Watch the webinar to hear the full set of product updates, or get a summary of Insightly’s new features below.

Watch the webinar

What’s new with Insightly AppConnect?

AppConnect is an integration automation platform that allows you to connect Insightly and its data to all the other software applications you use to get work done every day. Out of the box, it includes over 500 pre-built connectors to applications across HR, Finance, IT, Sales, Marketing, Productivity, and Data storage.

Updates to Insightly AppConnect:

• Added new Marketing, Data Storage, Database Programming Language Connectors
• No usage or record limits or restrictions on data transfers with AppConnect
• New bulk action to run an AppConnect integrations across multiple records
• It’s now much easier to set lookup field values in a recipe in AppConnect

What’s new with Insightly Service?

In September of 2021, Insightly Service was added to the platform. It’s a powerful, yet easy-to-use service and support application that’s built natively within Insightly, connecting seamlessly with all the applications you use today to run your business. Since then, we added a new mobile application for both Apple and Android users, while also updating three key areas of the Service product:

• Knowledge Base 
• Ticketing Management
• Customer Portal 

Knowledge Management Improvements

Insightly’s Knowledge Base is a convenient reference designed to save time and resources for customers. It’s also a great source of all documentation that teams need when learning about the product.

Updates to the Service Knowledge Base within Insightly Service:

• Reorganize articles in bulk
• New Insightly API endpoints for knowledge article management
• Generate a table of contents in an article automatically from a new editor button
• Archive knowledge articles in bulk from within list views
• Last published date field to article lists and details
• New reports available for knowledge base articles

Ticketing Management improvements

Ticketing is at the core of a team’s ability to track, respond to, and manage customer service requests and we have a significant number of feature updates to report here as well.

Updates to ticketing management within Insightly Service:

• New mobile and tablet applications
• New API endpoint for Insightly Service
• @ mention other agents within a ticket comment
• Ability to see when other agents are viewing or responding to a ticket
• Automated customer satisfaction surveys
• Additional capabilities around ticketing merging
• Improvements to processing incoming emails 
• Auto-hiding of quoted reply text in the ticket view 
• Improved visibility of customer service tickets

Customer Portal improvements

Another Insightly Service update is to our community management experience. You can use the customer portal to organize, manage, and order community content like topics and posts, moderate user comments, flag posts and comments as spam, or edit and clean up user-posted content.

Updates to the Customer Portal within Insightly Service:

• New capabilities for moderating, editing, and approving community posts and comments
• Insightly now monitors and auto-flags offensive and spam user-generated content using AI to save time
• Ticket forms in portals can now be completely  customized including custom fields
• New ability to customize 404 pages

What’s new with Insightly Marketing?

Check out these updates to the behavioral analysis and segmentation functionality of Insightly Marketing.

Segmentation improvements

Segmenting your customer base and targeting a subset of people with exactly the right communications or journey is now easier than ever in Insightly Marketing with powerful new capabilities. Users can now segment and filter prospect’s static and dynamic lists by activities including:

• Emails sent
• Journeys completed
• Forms filled
• Web pages viewed
• Links clicked
• Video’s viewed
• Emails opened

Email system improvements

Email systems often include security software that opens and scans every incoming email for malicious content and scams. Those automated bot email opens and clicks can cause issues for marketers in journeys and email analytics. 

Insightly Marketing now includes newly added AI-based capabilities to detect and filter out these automated bot clicks and phantom opens so marketing journeys that branch off email opens or clicks work reliably, lead scoring is accurate, and email engagement analytics are correct.

What’s new with Insightly CRM?

The Insightly team has also been working on ways to not just improve each product’s functionality, but also the integration between products. In the past 6 months, we’ve invested heavily in the integration between Insightly Marketing and Insightly CRM to make it more seamless.

New Cross-Object List Filtering Capabilities

Easily combine Marketing data and CRM data together in the Insightly platform with new capabilities in list filtering:

• Filter CRM contact and organization lists using filter criteria from Insightly Marketing Prospects 
• Filter Leads in Insightly CRM by using filter criteria from Insightly Marketing Prospects
• Filter opportunities by the linked organization fields

New Quotation Productivity Improvements

Easily manage, search, and generate quotes with these updates to the quoting experience within Insightly CRM:

• You can now use the same list filtering and search functionality in the standard list views to quote products, including the ability to filter by multiple fields and search within a list
• Added support for custom fields on quote products and quote line items, and in our API
• Now configure fields displayed in modals for managing quote products & quote templates
• New capability to quickly clone a quote
• Now one click to email linked contacts in opportunities, projects and organizations

What’s new with the Insightly platform?

Rather than just affecting one application, there are several improvements that will affect the entire Insightly platform:

• Configure Insightly to display a fixed number of  columns of data in any details view
• New improvements to email notifications after  bulk updating records
• Search dashboard lists to find the right dashboard & a new setting to lock all dashboard cards in position
• Automatically log back into the last app used
• New detailed login history of every user login for security purposes
• Audit logging now includes a history of changes to made to related links

If you’d like more information about these new features and how you can leverage them within your current Insightly plan, reach out to your Customer Success Manager. 

Looking to upgrade your plan to include Insightly Marketing, AppConnect, or Service? Request a demo.

Request a demo

The post Q2–2022: Product updates to Insightly AppConnect, Service, Marketing, and CRM appeared first on Insightly.

As technology converges and start-ups grow, businesses and consumers have more choices than ever. Smart executives know that the customer experience is what is going to win in today’s crowded marketplace. 

But you’ve got this, right? You’ve mapped the customer journey and you’ve analyzed the customer experience (CX). Customer support is the pride and joy of your company. Your execs think that customers are thrilled with your service. 

But are they?

According to a recent survey commissioned by Insightly and conducted by Zogby Analytics, there is a disconnect between what consumers say and what companies believe. 

Only 6% of consumers say a company’s customer support always exceeds expectations but 35% of business decision makers believe that their company always exceeds customers’ expectations.

Ouch.

There’s a CX disconnect  

Maybe your CX team isn’t killing it? Check out these stats:

About a third of Americans (31%) would rather wait in line at the DMV than try to resolve an issue with a company or service. They would also learn a TikTok dance with their kid (18%), get a tooth pulled (14%), or stay with their in-laws for a month (10%).

Why would anyone choose these awful alternatives to simply placing a call with customer service? According to the study, they say they fear being ignored (30%), having to repeat oneself to multiple departments (30%) and length of time to get the issue identified (27%).

How does your customer support process work? Would your customers ever feel ignored during the process, get stuck in ‘a phone tree of frustration,’ or spend an unreasonable amount of time on the phone? 

When was the last time you tested it? Listened to calls? Sent in a social media message to see the response?

It’s always a good time to examine your processes and look for incremental improvements. 

Appreciating your customer support team

Don’t ever underestimate what it takes to answer support calls. You need a deep understanding of your product and your customers, plus a whole lot of empathy. These team members start each day knowing that every time they pick up a call, they may be dealing with an irate person. 

Business decision makers on the same Insightly survey don’t seem to have the personality to perform the functions that their support teams do. 

For example, 44 percent of business decision makers surveyed said they’d rather enter data in a spreadsheet than deal with a call from an angry customer, while three in 10 said they would do almost anything other than take an angry call, like sit on an 8-hour Zoom call (13%) or sit next to a crying baby on a cross-country flight (15%).

How do we show this team how awesome they truly are? First off, put National Customer Service Week on your calendar. It’s typically the first week in October. Use this as an opportunity to recognize your team’s hard work. But don’t wait for a special occasion; check in on the team and ensure they have the leadership, tools, and bandwidth to make every engagement a successful one. 

CX shows up on the bottom line

There is good news here, too. Unlike the external threats to your business like emerging competitors, market forces, economic downturns and the like, customer experience is something you fully control.

Data from the same study reveals just how powerful this can be.

When customers are unhappy, businesses worry that they will complain to customer service (23%), complain on social media (56%) or, even worse, choose a different provider (21%).

However, when happy, American consumers are most likely to tell all their friends (27%), tell the company (25%), write a comment on review sites (23%) and post about it on social media (15%).

These actions should sound familiar since they are all characteristics of brand advocates. According to Entrepreneur.com, brand advocates are super fans and brand loyalists who engage with the brand because they truly love it and will take action if asked.

If you reframe calls and outreach to customer service as an opportunity to create brand advocates, you start a cycle that fills the top of your funnel with new leads. 

Feed the top of the funnel with successful CX

After seeing these statistics, what are some action steps that leaders like you can take today? 

• Examine closed tickets. Don’t just read them. Look at the time stamps. Look at the length of the calls. Listen to the calls if possible. How can each interaction be studied and improved the next time?
• Reframe your mindset on support. Every time the phone rings or an email is submitted is an opportunity to create a positive experience and produce a brand advocate. Think about the things that people said they would rather do than talk to you (e.g. learning a TikTok dance), and then elevate their experience by delighting them.
• Some people will never be happy. Ensure you have ‘no blame culture’ from the top. Frame those negative customer interactions as learning experiences for the team without blaming team members, product, sales, etc.
• Encourage leadership to personally call random customers regularly and check-in to see how they are doing. They could potentially intercept a problem before it snowballs, but they will also gain an understanding of what’s going on daily on the front lines.

Manage relationships with Insightly Service

Your customer service team needs a powerful tool to meet the needs of your customer base. Wouldn’t it be ideal if your tool for customer service was part of the same suite of products as your CRM and marketing automation platform? So the sales, marketing and customer service teams are aligned on a single, powerful platform?

Built on Insightly’s platform, Insightly Service is a customer service and support ticketing product designed to work seamlessly across the business applications that companies are already using. With Insightly Service, critical data is shared across departments and in real-time, so that all customer-facing teams are aligned and empowered to have more relevant conversations that drive customer satisfaction and success.  

Insightly Service can be bundled with the entire Insightly suite of customer relationship management applications and is also available for purchase as a standalone customer service and support product. 

Get a demo of Insightly Service today.

The post CX survey shows companies overestimate customer support satisfaction appeared first on Insightly.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) implementation is an essential ingredient for a successful CRM project. Our team has helped more than 25,000 businesses successfully implement their CRM system to meet their unique business needs, and we’ve done so with companies of all sizes, across many industries. 

Here is the CRM implementation process developed over years of onboarding new customers. Read on and see how you can optimize it for the best CRM rollout at your company.

Why you need a CRM Implementation Plan

Up to 69% of CRM projects fail because of poor implementation. If done incorrectly, your users will be frustrated or worse. A poor experience could lead to lost customer trust and even lost revenue as customers move away from your business solutions. 

A successful implementation of your CRM makes all the difference in user adoption, customer data integrity, and, ultimately, ROI and your bottom line. It ensures your team will be productive and happy with your system. It also ensures your new CRM software will have enhanced functionality and contribute to customer retention. 

13 Steps To Successful CRM Software Implementation

Whether you run a small business, are heading a start-up, or planning a new CRM system for a large company, your CRM implementation strategy matters. 

Not only will it streamline your sales process and make life easier for different end-users on your team (especially your sales reps), but the right CRM will improve customer satisfaction and enhance workflow for salespeople and managers alike. 

Despite the compelling reasons to switch, organizations continually find themselves settling for what’s familiar. The simple truth is that CRMs can feel risky and costly at first glance – which means staying put feels like a safer choice than taking this leap into uncertainty. 

Here are the 10 steps Insightly takes with every client to maintain our unbeatable customer satisfaction track record. 

1. Gather Your CRM Implementation Team

Before starting the process, you’ll need two key elements to build your team: a CRM owner or sponsor and a CRM implementation team that includes cross-functional specialists and advocates. 

Choose an owner

By choosing an owner, you not only gain a crucial resource to help communicate business needs throughout the organization, but you also get someone committed to its success. Shared ownership for multifaceted CRM implementations can result in no ownership at all, leading to poor and ineffective implementations.

Structure your team

Below is a typical CRM implementation team with cross-functional specialists and advocates.

• Owner: This person will guide and offer organizational perspective and own its success.
• Project Manager: This person will act as the leader throughout the CRM planning process. 
• Application Developer: Their role will be to oversee system customization. 
• Application Analyst: Responsibilities include data cleansing and migration. 
• QA Test Engineer: This person will lead testing efforts. 

Involve stakeholders and future users

Additionally, you’ll need to gather a sampling of representatives from all essential user groups to ensure everyone’s voice is heard. 

• Sales Managers
• Sales Team
• Delivery Managers
• Marketing Managers
• Marketing Team 
• Customer Service Reps 
• Project Managers 

As you gather your team, it’s crucial to think about each member’s role within the CRM implementation project. They are there to help your company meet the goals and KPIs set when you decided to choose a CRM system. 

Pick team members who believe in CRM, can get others on board, and will work to make it a success. 

2. Benchmark your current CRM performance

What are you currently using for a CRM or in place of a CRM (e.g. spreadsheets) Take some time to document what is working with your current system and where there are gaps. Many of these may be the exact reason you started looking for a new system. This data will come in handy post-implementation as a way to see if the major pain points were resolved with your new system. 

3. Assess Your Needs And Define Your Goals/KPIs

The next step is to figure out what solutions your CRM technology will offer your company. Identify goals you want to achieve by outlining how you expect your team to use the CRM system. 

After you run a CRM needs assessment, you are ready to set goals. Your goals for the new system need to include tangible, specific results that are measurable by your business performance within a particular time frame. Established goals will help you identify an actionable plan. 

How to define your CRM goals

Take a look at some examples of measurable goals you can use to design your own. 

Consider CRM pricing at this stage since it may expand or contract the providers you can consider. For instance, Salesforce is a high-priced CRM for the Fortune 500. Microsoft Dynamics is as well. Are those in your price range? Likely not. Does your organization have an ERP? Do you have an ecommerce platform? These considerations may limit the pool of CRMs from which your team can choose. A tool like HubSpot may be appealing, but keep in mind that it was a marketing automation platform first, so it’s CRM function isn’t its strength. Plus, it’s on the pricer side as well. Should it be considered?

When you create goals from your company’s unique needs, you will improve your CRM implementation plan by designing the most useful CRM solution. 

4. Collect And Prepare Your Data

Data management is a big headache that is often overlooked during the CRM implementation process. If not done correctly, it can result in higher implementation costs. Manipulating data once it’s been imported is challenging because the new CRM will use it in a new way. With this in mind, you’ll want to strive to get it right the first time.

Collect existing customer data

It’s important to determine ahead of time what customer data needs to be brought over to the new CRM system and where it is currently located. Your team will also need to identify how they will use it in the new CRM. While bringing over everything may sound like a good idea, you don’t want to clog up your new system with non-actionable data. Be selective.

Build your data model

Once you’ve decided what will be migrated, build a model and see how that data maps from your old system to your new system. Take time and put a lot of detail in this step. It will save you many questions down the road.

Choose the right CRM fields

Your team can transfer company, contact, and contract data from your existing business systems by simply using a CSV file generated through a spreadsheet. Ensure that the data goes into the right fields using the model you set up in the previous step. If custom fields are in order, now is a great time to create and populate them.

Most CRMs have a tool that will automate the import process. Since every solution handles data migration differently, you’ll need to evaluate what is required from the get-go. This will depend on your CRM vendor and can impact your implementation costs drastically. Insightly makes it easy to cleanse your data and migrate all of your data. 

5. Setup Your CRM Properly

Your new system is shiny and clean…yay! You’ve determined how to load your data so it’s all in the right place. Now it’s time to think through the administrative functions. Who needs access to what? You want to provide as much information as possible to users without jeopardizing security and opening yourself up to issues with personally identifiable information (PII). Giving someone too much access is typically worse than giving someone not enough access, so err on the side of caution here.

6. Connect Your CRM Integrations

The beauty of CRM integration is that you connect apps you already use into the new technology, allowing your team to access unified data from a singular platform. It saves time and makes your team feel more interconnected. 

You’ll also want to integrate any program known to enhance the customer experience and automate business processes.

Here are some of the most popular integrations: 

• Communication Platforms
• Accounting Packages 
• Social Media Management Tools 
• Lead Generation Programs 
• Email Applications and Automation Programs 
• Analytics Tools 
• Live Chat Programs 
• Project Management Tools 
• Help Desk Applications 

The downside of integrations is that, with some systems, they can be complex and expensive. For example, legacy CRMs like Salesforce typically require you hire an integration partner or use your dedicated Salesforce team to create an integration. Newer, modern CRMs make integrations significantly easier.

Insightly has endless integration possibilities that are low-code/no code via AppConnect. AppConnect offers customized integration that will align all of your teams and processes to eliminate the need for time-consuming manual tasks. This will allow you to close deals at a faster pace. 

7. Import And Verify Your CRM Data

You’re getting closer to success with your new CRM system. You’ve done the prep work above to model out and plan your data migration. You’ve isolated the data that will be brought over. Now, it’s time for one last cleansing session. 

Clean up your CRM data

It’s vital to cleanse your data before transitioning to a CRM platform. You know the types of data you want to bring and the data you want to leave, but within the data you want to bring, you should be critical. Your team should review it to ensure unnecessary data is removed and data that you will transfer is formatted properly. This last cleansing step will ensure your new system is top notch. 

It’s time!  Now it’s time to make the move; it’s time to import it to your new CRM system. 

Once the transition is complete, verify that the data has been imported successfully by testing a few processes against the old system. This will make the rest of the implementation process much smoother since you can identify and fix any issues before you get too far into the project.

8. Test Your CRM Implementation 

As you near the end of your implementation process, you’ll need to test your CRM software to verify it’s fully functional and works according to the requirements of your business needs. 

As you test, you’ll see how each component works, and evaluate customer touch points connected to the CRM to ensure they work properly and will not impede the customer experience. 

Here are the key elements you need to test:

• Contacts: Ensure all data fields assigned are fillable and recognizable. 
• Pipeline Tracking: Check management systems to see if deal columns match the sales process. 
• Automated Tasks: Look to see if triggers for automated tasks work correctly. 
• Email Capture: Email exchanges should be connected to the proper contact, and dual email sync works as it should. 
• Website Forms: Ensure all forms display correctly, all present fields are fillable, and a completed form is routed to the proper channels. 
• Migrated Data: Double check that all imported records match the appropriate fields and no duplicate data exists. 
• Integrations: Review all of your company’s integrated apps to ensure they are correctly connected. 

No matter your level of experience, CRMs are typically simple to set up and maintain. Insightly offers support for all aspects of your new CRM features to ensure a smooth integration. 

9. Onboard And Train Your First CRM Users 

Now that you’ve tested your new CRM and rolled out all components, it’s time to offer CRM training to your first users. While onboarding for all new tech is an important step, the onboarding for a CRM is likely the most critical process your business will face.  If this process doesn’t go well, the CRM will be useless and the implementation will likely fail.

How to onboard your first CRM users

Starting with a beta group is a good approach. Identify this group and put them through your planned onboarding training sessions. Then, sit back and listen. What went well? What areas are they struggling in? What were the common questions? Use this intel to bolster your training program before rolling it out to all teams.

When showing people how the system works, follow a hybried approach: allow them to watch a live demonstration, followed by some hands-on training. 

Be sure to collect your team’s feedback to discover critical insights on improving the system and making it work for your company. This will minimize roadblocks and system issues down the road. 

10. Built the right CRM dashboards and reports

Dashboards are data visualizations used to discover insights and chart progress towards your goals. You want to have your CRM create dashboards and reports to share among your team, with other team members and with leadership for a top-level view of what’s going on in the organization. As users are onboarded, ask them what types of dashboards they need and find valuable. Follow-up to ensure they are being used. For example, a CRM dashboard could include data on new leads, what’s in the pipeline, team KPIs, and recent activities and and upcoming events and activities.

11. Actively Look For Bottlenecks And Improvement Opportunities

Even those most dynamic implementation processes can yield trouble spots and areas that need improvement. This typically happens when users input workloads too quickly for a team to handle. They create costly delays for your company and cause issues with team members who may already be skeptical of the new CRM. 

Common CRM bottlenecks

Where is information being held up? Examine these areas and look for ways to make improvements. For example, there is a bottleneck in the change from lead to opportunity. Do you need to add an additional step or two in that area to clarify and better communicate the state of the lead?

Build a feedback loop with your users

Take the time to keep a close eye on your CRM to identify these bottlenecks in the sales process, as well as areas that you can improve upon. Keep asking users for their input and make improvements that make sense for your unique situation. This could take many forms, like sending an email, hosting a regular meeting, creating a Slack channel for suggestions, and more. 

Iterate often

Re-evaluate requirements and improvements in your CRM. Choose a cadence and stick to it. For instance, you may plan to make changes and updates ones per month, every other month, or every quarter. This lets the team know that you are committed to responding to their needs and that the system is an ever-evolving part of your organization.

12. Scale Your CRM Implementation as You Grow

A successfully implemented CRM solves your immediate needs, but new needs always arise. Therefore, try not to see the implementation as being “done.” Instead, view it as a continuous effort to evolve and align your current state to the ever-changing marketplace. 

Maintain your growth and business goals as the driver for flexible and scalable enhancements. Gather stakeholders and power users often to identify, update, and prioritize your CRM roadmap. By doing this, administrators can ensure an implementation grows to meet any needs or challenges as they evolve. 

Scale Your CRM Implementation

The scalability of your CRM determines how easily it will be to use your CRM software with a much larger or smaller group of users and locations. 

The chances are that you onboarded critical members of your company whose buy-in you needed to make the CRM a success. Now it’s time to scale your CRM software for the entire team. 

Regular meetings can help your team scale CRM implementations. These meetings allow teams to prioritize features so system administrators can make changes in real-time. This approach offers flexibility and scalability for your team.

13. Measure User Adoption And Implementation Success

You’ll need a customized dashboard that pulls out critical data to target and track consistently to best measure implementation success. 

Pay close attention to critical metrics and whether or not your CRM is meeting the goals you initially set at the start of the implementation process. Here are some key metrics Insightly uses to evaluate the success of our CRM implementation projects. 

Quality of Inputs: An audit to assess whether the quality of all system inputs will be beneficial. It’s best to check inputs that have the most significant possible quality variable. 

• Business Metrics: It’s a good idea to look at broad business metrics and see if you can find connections to your new CRM software. 
• Record Updates: Check to see if users engaging with the CRM are updating records as expected. 
• System Activity: Review the number of actions completed by a specific user in the system. This high-level check will see which users are logging in and actively engaging with the system. 

By evaluating user engagement and the overall implementation process, you can be more confident that the new CRM adds value to your company. 

CRM Implementations Made Easier with Insightly

Implementing CRMs are not simple one-and-done initiatives. While most CRM systems can technically work as purchased, to maximize your investment, you need to make sure that the implementation, configuration, and Go Live phases have all been properly planned and deployed.  

The experts at Insightly are highly trained in integrating, testing, customizing, training, and gathering feedback on your CRM solution. They take the guesswork out of CRM implementation and free up your valuable time to focus on other business processes that need your attention. 

Test out the Insightly CRM free of charge with a free trial. Sign up today to see all the great features!

FAQs

How long does the CRM implementation process take?

The timeline varies depending on unique business and technology needs, though with Insightly CRM customers can begin to become productive and see benefits within 35-45 days. Whereas platform implementations take between 60-90 days. However, depending on the complexity and number of integrations needed, or the platform’s flexibility, the CRM implementation process can take several months.

Does my business need CRM and marketing automation? 

Yes, your business needs both CRM and marketing automation to effectively engage customers at all steps of their journey. Insightly Marketing is native to the CRM platform and enables your marketing and sales team to leverage the same view of customers and provide the best experience for customers.

The post CRM Implementation: Steal this proven process appeared first on Insightly.

Single customer view (SCV), also called a unified customer view, is the process of presenting a single, accurate record for each customer. SCVs allow cross-functional teams and organizations to use aggregated data to drive higher value business outcomes and provide high-quality customer experiences.

Single customer views are imperative for organizations looking to maintain a competitive edge and provide superior customer experiences. In many organizations today, customer data is stored across several different platforms, accessible by individual teams and access is limited or non-existent for many others. This decentralization and inaccessibility leads to missed opportunities, poor customer satisfaction, and lower value business outcomes. 

A 360-degree unified customer view often includes the following data:  

• CRM and customer data
• Behavioral data
• Marketing channel interactions
• Sales representatives’ interactions
• Support tickets
• Project status

Next, we’ll discuss what types of data you’ll want in your single customer view, and the six core benefits you’ll experience once you put yours in place.

What types of data should be in your SCV?

The single customer view is crucial for business success. Data can no longer be stored piecemeal in one platform or another and isolated from the rest of the organization. Instead, data must be shared and instantly accessible across your organization. Single customer views allow you to make critical business decisions with a full picture. The types of data that make the biggest impact are listed below.

Behavioral Data 

Single customer views aggregate a customer’s behavioral data, including website interactions, form submissions, and time on site data (among many other metrics) to allow marketers to make split-second decisions on their audiences’ preferences and buyer’s journey. This data is typically isolated to marketing. With a SCV, sales reps benefit when they know what content piece or pages a prospective customer viewed that prompted them to talk to sales. 

Sales Representatives’ Interactions

SCVs include the most important driver of revenue in a business: sales representatives’ interactions. Pre-sales follow-up and high-quality interactions with customers (driven by background information and superior customer intelligence) are some of the major reasons customers choose one brand over another.   

While most organizations believe they win or lose on price, it’s often service that is the bigger factor, according to recent research from DoubleCheck. In one of DoubleCheck’s recent new win/loss program client onboarding sessions with a midsize enterprise software vendor, the CMO stated, “We felt like the pre-sales support we received wasn’t great, so we didn’t think the solution was worth the extra price.” 

Flaws in pre-sales support can be a major reason C-suite execs or Product Managers often pass on one particular solution in favor of another. SCVs expose this interaction data to your entire organization to create a complete picture of how all teams share in the sales process. For instance, marketing and customer service can get better insight into the sales process when they see phone call frequency/notes, email chains, or in-person interactions (events or quick meetings) that the sales team conducts. Perhaps a customer success rep can better serve a client with a support question if he or she knows that the client is in talks with a sales rep about upselling to the next level of service on your platform.

Customer Service Representatives Interactions

The support tickets that customers submit give insight into how they are using your product or service.  Your technical support team can field hundreds of support tickets per day. Having customer service interaction data at the ready for all teams helps improve understanding across the organization when all teams can see the most common concerns coming in. 

For instance, if a sales team member is on an upsell call with a customer, it’s helpful for that person to know that the client has three open support tickets. Engineering may be interested in seeing what’s causing concern within the user base in real time. Marketing, the team most likely to be monitoring social channels, can benefit from knowing if there are issues with a feature that may come up in social posts.

Marketing Channel Interactions

The number of MarTech applications has risen astronomically in recent years. Chances are, your marketing team has a sizable MarTech stack with tons of valuable information on various platforms. 

Single customer views allow your organization to consolidate fragmented marketing channel interactions into actionable data. It is essential for marketers to clearly understand what is happening across social platforms, SEO tools, ad platforms, SMS tools, marketing automation platforms, and more.

With single customer views, marketers in your organization will no longer be required to waste time and effort logging into multiple platforms to monitor campaign data and conversions. SCVs simplify the work for data analysts by providing a holistic, easy-to-customize view of a customer’s journey across channels, providing a window into the customer’s behavior – tracking their journey from search, to clicks, and ultimately helping you better understand how, when, and why they purchase your product. Better yet, this data is shared across teams like sales and customer success for better communication.

6 Single Customer View Benefits

1. No more data duplication

SCVs eliminate the widespread issue of data duplication across your organization. When data is duplicated, there is a strong likelihood of errors.

2. A better understanding of every single customer

SCVs combine all of the random decentralized fragments of data collected across your organization and then build a true roadmap that clearly presents a holistic view of how your customers interact with your brand, make purchases, and interact with your customer service teams. SCVs allow you to:

• Instantly view each customer interaction and get up to speed on ticket statuses to avoid going into a conversation unprepared or ill-informed. 
• Avoid the frustration of working in standalone service applications.
• Access multiple data points in a single platform – communicate faster, deliver better experiences, and resolve customer issues faster.

3. Improved personalization opportunities

A 360-degree view allows customer service agents and marketers the ability to custom-tailor solutions and interactions as they track each and every touchpoint your customer has with your brand. 

• Understanding your customer’s behaviors allows your organization to build 1:1 relationships and rich, personalized experiences.
• Improved personalization increases brand credibility and enhanced authenticity.
• Better customer experience and more opportunities for customer engagement result from a deeper understanding of customer intent.

4. More efficient marketing campaigns

SCVs allow your team to improve targeting and reach customers at their decision point rather than dragging out marketing campaigns due to poor understanding of each segment’s customer journey. 

• Single customer views ensure better audience segmentation and improve campaign performance.
• Enriched data allows you to improve your ad spend and laser-target your marketing messages to ensure they reach the right audience at the right time.

5. Faster customer service inquiry resolutions

A 360-view of each customer enables you to empower your teams to quickly solve customer challenges.

• Mission-critical customer data is available to all your teams, in real time, empowering them to have more relevant conversations that drive customer satisfaction and success.
• Your team can close tickets and share information across your organization faster than ever.
• Understanding churn rates and churn risk tells you where and when to intervene, re-engaging customers throughout the renewal cycle.

6. A better user experience

Rich user experiences increase the likelihood of future purchases and ensure customer delight across all segments. Delivering world-class experiences will set you apart, drive growth, and improve your brand’s positioning as a leader in your industry. 

Get a 360 degree Unified Customer View in a Unified CRM

Your SCV can be a reality; choosing the right CRM is a first step. Insightly’s Account Plan feature is a great way to set the vision for your SCV. If you’re ready to choose your first CRM switch from your current platform, it’s time to check out Insightly, a unified CRM that combines sales, marketing, project management, and service into one platform to unify your teams. Plus, with Insightly AppConnect, you can build low-code or no-code integrations to connect Insightly with all of the other tools you use throughout your organization. 

Know your customers. Build stronger relationships and unify your fractured data with Insightly’s unified CRM. Schedule a free needs assessment and a demo today.

The post Single Customer View: What it is and why you need it appeared first on Insightly.

Engagement is a predictor of whether or not that customer will stay with you, and possibly even refer you, so it can be a leading metric for future revenue and growth.

So here’s how to use your CRM to track customer engagement and the appropriate Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your business size.

What is customer engagement?

Though a sale or a subscription is a landmark in a customer’s relationship with your company, it’s just the beginning. Engaged customers create emotional bonds with your brand, and can create a valuable feedback loop for product improvements. 

You can elect to add engaged customers to customer or member councils who can get early access to new products or services and provide candid feedback in both one-on-one and focus-group style programs. If you’re in software, your engaged customers can be the ultimate beta testing group. 

In the positive cases, engaged customers become brand champions who are willing to provide referrals, testimonials, and enthusiastic reviews. In the best cases, they become brand evangelists who regularly engage in a positive manner with your brand on social media, and may even speak on your behalf at events, effectively functioning as an extension of your marketing team. 

Why measure customer engagement?

While engagement is a major revenue predictor in recurring revenue businesses, all businesses can benefit from surfacing these metrics. No one will argue that engaged customers create lasting value for your company. Knowing you can count on positive references and referrals from clients will help you compete for more and bigger deals. While some of this will likely be qualitative in nature, there are tools and metrics available today that can quantify engagement and track it over time, giving you insights into past, present, and future performance.

Five customer engagement metrics and KPIs that matter

There are five top customer engagement metrics that matter to nearly all companies. Each is described below. If you are wondering which matters the most to your company in particular, read on. At the end of each KPI summary, you’ll see a list of which kinds of companies typically prioritize it.

Start-ups defining and implementing their Unique Selling Points (USPs) will track different KPIs than mid-market companies working to scale up, gain traction, and win market share. Massive corporations typically focus on metrics that reflect their dependence on established brand reputations. That said, these metrics surface at the top for nearly all organizations.

1. First-week engagement

Engagement is often at its peak at the start of a contract. Make the most of your customer’s initial enthusiasm with streamlined setups, progress tracking, and solid support.

In a 2021 study, Linköping University’s Gustav Fridell examined SaaS best practices. He found that reducing friction and monitoring progress increased first-week retention.

Consider guiding, tracking, and displaying your new user’s progress through the onboarding process. They are more likely to stick with your solution if they can visualize a successful customer journey, especially during their first crucial steps.

For example, these tips can improve the new customer experience and lower abandonment and unsubscribe rates in the software industry:

• Make your platform or tool intuitive and easy to learn.
• Offer fast page load speeds.
• Prioritize addressing bugs and glitches that emerge during onboarding steps.
• Demonstrate ‘quick wins’ and value early on.

No user experience is perfect. Inevitably, people will have some trouble adopting your products or services. When they reach out, you need to offer reliable customer service to promote customer retention. Invest in robust support and show new customers you care about their success. 

Chatbots can be a great tool when implemented thoughtfully, but nothing is better than interacting with a deeply-knowledgeable support person. Short term churn can be avoided by quickly showing value to your customer in the onboarding phase. You have to get it right.  

Best for: Mid-market companies, especially startups, should hyper-focus on frictionless onboarding, user journey tracking, and responsive, knowledgeable support. At a small scale, individual customer success equals corporate viability.

Large brands with solid reputations enjoy more initial customer enthusiasm than smaller organizations. Their positive legacy marketing efforts mean users are less likely to jump ship when frustrated.

2. User Activity

SaaS companies, mainly social media platforms, eCommerce brands, and game manufacturers, pay close attention to their Daily Active Users (DAU) and Monthly Active Users (MAU) metrics. However, DAUs and MAUs aren’t just about competing for market share. Together they create an early-warning system. 

Think of MAUs as benchmarks and DAUs as indicators. If you see a significant difference between your daily numbers and your monthly averages, something unfavorable is happening. DAU valleys or spikes could be your first signal of a major problem or win.

Best for: Companies of all sizes should compare DAUs to MAUs to stay ahead of news events and emerging trends. Small and medium-sized companies can track this metric to acknowledge marketing strategy milestones. However, MAUs are crucial for large companies to maximize their market share for bottom-line profitability.

3. Stickiness

You can use DAUs and MAUs to measure “stickiness.” This metric represents how happy people are with your product or service based on how frequently they are returning. It’s an effective way to predict how likely users are to stick with your brand.

Typically, stickiness equals Daily Active Users divided by Monthly Active Users.

Stickiness = DAU / MAU

However, you may want to consider alternative formulas that account for unique users. Unique users represent the number of visitors to your site. An increase in this metric shows your company and website are growing. 

Businesses often look to churn rate as a measure of stickiness, but keep in mind that churn is a lagging indicator that doesn’t allow you to be as proactive as the formula above. 

Best for: Stickiness matters most for startups that need to build momentum and raise brand awareness. 

Mid-market and large businesses also want to limit turnover, but they are typically better positioned to tolerate variations in customer engagement and have more varied marketing campaigns.

4. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

You’ve likely seen NPS in action even if you’ve never heard the term. If you’ve ever been presented with a scale from 1-10 asking how likely you are to recommend a company, you’ve been NPS’d. The idea is that the most satisfied customers (those who rank you as a 9 or 10) will spread the word about your product or service. 

When you survey your customers, some will say they’ll probably promote you to their peers. Some will say they won’t. And some won’t feel inclined to share positive or negative information about you. The scale lists scores of 0-6 as “detractors”, 7-8 as “passives,” and 9-10 as “promoters.”

To calculate your NPS, subtract the percentage of survey respondents who would say negative things from those who would offer positive things about your brand.

NPS = Promoter % – Detractor %

For example, if 70% of people share positives and 20% share negatives, your NPS would equal 50. Many popular brands struggle with their NPS score. Apple, which is considered world-class when it comes to NPS, sits at around 50.

Best for: Large companies with massive ad budgets need to track brand health with the NPS metric carefully. Experts consider this a fundamental KPI for predicting near-term revenues, especially your target audience. Smaller and emerging businesses that rely less on brand recognition and more on networking and feature-driven ad campaigns rely less on this KPI.

5. Customer satisfaction (CSAT)

SaaS companies often measure CSAT by asking users for short one-to-five star or emoji ratings. You can use these quick check-ins to measure the customer experience with the features they use. 

This is different from NPS, which provides a more general satisfaction rating of your product, service, or brand. In short, CSAT tracks customer satisfaction, and NPS measures customer loyalty.

Best for: Because they focus almost exclusively on new solutions and USPs, startups must measure CSATs. Small SaaS businesses need to know specific user preferences when offering suites of new tools. Larger companies need CSAT data when adding features but depend more on NPS scores for predictions.

Track user engagement and much more with Insightly Service and unified CRM

There are other metrics out there, but this list represents a good batch to focus on first.  

With Insightly Service, mission-critical customer data is available to all your teams, in real time, empowering them to have more relevant conversations that drive customer satisfaction and success. A dashboard view gives you rolled-up access to the data that’s important across the organization and to measure the KPIs that are vital to your team. 

Break down silos with a robust view of the customer. Empower your support teams to solve tickets quickly, listen with empathy, and create sales opportunities right in the application. See the features that matter to you with a free demo of Insightly today.

The post 5 essential customer engagement metrics and KPIs appeared first on Insightly.

In addition to solving customer problems, customer service professionals need to deliver a positive customer experience in everything they do, whether it’s offering technical support, sharing additional information to help customers maximize their investment in your product, or simply listening with empathy.

Customer service professionals need to perform to the best of their abilities for the good of the customer and the company. 

But how can you evaluate whether or not your customer service is effective? The answer is Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which can give you critical insights into your customer service team’s performance and provide you with actionable and practical paths towards success.

Tracking customer service KPIs is essential

There’s no debate between the benefits of intuition vs. data. Data-based decision making uses quantitative measuring to make crucial business decisions. 

KPIs empower you to better understand the health and performance of your customer service practices so you can guide your team in reaching your company’s benchmarks and goals. 

The benefits of KPIs include:

• Sharpening business insights
• Improving customer satisfaction 
• Measuring efficiency 
• Strengthening customer retention 

When you focus on customer service-based KPIs, you can achieve results quicker and gain critical insights into buyer interactions. You will also help your customer support team identify and gauge customer loyalty and customer retention patterns. 

How to choose the right customer service KPIs

When you identify and measure your customer service teams with KPIs, you commit to helping your company efficiently analyze and monitor the entire customer journey. 

Let’s look at the best metrics and types of customer support KPIs you can use to accurately measure customer service practices. 

Customer satisfaction KPIs

Customer satisfaction KPIs measure how your customers feel about your company and the quality of their interactions with you and your customer service team. 

The following are the best KPIs to track and measure how satisfied your customers are with your company and their customer journey: 

1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The NPS is a metric that helps you measure customer enthusiasm, satisfaction, and customer loyalty. You can calculate the Net Promoter Score by asking customers to rate their likelihood of recommending your company, product, or service on a scale of 1 to 10. 

Why it matters: 

You can use the NPS to determine business growth opportunities. A high NPS shows a healthy relationship with your customers, while a low one indicates there are issues with customer relationships that you need to address. 

How it helps: 

While the NPS alone isn’t enough to paint a complete picture of your customer’s loyalty, it allows you to quantify the data over time to create internal benchmarks. 

You can also use it to rally your employees around creating an enthusiastic customer base because your teams can see the impact they have on customers.

2. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

The Customer Satisfaction Score is a metric that measures customer satisfaction levels throughout the customer experience. 

This data comes from customer feedback surveys that ask questions about their satisfaction with your product, service, or brand as a whole. The CSAT score can range from 0 to 100%. 

Why it matters: 

The CSAT is a strong indicator of your customer loyalty and overall customer experience because it tells you how happy your customers are with your company. 

It also helps you identify the steps your need to take to increase your retention rates and improve your brand’s reputation. 

How it helps: 

The KPI gives your company a cumulative view of customer support to deliver goods and services for you to compare and contrast over an extended period. 

3. Customer Effort Score (CES)

The Customer Effort Score allows service organizations to analyze how easy it is for customers to interact with your customer support team to resolve their issues. 

The CES asks one question and then scores the responses on a numeric scale with one being the highest level of disagreement. 

Why it matters: 

Boosting customer loyalty is essential, but there is a more significant opportunity by keeping customers from becoming disloyal. 

Disloyal or dissatisfied customers are much more likely to negatively impact your company in a variety of ways.

How it helps: 

The CES analyzes the amount of effort your customers have to exert during their interactions with your service agents. 

You can use this metric to gauge and adjust your processes to achieve a highly satisfactory and low-effort experience for your customers.

KPIs for Customer Service Performance: Teams and Individual Agents 

Your customer support team is the face of your company in post-sale interactions. They are often the first ones to interact with new customers, which means their performance will reflect on your business and reputation. 

Companies need to make sure their customer service experience is second to none. And to do this, customer support teams need access to key metrics that will help them identify areas of strength and improvement. 

4. First Response Time (FRT)

Also known as Time to First Response, this metric measures the minutes, hours, or days it takes from the moment a customer submits a support ticket to when customer service reps respond. 

To find your average time to first response, identify the total number of tickets within a selected timeframe and divide the total time it took your team to send the first response. 

Why it matters: 

Your Time to First Response plays a critical role in enhancing customer satisfaction levels. Your clients want a prompt response to their support requests so your team’s performance makes a big impact. 

How it helps: 

Identifying your Time to First Response will help you set a baseline for support ticket response times. In addition, it can help you develop a timeframe benchmark for your customer service reps. 

5. Average Handle Time (AHT)

The Average Handle Time identifies the time it takes for a customer to finish their interaction with your customer support team from when they start the call to when they hang up. This KPI includes hold time, talk time, and any other idle time during the call. 

To find the AHT, add the total hold time, talk time, and after-call task time. Next, divide that time by the number of calls your team received during that time frame. 

Why it matters: 

Once customers start the resolution process, they want it to go as quickly as possible. No one likes to wait for a solution to their issue. The longer your customers have to wait for a resolution, the more likely they are to become dissatisfied and end the call. 

A discontented customer can make a negative impact on your business, so it’s crucial to identify and put practices in place to avoid long resolution times. 

How it helps: 

Finding your Average Handle Time will allow you to compare it with your industry benchmark times to ensure you are on par with your competitors. 

It also provides a benchmark to strive towards, which will motivate your customer service team to meet their call time goals. 

6. Ticket Resolution Rate (TRR)

The Ticket Resolution Rate is a metric that compares the number of tickets your representative or team receives with the number of tickets they resolve within a particular time. 

To determine the TRR, divide the number of tickets your team solves by the number of tickets they receive. Next, multiply that number by 100 to identify the resolution rate. 

Why it matters: 

Ticket resolution rates are subjective to your industry; however, every business knows they need to solve any customer issues quickly and efficiently. 

Your customers need to know you care about their time and problems, so offering a quick ticket turnaround time dramatically improves the customer experience.

How it helps: 

Identifying your ticket resolution rate will help you compare your company with others in your industry and assist your customer support team with identifying the areas they need to improve. 

7. First Contact Resolution Rate (FCR) 

The FCR is an essential customer service metric because it measures how many customer contacts your team resolves within a single interaction with the customer. 

If your company resolves the customer issue on the first contact, your customers won’t need to call again or require the representative to follow up. Improving your FCR increases customer satisfaction and improves customer loyalty. 

Why it matters: 

There are many ways to measure the performance of your contact center so it’s important to find the right metrics. 

To boost customer satisfaction, your customer support representatives need to view customer contacts as an escalation and have a strong desire to deliver prompt, effective resolutions. 

How it helps: 

The FCR is a straightforward way for you to experience your support team’s interactions through your customer’s perspective.

