User Experience and CRM: Where Digital Meets Physical

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When you first start your company, you get the best CRM software for customer service that you possibly can, and you implement it with both your sales team and your customer service partners. The data gathered there is something used every day by both departments. Salesman use it to remember details about each customer that help them relate and guide their sales journey.

The customer service partners use the software to resolve complaints, assist customers with issues, and even to offer new services when the customer contacts you about another issue. There is one department that may be missing out, but that should be integrating data from your CRM into their everyday activities as well: the marketing department.

Content is Still the King

Whether you are talking about digital marketing, a content marketing strategy, or your physical advertisements and marketing materials, content is king. What you say and why you say it matters more than the best graphics or amazing hero videos and photos. How do you know what content to create, and what will resonate with your customers?

The first key is to look at them. Look at who they are and analyze them. Are you appealing more to men than women? This will inform the colors you should use in your ads along with the words. It should also inform your blog content. Are your customers rich or poor? