It was predicted that the CRM industry would be increasing at a great precedent rate. True, the CRM industry has seen impressive growth, which is attributed to realigned focus to customers by companies.
The idea that the customer is essential is nothing new. Motto ‘Customer is always right has been a company’s consistent strategy. The major change came with customers finding that they have a real voice about how they are being served. The proliferation of digitization and information technology has given a chance for customers to share their experiences, and thus, successful businesses have started to listen to them.
Modern CRM gives imminence to clients and keeps them in the center around which business is based. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It allows organizations to gather information about the customers, track customers through the customer journey, and relative information such as preferences, needs, wants, customer history, and use data that provide a better customer experience.
Superior customer experience is not a one-time option that businesses present to customers and then let it just be. Instead, it is an ongoing process that has to be implemented every step, and for this, one critical aspect is customer lifecycle management.
Auro CRM is designed to support sales professionals in improving sales,
automated sales activities, and managing the sales process from lead generation to contact. It is suitable for companies of any size as it delivers customer service capabilities for B2B and B2C domains.
Every good customer service employee will know that business is more than closing a one-time deal. Instead, companies build a mutually beneficial relationship with customers, which equates to high customer lifetime value, which means customers are meant to make repeated sales.
It is here that customer lifecycle which is important. Analyze customer lifecycle that allows you to understand and make better preparations for marketing, sales, and customer service teams to enable one-time customers into loyal customers and loyal promoters.
What is the customer lifecycle?
The customer lifecycle is the process of prospective leads becoming aware of the business’s products, purchasing the brand, and ideally becoming the company’s long-time customer. In CRM, the customer lifecycle is a term that describes the progression of steps that customers go through when considering, purchasing, usage, and maintaining loyalty to products and services.
Simply it outlines steps that the customers take during the progress through the sales funnel. It helps the marketing team, sales team, and customer service support team complete a picture of the customer’s journey and highlight areas of improvement.
It allows the team to leverage lifecycle to generate better lead acquisition content and deliver customer experiences that delight customers across every stage. Business needs to map customers’ journeys as they go along.
The customer lifecycle is depicted by an ellipse, which represents customer retention truly is a cycle. The goal of effective CRM is to get customers to move through various stages of the cycle again and again.
Customer appeal is a large aspect of success in retail. Therefore, it is important to dedicate enough
time and various resources to ensure your team is equipped with the right knowledge and information and has the technology to meet fluid demand. The Retail CRM can help grow business and brand everything in between to sell more online and offline.
Auro CRM works with businesses to ensure they have loyal customers. It helps businesses to create brand allegiance amongst the clientele. In addition, it helps in a better understanding of customers and their journey.
What is Customer Lifecycle Management?
Customer lifecycle management is a suite of tools that helps to ensure leads and clients receive high-quality, personalized service throughout. It is part of the marketing strategy. The customer lifecycle management provides effective one-to-one customer journeys to promote and improve customer loyalty and better brand reputation and tap into motivations that help to turn leads into brand evangelists.
The customer lifecycle management model is divided into five stages or steps:
Customer lifecycle management is about the development and constant improvement of the company’s relationship with customers. The idea behind CLM is managing customer lifecycle, which maximizes customer retention and increases profitability rates.
With fierce competition in the marketplace, every company needs to pay attention to this CLM.
Approach/ Reach: When locating potential leads, businesses need to demonstrate the value of products or services being offered. They need to show leads as to how they can become customers.
In this step or stage, customers search for a product or service after becoming aware of the issue or problem they need to solve. The stage is called Reach as it is a business’ chance to reach the customer when they are deliberating.
During this stage, the customer compares different products and services across competing brands, doing research as they read customer reviews.
In this stage, social media marketing, search engine marketing, and SEO, etc., inbound and outbound methods place your brand on the customer’s radar. The stage is successful when customers’ reach out for more information about your product and services and get a definitive price.
Acquisition: the leads in this stage enter the sales pipeline. Customer’s progress through, when businesses can continue to give product value offered products or services and address any concerns that may arise.
When a customer makes an inquiry customer enters the acquisition stage. At this stage, you must offer the best products and services to satisfy their needs and educate them on the uses of products and services.
Your content should give customers what they need to decide and make a purchase. All interactions should lead to a better customer experience at every touchpoint.
Conversion/ Development: leads that reach this end of the pipeline will complete their sales and become customers. In this stage, the businesses focus on the further development of relationships through follow-up with customers and customer feedback.