Call centers that honor the reality of customer contact allows them to surpass the expectations and requirements of the customer, which leads to a more satisfying customer service experience. 

8. Identify your top performing agents

When you combine multiple KPIs, like conversion rates, customer satisfaction surveys, and call response times, and sort them by the representative, you’ll be able to identify which of your customer support reps are performing well and which are not. 

Why it matters: 

Your representatives want you to recognize their accomplishments. They also want to clearly understand the expectations of their roles. 

How it helps: 

Positive reinforcement by rewarding top-performing representatives will ensure adequate staffing and encourage employee engagement. 

Operational customer service KPIs

Operational KPIs measure company efficiency in your day-to-day operations. These key metrics help identify which strategies during daily operations need improvement and which are working well. 

Here are the most important customer service KPIs to ensure your support operations are running smoothly. 

9. Tickets by channel

This metric identifies how many tickets your customers generate through various channels, such as your website, phone calls, or chatbots. 

Why it matters: 

Whether you operate through customer service apps or live call centers, knowing where your customers are looking for assistance is crucial. 

To meet the needs of your customers, you must be sure to have the optimal resourcing in the right places. 

How it helps: 

Seeing where your tickets are coming from will help you target where you need to focus and improve your customer service efforts. 

10. Tickets by customer

Use this metric to determine if any of your customers need to repeatedly reach out to your customer service team. 

Having to keep contacting support will lead to customer dissatisfaction and lead to a reduction in customer retention. 

Why it matters: 

If a customer generates multiple help tickets, you’ll know there is a problem to pinpoint and solve as soon as possible to avoid customer frustration. 

How it helps: 

Using this metric can help you determine which product or service is causing the customer to generate multiple tickets. Then you can set actionable goals to resolve the issue and stop multiple help tickets.

11. Tickets by category

Sorting tickets by category allows you to see which areas of your business result in higher amounts of customer inquiries or tickets. 

Knowing where to focus on improvements can help you improve the customer experience and raise customer retention rates. 

Why it matters: 

Much like sorting tickets by the customer, identifying how many tickets your customers are generating per category shows you the key areas you need to address. 

Faster resolution for customers will raise customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

How it helps: 

Automating the ticket categorization process can make it easier for your customer support agents to handle tickets by routing rules and knowledge sets.

How your customer service efforts impact higher level metrics and KPIs 

Every customer touchpoint is an opportunity to build your customer relationships and increase profits. Since your representatives are the first point of contact for questions and concerns, they play a significant role in your user experience (UX). 

Sometimes, customer service efforts can impact higher-level metrics and KPIs. Surprisingly, the following KPIs and metrics that may not seem connected to customer service can act as a litmus test for whether or not your customer service makes a positive impact on your customers.

12. Customer Retention Rate (CRR)

Customer Retention Rate (CRR) measures the number of customers a business retains over a specific period. 

To identify your CRR, begin with the number of customers at the end of a given period and subtract it from the number of new customers during that same period. Next, divide this number by the number of customers at the beginning of that period and multiply it by 100. 

Why it matters: 

Onboarding new customers improves your overall brand, but retaining them for the long haul shows you have cultivated a solid relationship of trust and loyalty. 

How it helps: 

Tracking your customer retention and churn rates will help you build unique, long-lasting relationships with your clients. It also demonstrates they trust you and your brand gives them value. 

13. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Some businesses abbreviate this KPI as CLTV or LTV. It identifies the net profit your company has contributed to the entire relationship lifecycle of a specific customer. 

Essentially, this metric lets you know how much it costs you to retain a client as well as the revenue they bring to your business. To calculate your CLV, subtract the lifetime customer costs from the lifetime customer revenue.

Why it matters: 

Successful businesses use CLV to guide their business decisions and identify where to focus their marketing efforts. This gives them valuable insight into which customer segments are the most profitable. 

How it helps:

Knowing which customers are bringing in the most revenue will help your customer service team focus on maintaining positive relationships with those clients. 

14. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

The MRR is a KPI that identifies the revenue a company can accurately predict it receives every month. It’s the amount of income existing customers generate. 

Calculate the MRR growth metric by adding the additional revenue from current clients that occurred within a given month. 

Why it matters: 

This metric is essential to understanding your overall business cash flow and profitability. Your KPI can help you monitor your business profits and make changes before your revenue sinks too low. 

How it helps:

Tracking MRR and MRR growth will give you a better idea of how your company is performing right now with current customers. It may shed light on customer service practices that are working well and some that may need improvement. 

15. Contract Renewal Rate (CRR) 

Your company’s contract renewal rate is the percentage of customers that renew their contracts or subscriptions with your business. This metric shows you how many customers are satisfied enough to extend their relationship with your business. 

Determine your contract renewal rate by dividing the number of contract renewals by the number of eligible members within a specific period. 

Why it matters:

Happy customers will renew their contracts. If your contract renewal rate is low or dips, it could indicate that you need to make some changes to your customer service procedures. 

How it helps:

Evaluating this metric regularly will help alert you to potential problems so you can start taking action. If renewal rates are trending down, this will alert you to look at a number of areas across your business, including product performance, service offerings, support, or customer success practices.

Build your customer service KPI dashboard with Insightly

The front-line interactions of your customer service professionals can determine whether or not your clients stick with your business or move on to a competitor. 

Evaluating critical KPIs is an efficient way to provide them with a clearer focus and ensure your strategy is on the right track. These metrics provide critical insights into the health of your business and point out areas you may need to improve. 

To help your customer service team go above and beyond, they need the benefits of a high-quality CRM. The KPIs they offer will allow you to access essential client interactional information and data to drive innovations and improvements. 

Test out all the great features Insightly CRM offers with a free trial. 

The post Use these KPIs to optimize your customer service efforts appeared first on Insightly.

A unified CRM is what’s required to thrive in a competitive landscape. The tools and data integration that it provides enable all of the company’s teams to seamlessly achieve synergy. They enable you to gain more insights and deliver a better experience.

Let’s dive deeper into the ways Insightly’s unified CRM software can have a transformative impact on your business.

What is the CRM process?

The CRM process can be best described as a business strategy that enables companies to better identify and interact with current and potential customers. 

The idea here is to improve personalization for every customer interaction for enhanced customer experience and loyalty through data analysis and segmentation tools.

The same approach is also leveraged for prospects to convert them into paying customers. The five core steps of the CRM process signify a collaborative effort between the key departments in a company.

The 5 steps of the CRM cycle

1. Increase brand awareness

Typically the marketing team’s domain, the first step in the customer relationship management process involves introducing prospects to the business. It requires in-depth research on the audience’s demographics and interests.

Audience personas are created based on this market research to launch marketing campaigns that will theoretically have a greater chance of resonating with the audience.

2. Acquire more leads

The lead acquisition step is generally handled by the sales or marketing teams, or in some companies, both. This is essentially an effort to get prospects to engage with the business. 

For example, the marketing team might offer downloadable content as a lead magnet to website visitors if they provide an email address. The sales team could then pull that data from the CRM to proactively target prospects to convert them into customers.

3. Convert leads into paying customers

Reps nurture leads to get them to convert to paying customers in this part of the sales process. They usually rely on lead-scoring data in the CRM to identify prospects that may have the highest probability of a sale and follow-up diligently with the lead.

Converting prospects into new customers is more of an art than a science. Sales reps must be skilled at building trust to inspire confidence in the leads to convert them into paying customers.

4. Retain customers with customer support and customer success

The job doesn’t end when the lead converts into a customer. Providing them with exceptional customer service is key to ensuring that they remain loyal customers.

The most widely used metric in customer service is CSAT or customer satisfaction. This data is used to track trends and identify and fix any issues impacting customer service.

5. Extract more value per customer with upsells/cross-sells

Upselling and cross-selling are great opportunities to proactively meet the needs of your customers by utilizing the data in the CRM. Companies should be mindful of the fact that customers’ needs may change over time. 

This can be achieved by leveraging purchase data to provide personalized recommendations on the products and services that would provide further benefit to the customers.

Why the CRM process is flawed

Not all companies are created equal. The customer journey will always be different for every company. What works for one may not necessarily work for the other. This crucial fact tends to be overlooked by the CRM process. 

What ends up happening is that the data gets compartmentalized in different tools. It turns into a mess as data discrepancies inevitably occur when all teams are not entering data into the same system.

This causes friction between various teams, including sales and marketing, since they effectively work in silos with complex ad hoc data sync processes.

Employees thus end up not trusting the data as it doesn’t provide them with a holistic view to make empowered decisions. They come to question the integrity of the data because it doesn’t appear to be cohesive and comprehensive.

They also find it difficult to achieve synergy with colleagues on other teams. Alignment across teams is crucial to close more customers and to improve retention.

A real-life CRM process example

A legacy CRM is effectively used as a suite of apps by a company. All of the sales, marketing, and service data is collected and managed in separate silos. 

