Perhaps best captured by the age-old mantra “Customer is King,” the world of commerce is undergoing a radical shift. Today, more companies than ever have come to identify themselves as “Customer Obsessed,” and businesses are doubling down on improving the customer services and the customer experience they offer.
This customer-centric approach has been materialized by the widespread popularity and use of CRM software. CRM, an acronym for Customer Relationship Management, stands for exactly what it sounds like. Everything a company does to build, maintain and nurture its relationship with its customer can loosely be defined as a CRM initiative.
CRM strategies are essential because they help businesses focus on what matters, the customers. Utilizing CRM solutions, companies can refine and improve their interaction with their customers driving up engagement and combating churn.
But how exactly can we do this? How does a company move from having a customer-oriented philosophy to taking the right actions? Below is a list of 3 case studies highlighting the customer-centric approach that companies of different sizes have managed to implement.
Mission.org: A Small Business on a Big Mission
Mission.org is a platform committed to telling stories that help improve the lives of its listeners. Mission is a media company that specializes in creating custom podcasts for clients. A giant in the podcast space today, with multiple shows ranking in top charts; Mission started as a humble Medium blog.
And a lot of their success can be attributed to the client-centric approach they adopt in running their business. Beyond just being committed to delivering ‘humanized’ stories to their listeners, said Ian Faison, co-founder of Mission.org, Mission also strives to provide a smooth and authentic experience to their clients.
On the product end, they deliver value with their podcasts. On the customer end, they utilize software from Top CRM Companies (Salesforce in this case) to simplify and improve their client interactions. For a company like Mission, which needs to interact with multiple groups of people (audience members, podcast guests, and customers), keeping track of all your client interactions is critical.
CRM solutions allow such companies to maintain a 360-degree view of their customers. How? In the case of Mission, CRM helped them track conversations across multiple channels, especially emails, allowing them to know where each customer was within their conversation, who had spoken to them before, and how to meet their needs best.
Simplifying your business interaction allows you more than just efficient workflows; it helps your build trust with the customers you are in touch with. In a market where Brand Image and credibility continue to get increasingly important, CRM solutions cannot be ignored by anyone who takes their business seriously.
By embodying a customer-centric approach both within their philosophy and how they do business, the team at Mission managed to scale a simple media company into a podcasting powerhouse that audiences love listening to and clients love being a part of.
Activision Blizzard: How to build a Videogame Empire
Activation Blizzard is the company behind massively successful games like Candy Crush and World of Warcraft. Easily among the world’s biggest gaming studios out there, Activision clearly understands videogames very well. What they also understand very well though is the average gamer.
When Activision launched Call of Duty 3 (often considered the biggest launch in the industry’s history!), they implemented a brand new approach to customer service that proved to be an absolute game-changer. Activision knew very well that every time players faced difficulties within the games, they would flock to customer support for much-needed help. For a game as popular as COD that meant tons and tons of queries that would be very difficult to manage.
To get around this issue, they utilized CRM solutions that integrated with social media to deliver a fast and personalized customer service experience. With the2 right CRM tools, Activision managed to pull together queries from various social media channels which made it significantly easier for them to respond and resolve these issues.
Tweets and posts about Bugs and game issues turned into engagement posts that not just helped other gamers resolve their problems themselves, but also generated content for service and marketing teams. Naturally, this worked wonders. Not only did the approach improve the customer service experience, but the strategy also helped drive up engagement for the company.
As a result of implementing CRM strategies within their workflow, Activision managed to reduce its customer service operation costs by 25%, while the number of customers solving their problems by themselves jumped from 50% to a whopping 85%! With CRM done right, Activision managed to improve customer satisfaction while reducing the cost for the same.
Amazon: The Titan that knows its Customers
With millions of customers worldwide and valued at more than a trillion dollars, Amazon is undoubtedly a global e-commerce titan. And the reason behind this huge success is indeed very straightforward: Amazon is safe, reliable, and convenient for its customers.
Customers trust Amazon for a number of reasons, like those precise, personalized recommendations, hassle-free returns and replacements, a ridiculously convenient buying experience, and a solid, reliable customer support infrastructure. Add to that one-day delivery across the globe, a clean user experience across all platforms, and a wide range of available products. All of this makes Amazon’s success look obvious, if not inevitable.
But how does Amazon manage to pull this off? Amazon has a ton of customer data that it utilizes to the fullest. Your browsing and purchase histories inspire suitable recommendations and offers. And your bank details make it easier to place orders with just a few clicks. All this data is managed with a custom CRM solution developed in-house by Amazon to suit its needs best.
Amazon’s CRM systems continue to collect, process, and sort valuable customer data, which is then used to personalize and simplify the shopping experience for every customer. The scale of this operation is massive but the efficiency with which the entire machinery runs is truly commendable.
With this relentless commitment towards ensuring customer satisfaction, Amazon has grown from a garage-based online bookstore to the world’s largest online marketplace. If that doesn’t go far enough to emphasize the value of maintaining strong customer relationships then perhaps nothing else will.
Conclusion
Ensuring your customers a good experience and focusing on building that relationship with them is always worth the effort, regardless of the size and type of your company. Every business can benefit in numerous ways by adopting a customer-centric philosophy. And implementing this has become increasingly easier in a world of digitization, Big data, and personalization.
CRM software can help you grow your business, improve your brand image, build a loyal customer base and do so much more. With such clear and numerous advantages, having a dedicated CRM strategy and budget is no longer a trend but a much-needed necessity.
