Category Archives: Contact Relationship Management

Why Use a CRM Product? How High-Quality CRM Software Will Benefit Your Company

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High-quality CRM software assists you with cultivating and maintaining strong customer relationships.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) can contribute significantly to your company’s success. When you develop the best strategies and deploy the best tools to strengthen your relationship with existing and potential customers, your company enjoys important benefits.

High-quality CRM software assists you with cultivating and maintaining strong customer relationships. Why use a CRM product? In the long-run, it can save you money and improve profits by attracting more customers, increasing customer retention, and allowing your employees to work more efficiently.

How does it give you these benefits?

1) It keeps you organized and better informed

CRM software integrates customer information from a wide variety of sources, including email, social media, and in-store and online purchases. All of this information is kept centralized and updated, with a record of your interactions with each customer, including calls you’ve made and emails you’ve sent.

You can also keep track of customers’ feedback, including complaints about your products or services. All of this information, gathered in one place, gives you an important overview of your relationship with customers. It provides you with insights for how to keep reaching out to them, meeting or exceeding their expectations and addressing their concerns.

2) It contributes to a more meaningful relationship with customers and clients

Because your CRM product keeps track of customer information, you can use it to help make your interactions with customers more personal and meaningful to them. You can remember their preferences, interests, personal characteristics, and purchasing habits. You’ll be in a better position to understand when they expect to hear from you and when they’ll next need one of your services or products. You’ll also have greater insight into the types of qualities or information that will convince them to make a purchase.

3) It helps make your response to customers more timely and prompt

With CRM software, you can consistently keep track of when you need to contact your customers. You can prioritize the calls and emails you send out based on impending deadlines, the urgency of your customers’ needs, the stage of the sales cycle, and any other factors you consider important. You’re more likely to stay in touch with customers, follow up with them appropriately, and not leave them hanging when they need to hear back from you.

4) It allows you to work with flexibility and efficiency

With high-quality CRM software, you can access the relevant customer information from any device and location. Whether you’re at home, in the office, or on the road, you have access to everything you need.

Your CRM product can also integrate with other software and seamlessly become a part of your business operations. Different departments in your company can tap into it and utilize its insights. Not just your sales and marketing departments but also, for example, your IT personnel looking for feedback that will help them improve your company’s website. Or your customer service department evaluating patterns of problems that lead to customers leaving your company for competitors.

Furthermore, CRM software can accommodate your company’s growth. It can encompass a growing number of customers and clients, and new sources of information about them. You can also customize the software to best serve your company’s needs.

Making your CRM product an important part of your company’s success

Ultimately, your CRM product will be part of a general approach at your company that emphasizes a stronger relationship with customers and positive customer experiences.

In November 2015, Consumer Reports published a survey on poor customer service interactions, with many consumers complaining about a lack of a response, irrelevant sales pitches, and rudeness. These kinds of complaints aren’t limited to customer service representatives. Customers and clients also get turned off by similar behaviors from sales representatives and marketers. If your company comes across as tone-deaf, neglectful or belligerent, you’re much more likely to lose customers.

Your CRM software can give you the resources and tools to reach out to customers in a favorable way and remain responsive to their needs. Don’t hesitate to contact us for assistance with installing and customizing high-quality CRM software. Your CRM product can significantly improve your sales and your customers’ satisfaction.

Contact Management After the Fact: How Small Businesses Can Keep Their Contacts Clean After ACT! Contact Management Software Integration

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Managing your business's contacts is key to turning leads into customers.

Managing your business’s contacts is key to turning leads into customers.

Developing an effective contact management is crucial for any small business, potentially making the difference between a lead becoming a customer and a customer who walks to a competitor. That’s why following best practices when moving your contacts to a new CRM is absolutely crucial.

But the worst thing you could do to your small business success is think of contact management as a one-time ordeal that is done once you’ve fully implemented your CRM. While customer relationship management software is undoubtedly helpful in managing your contacts for you, your strategy must continue in order to allow you to manage contacts as well as possible. Here are 3 ways you can optimize your processes after moving to ACT! contact management software.

1) Keep a Dynamic Contact List

One of the major benefits you will enjoy from Act! is the fact that your contacts are not managed on a static list. Depending on their interactions with your brand, their profile will grow, giving you a fuller picture on just who they are – and how you can convince them to become customers or repeat customers.

