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Benefits Of CRM Software

Benefits Of CRM Software

March 24, 2022
Benefits Of CRM Software

What are a few of the benefits of CRM Software?

It can become extremely time-consuming and challenging for service contractors to manage all your workflow, inspections, proposals, field technicians, repairs, parts, invoices, customer interactions, payment history, etc.

In the technology age, customers have rising expectations. Customers don’t want a field service agent to arrive at the last hour of a four-hour window and then not have the right tools with them.

The only way for service contractors to stay afloat is by attracting and retaining customers. Yet, many service technicians still depend on paper and pen. There has to be a better way to take service orders, dispatch field technicians, create invoices, and process payments.

Nonetheless, the only way to remain competitive in a digital society is by responding, scheduling, and dispatching service calls quickly, efficiently, and responsive.

Service contractors need a well-run and relevant customer relationship management (CRM) solution. The goal is to satisfy customers, improve sales, and boost efficiency.

What is CRM Software

CRM software, or Customer Relationship Management Software, allows service businesses to manage and nurture interactions with customers and prospects. With a CRM, you can have a big-picture view of each client and centralize task management.

To illustrate, if you receive a service call from a specific client, you can look through your CRM to see information on past service calls, interactions, invoices, and more around the same client.

Or in the case of new prospects, you or your sales team can track how prospects move through your sales pipeline.

Other details might be customer preferences such as times of day when they are normally available or what services they call in for the most. You can also make sure you save time by simply sending your service technician to the correct address (because it’s on every screen).

This can help your company create a more personalized experience for the client. You want that experience to be based on their history. So, CRM software enables you to achieve this by managing customer relationships and allowing you to view information much more efficiently.

Types of CRM Software And Their Benefits

fieldpulse crm software

CRMs can be very specific to business types.

For instance, your CRM could house things like estimates and invoices, all work interactions (services provided to the customer), and billing and payment history if you have a contractor-based business.

There are three types of CRM software and here are a few of their benefits:

Operational CRM

An operational CRM assists businesses in managing their day-to-day marketing, sales, and customer service operations. An operational CRM is the most popular type of CRM. It will typically include features to support marketing, sales, and customer communications.

Analytical CRM

Analytical CRMs are usually suitable for companies with large amounts of data. The CRM analyzes the data to improve customer acquisition, customer retention, and contact management to keep track of customer details. It usually involves aggregating data from multiple sources and using it to recommend actions.

CRM platforms can pinpoint bottlenecks in your sales funnel, identify customer behavior, and predict conversions by going through tons of customer data. These features allow you to analyze the data and identify patterns of behavior. An Analytical CRM requires a significant amount of data (sometimes millions of data points) to operate effectively.

Collaborative CRM

A Collaborative CRM allows a company to simplify communications between a large team, working across departments and customers. It gives everyone access to customer data, and it can help improve customer experience and satisfaction. This type of CRM is helpful for companies where many different people are frequently talking with the customer.

What Are The Benefits of CRM Software?

Using a CRM system can be transformational in your business. The technology helps maintain the information, but more importantly, it can impact how you do business. This is often overlooked when choosing to use technology, but it should be part of the goals you outline. So what does it look like to use a CRM system?

Is a CRM System Worth It?

According to Baseline, the average ROI for a CRM system and every dollar spent is $5.60. This means you’ll get back $5.60 for every dollar you invest in CRM platforms.

Instead of pouring through unorganized paper invoices or figuring out an email trail, you have everything you need in a central database. This information includes phone numbers, best times to call, and customer interaction history.

In terms of service businesses, the right CRM for service business management would also help with the necessary features to deliver a more intelligent, productive, and customized field service to every client and prospect.

Customer Relationship Management Software Benefits

The old pen and paper methods no longer work. To achieve a predictive view of your future, you need a CRM. And in choosing the right one, you can and will facilitate a continual improvement and growth system.

Here are some of the key benefits from implementing CRM solutions for your business:

Improve Customer Satisfaction

One of the best ways for smaller companies to compete within a highly-competitive environment is by offering targeted and personalized service. Your CRM system can record the most detailed information about your customers and prospects, such as their behaviors and purchase history–even their birthdays.

You can’t be expected to remember 500 birthdays. But your CRM software helps easily do that for you.

Store detailed customer data, including…

  • Keep notes about all calls and interactions.
  • Categorize contacts into logical groups that make follow up easy
  • Keep reminders of future follow-ups

Using a CRM solution tailored to your business, you have ready access to all your customer data. This allows you to pull from a centralized database to handle invoicing quickly, proposal generation, and payment processing on the go without having to type up the same information repeatedly.

You’ll also be able to improve customer service leading to higher customer retention, customer loyalty, and more customer referrals.

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Marketing Automation

You can also use data from your CRM system to run email marketing campaigns. You can segment your campaigns based on data points like customer spend, customer type, location, and more. Then, you can view your email dashboard to see if your prospect or client has responded. It is challenging to build long-term relationships with just a spreadsheet alone.

A modern CRM platform offers tons of automation that can do a bulk of managing your customer relationships. Use automation to save your employees from doing tedious and repetitive tasks.

For example, with FieldPulse, you no longer have to copy and paste customer emails. Using a customized template for customer communication, FieldPulse automatically fills in the field values based on your job and customer data to make sending emails a breeze.

Help Your Sales Team Focus On High-Value Customers

Prioritization can save you significant time and precious resources. Your CRM technology can help your business prioritize high-value customers. You can segment the data by job type or spend so you know which customers matter most to your business.

Additionally, some contractor CRMs can integrate with mobile apps that have GPS functionality so you can track technicians in the field. This can make it easier when you need to find a technician quickly, and it allows you to schedule emergency jobs more efficiently with minimum downtime.

Automated Sales Reports & Other Data

By using a CRM solution tailored to your business, you have ready access to customer information. This allows you to pull up existing customers and details to handle invoicing quickly, proposal generation, and payment processing on the go without having to type up the same information repeatedly.

Other benefits of CRM software are that it’s also relatively easy to create a historical view of your revenue and other sales data.

But wouldn’t it be even more beneficial to explore leading indicators of your revenue metrics, see your customer journey, and improve customer relationships with prospective and current customers? Customer relations software can do that, too.

This will help you determine when you can afford to hire more service technicians and sales reps, buy more inventory, or invest in more company marketing.

You can identify key trends within your lead generation records, opportunities, and sales histories within your CRM’s reporting system. You can also publish sales reports that can help to uncover any issues around your sales process, such as:

  • Response times
  • Territory coverage
  • Lead conversion rates
  • Customer sentiment

You can also manage your marketing campaigns to see which ones were the most effective and plan future marketing activities accordingly.

Store Customer Data

You need a system to track everything from scheduling to customer equipment to service contracts. With a CRM system that supports the way you do business, you can:

  • Get instant reports and updates
  • Correctly manage service scheduling and route times
  • Manage the audit trails of customer equipment
  • Offer a knowledge base to field service agents
  • Track work progress, travel, completion, and follow-up
  • Utilize GPS-based location tagging
  • Offer mobile capabilities to field service agents
  • Send customer communications through email or text message
  • Eliminate manual data entry when customers are already in your system

Communicate Effectively

crm system

Most CRM systems will have a convenient way to contact your customers and your employees. This centralized database can improve the sales organization of your marketing teams by ensuring that everyone has access to all the information they need when they need it.

If you have a team member retiring, there is no need to worry about all the minutia they deal with daily. A CRM system guarantees that all that information is safe and secure, where the next employee can learn unhurried.

Many CRM systems have mobile device interfacing as well as in-office. In this way, even when you have a sales rep or tradesman on the job site, they will still have access to the critical customer details.

Track Leads and Sales Performance

As the infamous saying goes, “you cannot improve what you cannot measure,” and a CRM is a treasure trove of data and analytics that can help your business improve the efficiency of its sales.

Your sales team can find out the best source of your leads, the number of leads in your pipeline, calculate projected revenue, best-performing salespeople, and the stages where your sales cycle slows down using your CRM data.

These actionable insights can help you focus on areas that will deliver the maximum income and identify areas you need to improve by helping you keep a big picture view of your sales pipeline and identify lead sources that are delivering value

Increase Productivity

Another benefit of CRM software is that it can improve your sales productivity by 34%

With CRM tools, you can follow your prospect’s journey down the sales funnel from the beginning to beyond the point of conversion. For example, you can see how sales reps interacted with prospects over phone calls, which of the marketing’s multiple channels is most effective – or which marketing campaign yielded the best return on investment.