Thus, in reality, these so-called “integrated” CRMs are actually “assembled” CRM software where features and functionality were added over time in response to customers’ needs. 

These solutions don’t fit the customer journey, particularly for companies that offer multiple products and services. The many teams that work on them use different tools that all do the same thing but don’t allow for seamless data integration. It’s impossible to have confidence in the data when it’s scattered everywhere. 

There’s no continuity between the various tools in the CRM system, which prevents them from having an up-to-date and comprehensive view of the customer journey.

This will prevent, for example, the hardware and software sales teams in a company from leveraging the upsell/cross-sell opportunities that may exist with their customers simply because their data is all over the place. 

Trying to fully integrate the scattered data is an expensive and time-consuming proposition, often making efforts to achieve that futile.

A better, adaptive approach to the CRM process

1. Start with the customer journey

The customer journey is a vital part of any CRM integration. Most solutions go about it the wrong way by forcing the customer journey to adapt to the CRM process. 

Think about it, what works for a customer who wants to buy hardware might not work for someone who’s buying software. The same CRM strategy can’t be used for both.

It should be the other way around. The CRM process needs to be flexible enough to adapt to the customer journey. This increases the potential of converting leads and enhancing retention regardless of what stage of the sales pipeline they’re in.

2. Integrate with your existing tools

A single customer view that centralizes all customer data is a powerful tool to achieve synergy. Its integration with all of the existing tools that a business uses is also of vital importance. 

Insightly AppConnect is a tool that allows for integration automation. Companies can use it to link and integrate Insightly’s unified CRM system with the other apps they use in their organization. 

This allows for powerful new workflow automation between applications. AppConnect also features over 500 pre-built connections to popular business apps.

Even non-technical users can build seamless integrations by using its simple drag and drop interface without writing a single line of code.

3. Take a unified approach

Companies can both extract the most from their CRM implementation and improve customer service by adopting a unified approach that no longer relies on redundant tools and the compartmentalization of data in silos. 

They can achieve synergy and data integration by unifying the marketing, sales, support, and project management on a single platform. All of the teams work together with a holistic view of the customers’ needs and expectations.

​​One of the biggest benefits of a unified solution for teams is that they can complete many tasks in one single system. They no longer have to switch between multiple applications to use various tools just to access data, a task that unnecessarily slows them down. 

Insightly puts this unified approach at the heart of its CRM solution. Teams’ productivity increases through automation. With business intelligence built in, Insightly can also be used to create data visualizations and real-time data dashboards for unmatched visibility.

Insightly unifies your CRM process

Insightly empowers organizations and even small businesses to align sales, marketing, and support teams so that they have complete visibility over customer relationships. They can use that insight and knowledge to improve customer service. 

Automatic lead routing ensures that leads are routed to the right person in real-time. With workflow automation, companies can create complex, multi-step business processes to better serve their customers. It can even execute custom business logic to sync with external systems from the likes of SAP and Oracle.

AppConnect ensures that the ecosystem of tools that a company uses every day isn’t disrupted; rather it’s integrated seamlessly with the CRM. AppConnect comes with more than 500 pre-built connections to the most popular business software apps. This makes establishing seamless integrations between the CRM and apps very straightforward.

Interested in learning more about how a real single customer view can enable you to improve customer retention and to better connect with them? Try Insightly for free to feel the unified CRM difference for yourself.

The post The CRM process is flawed. Here is why. appeared first on Insightly.

Customer success and customer service are fundamental components in your organization’s ability to deliver great experiences and create long-lasting relationships.  More specifically, these two teams are at the very center of your organization’s efforts to drive adoption, retention, and ultimately, customer loyalty. And according to the Harvard Business Review, companies with a focus on loyalty grow revenues roughly 2.5 times as fast as their industry peers.

Businesses are increasingly differentiating themselves from the competition by providing seamless continuity across customer success and customer service, and ensuring that their employees are able to demonstrate expertise, insights, and empathy in every single customer interaction.  

Customer service and customer success are aligned in that both teams are responsible for creating and maintaining customer loyalty. But there are differences in each team’s remit. Understanding the differences and how they can complement each other is essential for minimizing churn and maximizing revenue growth.

Identifying the differences between customer success and customer service

Customer service and customer success together constitute the perfect marriage of reactive and proactive customer engagement. 

Customer service is primarily reactive. Teams respond in the moment, as quickly as possible, to customer tickets, concerns, and complaints. There might be a technical issue to solve, or a bug to identify and report to engineering. Customers might also reach out to the support team to address learning needs, or alleviate confusion about how to leverage and optimize product feature sets and functionality.  Customer service also has the opportunity, by listening with intention, to identify and create sales opportunities based on unique customer requirements and growth strategies. 

Customer success is primarily proactive, with a focus on the strategic, long-term view. CS teams typically focus first on the onboarding process to encourage engagement and adoption, and drive retention. They continue to build for the future by leading customers through quarterly business reviews to analyze performance and create long-term, strategic mutual success plans to optimize the investment that customers have made in your product or service. 

Exploring the intersection of customer success and customer service

Even though these roles are clearly differentiated, ultimately, they need each other to optimize performance and orchestrate successful customer outcomes.  They become exponentially more valuable to your organization through cross-functional engagement and alignment. The primary way to achieve that is through enhanced communication across teams, facilitated by a unified customer data platform. 

To explore this concept in more detail, we spoke with Zeke Silva, Insightly’s Senior Director of Client Services, and Luke Via, Insightly’s Senior Director of Customer Success. They share key takeaways on their partnership in delivering exceptional customer experiences at Insightly. 

Securing a complete view of the customer

“Our collaboration has centered on breaking down barriers around securing a complete view of the customer. CS maps success to alignment with customers. If my team isn’t armed with detailed customer service ticket information to round out that full view, there’s a risk that we look out of touch,” said Via.  

Via and Silva’s teams are empowered to capture actionable customer insights through Insightly’s unified platform. “With data across sales, marketing, and service on the same platform, we’re armed with a complete view of our customers,” adds Silva. “My team works primarily in the Service app to capture current customer status, and that information is available to Luke’s team, and the rest of the organization, immediately–it’s completely frictionless, which enhances our ability to be successful across functional groups.”

Maximizing performance and creating impact

This seamless flow of information across the platform has made a tremendous impact in their teams’ ability to drive great experiences. 

According to Via, “With a consolidated platform view, we’re all able to do a much better job of anticipating and over delivering on outcomes. We’ve got the right information to guide conversations more effectively and with more impact. It also helps our teams move with greater velocity. We don’t need to schedule meetings to find out more about current customer status; the data is right there in the platform and anyone can access it quickly and efficiently. It’s made a huge difference during COVID, with remote teams. Ultimately, having access to support, marketing, and sales data in a single platform, and easily accessible to everyone, has freed up time for our teams and enhanced their productivity. It’s empowered my team to be much more strategic in their account interactions, which creates value for us and our customers.”

Silva adds, “With a unified view of our customers, we can all pick up the relationship right where it’s at. My team uses the data they collect in the Service app to quickly react and troubleshoot on behalf of customers, and Luke’s team uses that same information, along with data in the CRM, to facilitate proactive, strategic conversations leading to transformational growth.”

Empower your teams with unified data

A unified data platform is at the nexus of creating loyalty, building long-term customer relationships and growing your business.  Customer success and customer service teams, along with the rest of your organization, require unified data to optimize communication, create visibility through the entire customer lifecycle, and maximize productivity.  Empower your teams with the data they need to capitalize on insights and deliver exceptional experiences. 

Key takeaways:

• Remote work makes it even more imperative for cross-functional teams to have access to the tools and systems they need to support their customers
• The tools and processes you create should make it easier, not harder, for your teams to do their jobs, and ultimately, create impact for customers.  Think about ways to deliver information quickly and easily, with fewer meetings. 
• Optimize knowledge transfer, communication, and outcomes through a unified data platform across sales, marketing, and service for a full view to the customer relationship
• Make sure everyone has access to the same information so that, as Silva says, you can all “pick up the relationship right where it’s at.”

If you’re just getting started, be sure to check out the other articles in this four-part series: 

• Part 1: 5 customer service skills to build great customer relationships
• Part 2: 4 customer service challenges (and how to solve them)
• Part 3: 4 tips for creating a customer-centric experience

Interested in learning more about how you can align your customer service and customer success teams?  Chat with us.

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Many companies talk about being “customer-centric.” In reality, too few invest the time and effort to provide truly customer-centric experiences.

How can you push your organization to become more customer-centric?

Recently, I sat down with Luke Via, Senior Director of Customer Success at Insightly, to discuss best practices for enabling customer-centric experiences. Here are four important tips to consider.

1. Align around providing the best possible customer experience

Modern buying cycles are complex. Gone are the days of exclusively relying on sales to handle every customer interaction. Marketing, customer success and support, product development, finance, and a myriad of other stakeholders play important roles in the customer experience.