But of course, even the best CRM has its limits: it can not record interactions dynamically that happen offline. You may interact with your customers on the phone or face-to-face, and both are important interactions that help inform you about just who your contacts truly are. When these offline interactions happen, you should create manual entries in your contact files to ensure that a salesperson looking at the profile gets the full picture.

2) Clean Out As Needed 

Naturally, not all of your leads will become customers, and not all of your customers will give you business throughout their lifetime. So instead of wasting efforts trying to reach or interact with contacts who have “jumped off,” you should establish regular contact cleanings in which you sort out those contacts that aren’t worth reaching again.

Act! does some of the work for you. For example, some recipients of your email messages may simply choose to unsubscribe, and your software can ensure that they’re automatically excluded from future email communications. But are your unsusbscribes still getting phone calls or direct mail from you? If so, you may want to take them out of your contact lists altogether, or keep a master “do not contact” list.

3) Establish a Contact Quality Score

As we mention above, not all leads are created equal. Some will be more likely to become customers than others, and you can predict their likelihood to buy based on the number of interactions with your company.

It makes perfect sense: a lead who regularly clicks on or even responds to emails will be more likely to become a customer than one who may have filled out a form on your website once, but has never interacted with you since. That’s why Act! ‘s E-Marketing system can pick up and assign varying scores to leads based on these interactions, allowing your sales team to stop wasting time and only approach those leads who are most likely to convert to customers.

Such a lead scoring system can be time-consuming to set up, and requires continuous adjustment for maximum effectiveness. But done correctly, it is also an incredible contact management tool that helps you efficiently direct your sales efforts and maximize your ROI.

Contact Management can take some work, but the results will speak for themselves. And it certainly doesn’t hurt to have a tool that helps you maximize your efforts! That’s what Act! can do for you, so you can focus on the most important part: increasing your business by attracting, converting and delighting your leads. For more information on how the software can help with your contact management, contact us!

Using ACT! Contact Management Software to Create a Winning Loyalty Program

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ACT! Contact Management Software helps you to monitor and foster customer loyalty.

ACT! Contact Management Software helps you to monitor and foster customer loyalty.

Small business owners often struggle with the idea of how to design a loyalty program that really works to increase revenue and keep customers coming back for more. Unlike their larger competitors, many small businesses lack the resources to undertake a major customer loyalty program initiative.

Can ACT! Contact Management Software help with loyalty programs? The answer is a resounding “yes”. Here are a few things to consider when designing a loyalty program:

1) Define your loyalty program goals.

Sounds simple, right? You may be thinking that the main goal of a loyalty program is simply keeping customers. However, it is essential to drill more deeply. For instance, goals of your loyalty program might be to motivate additional spending by existing customers, to expand the existing relationship between your company and your customers, or to encourage upgrades or cross-sells. Each of these objectives would dictate a change in the basic structure of your loyalty program. So, to craft a cohesive strategy, you must prioritize your goals. Your ACT!CRM will help you to do this by providing valuable data about your customers and what they are looking for in terms of rewards or incentives.

2) Know When to Hold and When to Fold

The simple truth is that not all customers are created equal. ACT! CRM software allows you to see which customers are worth an extra investment. Realistically speaking, you will always have some once-and-done customers who purchase your product or service and never return for more. CRM helps you prioritize your customers according to their level of engagement with your company.

Armed with that analysis, you can craft your loyalty program to specifically target the customers most likely to spend again. These paying customers are the ones you want participating in your loyalty programs.

The concept of discarding potential customers may seem foreign, as standard marketing practice is to work a lead until there is no hope of engagement left. But remember this: loyalty programs cost money. And money spent to lure a customer unlikely to become loyal is akin to money squandered away. There is a fine line between reclaiming a straying customer and discarding a losing investment. The trick is to define that line, and understand when not to cross it.

Your CRM software can help you to do this successfully by segmenting your customer base into several categories like:

  • the once-and-done customer
  • the casual friend of your business
  • the brand loyalist
  • the brand advocate

Obviously, your loyalty program must cater to the brand loyalists and advocates. But it is also important to woo the casual friend of your business. With appropriate lead nurturing accomplished with the use of your CRM software, you can turn a casual friend into a loyalist.

3) Monitor Costs in Multiple Ways

When considering your loyalty program design, you must carefully count the cost of each component. For instance, if your loyalty program is based on discounts, at what point are the profits from loyalty program participants likely to be less than the costs of administering the program? CRM is not a crystal ball, and cannot predict outcomes exactly. However, the understanding you gain about your customers through an effective CRM solution will help you to make some solid assumptions and find a loyalty program that balances risks and rewards appropriately.