The best part is that you can customize this funnel according to your business operation sales cycle, so you can use the information to suit your goals and your customer base.

The average Return on Investment for using a CRM is $8.71 for every $1 invested, making it a no-brainer financially. Just make sure you find software that fits your business and your budget.

Upsell

Regarding Upselling or cross-selling, you have a 60-70% better possibility of increasing revenue from existing clients and a 5-20% chance of increasing the revenue with a prospective customer.

In addition, CRMs can improve customer retention by as much as 27%. So you make more money from the customers you have, keep more of the customers you have, and gain new customers. All with the help of CRM software.

Automate

crm automation

Most CRM systems allow you to set up rules to automate those tedious tasks that take up serious time. Automation means you can focus more time on closing leads and answering customer requests.

For example, with FieldPulse, you can quickly send templated emails and SMS messages with just a few clicks. The details are filled in based on the job and customer data. Easily schedule follow-ups, change notices, and estimated arrival times without having to type out each email or text message again manually!

Tips for Integrating a CRM Software

Now that you know the benefits of CRM’s digital tools, it’s tempting to jump right in and get one working for you. That is the next step, but it’s essential to find the right CRM platform for your business needs and goals.

Pick a CRM Specifically Built For Your Industry

For example, you will need a CRM that your technicians can easily access in the field for a contracting business. We understand the pain that small businesses suffer from the lack of resources and having to do everything independently. That is why we built FieldPulse specifically for small businesses in the contracting industry!

Don’t rush to get everyone on the CRM

Pick your top employees to pilot the software to prove the merits of the CRM, and the rest of the team will follow. For example, with FieldPulse, you can start small with just one 1-2 CRM users and then add on more users like sales reps and team managers later.

fieldpulse customer management softwareInvesting in a CRM system specific to your business helps improve productivity, customer satisfaction, and overall service delivery. For your business to remain competitive in a digital marketplace, you need a CRM system. Customers are becoming increasingly sophisticated, with rising customer expectations and never-ending options.

Provide Adequate Training

Adequate training is a prerequisite to getting high integration rates with CRM software. Don’t overwhelm your employees by throwing them directly into the CRM software’s dashboard; give them time to understand the system, implement their existing sales processes, and provide them with resources to answer any questions they may have.

Many CRM providers, including FieldPulse, offer hands-on training to new customers or detailed FAQs, so take advantage of these resources.

Start Small

Another easy way to manage training is to start by using only some of the features available, then introducing new processes that take more advantage of your CRM. You might begin with tracking every new lead and scheduling jobs in the CRM.

Later, you could manage your estimates and invoices from the system. Taking it one step at a time gives your team a chance to learn on the job and get more comfortable with the new system.

Some CRM vendors offer premium services to migrate your data (FieldPulse is one!); this can speed up your integration and ensure the integrity of your data. Secondly, consider using a CRM platform that easily integrates with other parts of your business, like marketing or customer support. This step can ease some of the issues that arise with data migration.

Now that you’re familiar with the benefits of customer relationship management software, you can take a deep dive into what you should look for in CRM software for small businesses and some of our favorite options.

Got questions about how CRM could specifically benefit your business?

With mobile CRM apps, accurate record management, and real-time access to information, your team can now offer the best, most personalized service to your customers at all times.

Curious about the benefits of CRM software for your specific business? Schedule a free demo with FieldPulse, and we’ll talk you through how the ways storing customer information in a CRM can help you, your marketing team, sales efforts, reduce customer churn, automate business processes, better customer retention, and provide key insights into your customer needs and most valuable customers.

Get The Best CRM Software

customer interaction

The right CRM system will provide a comprehensive view of each customer and their needs. It’s important to know when a customer prefers to be called on, what types of equipment they have, and any information they have offered about their preferences.

FieldPulse’s field service management CRM allows you to do this plus more, including scheduling jobs and creating invoices and estimates with customer information automatically pulling in. Try FieldPulse free now for seven days!

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