer experience.

Before long, this level of refined customer experience won’t just be a ‘nice to have’ it will become essential.

So, you should consider how you can get started now with adding AI and automation to your customer experience - before you get left behind.

Capture relevant information at the right time

Web forms are an essential part of inbound lead generation and customer communication.

Whether you use them to capture lead data, newsletter signups, webinar registrations, or even just a simple ‘contact us’ page - they’re an intrinsic, yet often overlooked, part of the overall customer experience.

The trouble is that form design can be pretty divisive for many of your customers:

Too many fields to fill in, and they won’t want to finish the form….

…While too few fields means you won’t have gathered all the information you need to help your customers.

It’s a constant battle of wills between the company and the customer.

In fact, 81% of survey respondents admit to having abandoned a web form before they had completed it, purely because of how poorly it was designed.

Our inbuilt custom web form builder gives you complete control over how you design and build your web forms - and then inputs all the data you collect directly into a CRM.

Being able to customize your web forms, test their effectiveness, and then further optimize them gives you the flexibility to create the perfect forms that your customers are happy to fill in, and your team is happy to receive.

This benefits the customer experience in two ways:

1. Your customers have a smooth, painless experience when using a well-designed and highly optimized form
2. Your customers benefit from an improved level of service when your team acts upon the form they’ve submitted - which includes the optimum information to assist the customer quickly and easily.

To help you build better web forms for your customers, here are some best practice tips you should consider:

By being seen to be taking care of the ‘small stuff’ like web form design, it will add a layer of reassurance to your entire customer experience for your customers.

So don’t overlook seemingly insignificant things like form design, email copy, or support tickets if you want to provide a great customer experience that’ll help you stand out from your competitors.

Conclusion

Your customers have more options to choose from than ever - so you can’t just rely on having a great product if you want them to stick around.

Combining your product or service with a memorable customer experience is a critical factor for both customer retention and the ongoing growth of your business.

With 73% of customers highlighting the quality of CX on offer as a determining factor in their purchase decisions - and 80% of companies who focus on customer experience noting an increase in revenue as a result - can you afford to miss out?

In this article, we’ve outlined 4 ways you can use a CRM - like SuperOffice - to improve your customer experience, including:

• Create personalized experiences - to help your customers feel their needs are being met.
• Make data-driven decisions - use integrations to build a full 360° view of your customers.
• Leverage AI & Automation - to enhance the experience by making it faster and smoother.
• Capture relevant information - giving you the data you need to better help your customers.

On average, 5.7X more revenue is created by companies who focus on delivering a superior experience for their customers - with individual customers going on to spend 140% more than they otherwise would as a result.

So, if you’ve not already thought about how you can use a CRM to improve the experience you offer your customers - it’s now time to take action and put CX at the centre of your strategy moving forward.

Improve the Customer Experience with SuperOffice

SuperOffice is an award-winning CRM and customer service platform that gives you all the tools you need to gain new business and deliver an exceptional customer experience.

Because we know how powerful a great customer experience is for your business, we’ve built customer experience features at the heart of the product, including:

• The ability to create personalized marketing, sales, and service experiences
• Smart data integration options to help you make data-driven decisions
• AI & Automation baked-in to help you take your CX to the next level
• Build your own customizable forms that your customers actually want to fill in

Using SuperOffice as a unified CRM and Service platform helps you to deliver against revenue and retention goals - while ensuring a ‘best in class’ experience for your customers across marketing, sales, and service.