The conversion stage is about customers making a purchase and having entered the relationship with your business and not just making the purchase. It is time to retain customers so that you ensure these customers come back to your brand.
Retention: As customers give information, businesses need to analyze the data provided so
that company can create a personalized customer experience. This leads to further sales and often provides opportunities in the form of cross-sales and upselling.
Customer retention starts by knowing more about how customers feel. You need to check with them if they have liked the new product and service. Using information directly, you can make improvements to products and services and improve the customer service experience. Offer exclusive perks to customers, offer customer support, discounts, and referral bonuses to make your customer your brand promoter.
Loyalty:
The end goal of the customer lifecycle is the creation of your brand advocates that promote the company in their social circles. Brand loyalty is most important.
Brand loyalty is not created suddenly. It must be nurtured and instilled in customers through services experience, which solves for them and proves the value of your product.
Factors that tie CLM and CRM together:
Customer Lifecycle Management is a slow process that involves different facets of interactions of customers. It includes parameters like:
- Purchase history and its frequency and its quantity
- Customer acquisition
- Retention cost
- Post-sales service
- Post-sales support
- Duration of customer’s relationship with business
And precisely at this juncture, CRM comes into work. However, there is no compulsory need to have CRM for CLM, but CRM benefits way too much for customer relationship management, leading to an increase in revenue. The modern CRM’s is beneficial to customer lifecycle management.
The new-age CRM is more than customer service and customer support. But it is a complete software integration platform that takes care of customer engagement right from being a prospect, progressive maturing to lead, and conversion to customers.
The Auro CRM is a modern CRM that integrated collaborative features that facilitates
customer communication and marketing, sales, and support team collaboration from the CRM platform and dashboard.
CRM is the new face and developed especially to make an efficient and effective customer engagement platform that promotes business growth.
CLM metrics tell about the success/ failure of CRM
CRM platform is an all-inclusive solution for businesses to manage their customer’s relationship that enhances the business brand, promotes products and services, ensures sales, fosters customer retention, and thus increases sales to generate higher revenues. But how do you know if CRM is generating enough ROI for business?
As per the experts, effective CRM can bring positive change in Customer Lifecycle Management metrics. And if it does not, you will know where the problem is.
You need to compare below mention CLM metrics before and after implementation of CRM:
You need to check the frequency of the customer purchases post CRM implementation if it’s frequent or rarely.
Sizes of transactions: whether customers have large transactions or small transactions after
CRM implementation.
Cost of customer service: with CRM implementation cost of customer service has grown or shrunk down.
Response to marketing initiatives: check whether responses to new marketing campaigns have increased or reduced after CRM implementation
Cost of the customer acquisition and customer retention has increased or decreased after CRM implementation.
If your answers are positive, then it shows that your CRM is the best fit for your business and its customers.
The CRM improves effectiveness at all CLM stages:
The modern CRM is best to empower businesses to focus their efforts on the client base and better handle their data and communications. The CRM and CLM take advantage of cloud tech to provide easy accessibility to sales teams, whatever device, any location, and time.
Businesses use CRM to develop an accurate picture of the target audience and automate marketing efforts with targeted marketing and efforts across multiple channels. The results are qualified leads to enter the sales funnel and allow sales teams’ efficient management and direct resources for leads that will become customers.
When leads enter the pipeline, the modern CRM tech automatically gathers, analyze, and store relevant data. The business uses the data to create customer profiles, share with sales teams and give them knowledge about what leads want.
Tracking of leads begins here and gives sales teams the advantage of knowing which stage the lead is and what will be the actions that are needed to be performed to help them to progress further.
Leads that complete sale and become customers become valuable resources. The studies have suggested that it is 7 to 10 times less expensive to sell to repeat customers than acquire new customers. Moreover, repeat customers can generate up to 10 times more revenue.
Effective customer lifecycle management solution is very helpful for businesses to retain valuable repeat customers. It can be further nurtured through personalization, follow-ups, special offers, and loyalty programs. In addition, it helps to strengthen the relationship with direct communication and reliable data.
The CRM technology has many advantages as it provides aid to customers in the one-to-one journey, the sales team cultivates continued interest in the repeating customers. In addition, it helps to cement customer loyalty, gather and act upon customers’ insights and help these customers become the brand’s ambassadors.
The business is about Lead to Loyal, which is right CLM’s best practices that help ensure sales teams provide their clients with personalization and customization and the personal level of support they need.
To find the best solution for your business Auro CRM provides the answer. The Auro CRM is the driving technology behind customer lifecycle management. It is easy to use, integrated fully with the existing system, and features full user support.