4) Have a Good Exit Strategy

As with any business initiative, loyalty programs carry their own particular brand of risk. Appropriately measuring the success of your loyalty program over time with metrics captured by your CRM software is essential to the effectiveness of the program itself and the profitability of your business as a whole.

Knowing that your loyalty program may one day outlast its usefulness as a tool to drive profitability, it is wise to build into your initial loyalty program blueprint an appropriate exit strategy. Here are some components of a well-designed exit strategy:

  • Build a defined expiration date into your program from the very beginning. This keeps customer expectation in line with reality. If your program is wildly successful and profitable for your business, you can always extend the program deadlines with an upbeat “Good News” email campaign.
  • In the event you decide to stick to your original program deadline, be sure to give your loyalty program participants adequate time to use their points, rewards, or discounts before program termination. This is another appropriate time to use your CRM automation features to send out a targeted email with informative content to your customers.
  • Craft any exit communication in the best, most diplomatic way possible to avoid alienating loyal customers. Maintain a steady stream of upbeat, informative content to ease the transition. Utilize your CRM analytic functionality to capture and contain customer reaction.

Following these tips, you can craft a winning loyalty program utilizing the full potential of ACT! CRM software. If you would like to know more about how ACT! CRM can work for your business, please  contact us. We will help you get started with a 30-day free trial today.

5 Advantages of Web Based ACT! Contact Management Software

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Although many in-house deployments have mobile apps as well, the universal access of web-based contact manager deployment creates a seamless mobile operating environment

Although many in-house deployments have mobile apps as well, the universal access of web-based contact manager deployment creates a seamless mobile operating environment.

As businesses integrate sales management tools with business management, accounting and more, ACT! Contact Management Software is a valuable tool for businesses wanting to integrate their entire business systems or just starting out. Since contacts are made in person, online, and via phone at any time of the day, your contact management system needs to be robust enough to manage the entirety of your business contacts and communication while scalable enough to meet your needs both today and in the future.

Although there are many reasons businesses use both web and in-house based contact managers, here are 5 advantages a web based contact manager may provide to your business.

  1. Security – Web based software is stored and deployed on servers in datacenters with certain levels of redundancy, security and telecommunication access required for each datacenters. These standards are often higher than those growing businesses can afford on site. With your information securely hosted in your contact manager’s datacenter, your sales team does not have to carry a database on their phones, laptops and other hardware accessible to anyone who uses them. This prevents a major data breach caused by one of your employees losing a laptop or mobile phone.
  2. Access – Whether it is via a browser based interface or delivery to an app from your cloud based deployment of your contact manager, web based access gives users access no matter their location. As long as employees and management can access an internet connection they can access their needed information and communication management tools. A web based contact manager is accessible wherever you have web access. This is essential to growing your business because employees do not have to wait until getting home to enter contact information into your contact managment system after meeting a new prospect.
  3. Mobile Access – From entering a prospects contact information into your web based contact manager via mobile access the moment they meet them to making calls directly from your contact management system, mobile access empowers employees to create the best sales system possible. Although many in-house deployments have mobile apps as well, the universal access of web-based contact manager deployment creates a seamless mobile operating environment.
  4. Streamline Social Media Management – With a web-based contact manager, your social media monitoring and presence is integrated in your contact management system all the time. Find prospects social media profiles and enter relevant information into the system.
  5. Synchronize with Other Web-Based Software – Google Apps, Microsoft Outlook and other business management systems are all available via cloud deployments. These will be easily integrated into your web based contact manager to create a seamless customer service and business management tool kit.

A web based contact management system still has all the tools that have made traditional CRM a valuable software industry and incorporated contact management tools into many other software systems. These include automation, work planning and scheduling and integration with other systems.

Use your web based contact management system to integrate the same automation procedures used in traditional software systems. This includes sending automatic emails out to customers upon an action or event happening. For example, if a customer opens an email, clicks a link to a product landing page on your site and they receive an email automatically thanking them for visiting and offering them addition discounts as an incentive to keep coming back to your website and using your business.

Since so much of sales and customer service is dependent upon proper planning and scheduling, any proper contact management system will enable scheduling and planning. Whether web based or traditional, look for integration with your current planning software like Google Calendar.

With so many ways to use web based contact management, and a low entry price point to using the software, web based contact management systems just make sense. For more information about contact management systems or to start your free trial, please contact us today.