Before you can align your teams and individual contributors around an ideal experience, you need alignment at the top. “Being customer-centric requires alignment among all of a company’s executives and agreement to focus on the best possible customer experience,” says Luke Via, Senior Director of Customer Success at Insightly. “From marketing to selling to supporting customers with great products and services, leaders must consciously seek new ways to improve.”

Open and honest communication is the best way to cultivate alignment among leaders. Start an internal conversation and begin collecting opportunities for improvement. Explore how your company can maximize value across every stage of the customer experience—and with the highest level of satisfaction. Which parts of the customer experience are contributing to (or eroding) satisfaction?

Tip: Frontline staff, who regularly interact with your customers, can be an excellent source of ideas. Find ways to include them in the conversation, too!

2. Define your ideal customer journey

Once leadership agrees that the customer experience is a top priority, it’s time to develop a shared vision of the ideal pre-sale and post-sale experience. “Leaders need to gain a clear understanding of a customer’s desired outcome,” says Luke. “It’s about knowing where customers are today, why they arrived at your solution, and the resources they’re willing to spend to achieve their goals.”

Journey mapping is one approach for obtaining a shared vision of the customer experience. As pointed out in 3 ways to use CRM data in building customer journeys, mapping your current journeys involves three basic steps:

Define your ICPs and personas. Gain a clear understanding of the types of companies and people you serve. What do they have in common? Organizing customers by ICP (ideal customer profile) and persona will make it easier to think in terms of an “ideal” experience.

Gather data to identify similar journeys. How do your ICPs and personas advance through the customer journey? Do they go through common steps when purchasing or renewing? Use data from your CRM or other business systems to avoid flawed assumptions.

Build your customer journey map. Your journey map could be a simple spreadsheet or a complex diagram. Either way, the end product should be backed by real-world data and easily accessible by leadership. Which parts of the journey are less than ideal for the customer? What steps can be taken to provide a more customer-centric experience?

Frequently reevaluating your journeys through the eyes of the customer will help you close the gap between the status quo and the ideal. And, according to Luke, it’s also an activity that can have a measurable impact on your bottom line. “If you provide the best experience possible, customers are more likely to stay,” says Luke. “So, if you’re looking to grow, you should be customer-focused through the entire journey.”

3. Get the right data, metrics, and tools

How do you know if you’re providing a customer-centric experience? Collecting the right data and monitoring the right metrics is key for establishing a baseline and tracking progress. Which data and metrics are most important? The answer may vary from company to company, but here are a few to consider:

CSAT is the measurement of a customer’s satisfaction with a particular interaction. A sustained uptick in aggregated CSAT can mean that customers are generally happier with their experiences.

Contraction, or churn, measures the number of customers who take their business elsewhere during a period of time. Negative experiences lead to elevated levels of contraction, while positive experiences reduce churn. So, it stands to reason that lower contraction indicates an improvement in the customer experience.

Average time spent per support ticket measures how long agents take to resolve customer issues. Customers prefer shorter wait times to longer ones, so reducing time per ticket is bound to make customers happier in the long run.

Aligning all of your customer interactions—across sales, support, and marketing—into one system like Insightly can make it easier to track and report on key metrics. Eliminating data silos reduces complexity and makes it easier to develop a comprehensive view of the customer experience.

4. Establish an effective feedback loop

Internal data and metrics are no substitute for direct customer feedback. Unfortunately, many companies struggle to implement a scalable feedback loop. “Effective companies do more than ask for feedback,” says Luke. “They use feedback to initiate meaningful internal discussions and ultimately communicate it back to their customer base.”

For example, Insightly’s founder and CEO, Anthony Smith, regularly hosts product release webinars to share the company’s latest innovations—innovations that stem largely from customer feedback. These webinars not only serve as an effective vehicle for feature announcements, but they also help customers feel more connected—and committed—to the Insightly experience. “Celebrating victories is huge because people want to feel like they’re being heard,” says Luke. “Forming an emotional connection further solidifies the customer’s connection to the company.”

Time for a customer-centric approach?

Customers have never had more choices at their disposal. In an increasingly commoditized marketplace, the companies that deliver the best experiences will win.

Stay tuned for additional customer service tips. Next time, we’ll explore the relationship between customer success and the customer experience.

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This is part 2 of a customer service blog series based on conversations with members of Insightly’s client services and customer success teams.

In part 1 of this customer service blog series, we discussed five important skills for building great relationships. Continuing on with my discussion with Zeke Silva, Sr. Director Client Services at Insightly, today we’ll discuss a few challenging situations in customer service—and how agents can apply their skills to overcome them.

1. Getting to the root of the problem

“It just doesn’t work.”

If you’ve spent any time in customer service, you’ve probably heard customers make general statements like this. Deciphering what the customer actually means can sometimes be more challenging than fixing the problem at hand. Is your product or service actually broken, or does the customer simply not understand how to make something work? Is this a support issue, or does it have more to do with training?

The customer’s level of technical expertise is a key factor to keep in mind when trying to get to the root of the problem. “You have to be very careful with word choice, especially if you’re working with someone who isn’t tech-savvy or familiar with your product,” says Zeke Silva, Sr. Director Client Services at Insightly. Newbies aren’t the only ones who can cause challenging situations for customer service agents. “On the flip side, you also have to be ready to help that super-technical customer, too,” says Zeke.

Try this: Avoid jumping straight into the weeds and making incorrect assumptions. According to Silva, a better approach starts with asking general questions. “You have to treat it like a funnel and slowly—or quickly—work towards more pointed questions,” says Zeke.

2. Dealing with seasonal fluctuations and other growing pains

Answering dozens of similar support tickets can lead to a numbing effect that quickly erodes an agent’s ability to empathize with customers. That’s especially true when your company experiences a period of rapid hypergrowth or a seasonal uptick in demand. Focusing too much on average handle time, time to resolution, and other performance metrics at the expense of the customer journey will only compound the problem.

Experienced customer service teams seek a balanced approach that focuses on efficiency and effectiveness without losing touch of the bigger picture. For Insightly’s support team, this means reminding agents that each new quarter is an opportunity to serve an entirely new batch of customers—many of whom may have similar questions. “Having agents ready for that prepares them to be in the right mindset for responding appropriately,” says Zeke. “Preparing the team for an influx enables them to offer a great experience, especially for brand new customers who may be switching from a competitor.”

Try this: Re-examine your company’s revenue patterns and identify periods that tend to yield large influxes of new customers or support requests. Proactively communicate this to your customer service team and make sure they’re amped up to handle the surge.

3. Advocating for the customer when things break

Not every customer service issue can be resolved with a simple email, phone call, or screen share. Sometimes things break and require a considerable amount of effort to identify, replicate, capture, and fix the underlying problem.

Training front-line support staff to diagnose and escalate tickets is the first step. However, escalating a ticket will do no good unless there is a reliable infrastructure in place to deal with bugs and other unexpected problems. “You don’t just throw a baseball at someone and hope they’re ready to catch it,” says Zeke. “They’ve got to be ready to receive it, and the same is true for dealing with escalated tickets.”

Solving complex problems may require input from multiple stakeholders across customer service, operations, engineering, and other teams. And, that’s no small task in a business environment that’s still dominated by remote work. It’s difficult to be an effective advocate for the customer when information is spread across multiple inboxes, threads, and systems. That’s why having all of your essential customer data in one, easily accessible location is particularly important.

Try this: Audit your existing ticket escalation workflow and look for ways to improve it. Where does information tend to get lost or overlooked? How does communication break down across departments? How can you consolidate overlapping systems and make it easier to advocate for your customers?

4. Holding other teams accountable

Streamlining ticket escalations, reducing overlapping systems, and eliminating data silos is a major step forward, but doing so doesn’t guarantee accountability from the rest of your company. To ensure timely resolution for your customers, it’s best to establish cross-departmental service-level agreements (SLAs) that are backed by leaders from each team.

Tying internal SLAs to customer-facing SLAs is another strategy for creating urgency throughout the organization. For example, Insightly users on the Ultimate success plan can expect to receive a response within one hour of sending an email. “That builds confidence with customers that they’ll get a first touch within a certain amount of time,” says Zeke. Once an issue has been validated, Insightly’s engineering team sequences the work based on previously agreed to SLAs, which gives the support team—and, in turn, the end user—a specific time frame for achieving a satisfactory outcome.

Keeping the lines of communication open is essential for avoiding misunderstandings. Insightly’s support team also sends a bi-weekly email to engineering, which contains additional context for prioritizing customer requests. “We’ve created multiple avenues to prioritize and elevate,” says Zeke.

Try this: Formalize the working relationship between your customer-facing and back-office teams, perhaps through one or more SLAs. Gain buy-in from leaders from across the organization and look for ways to tie agreements back to customer expectations.

Next up, tips for becoming even more customer-centric

Stay tuned for the next article in this series. We’ll be moving beyond customer service issues and focusing our attention on proactive strategies that ensure a customer-centric experience.

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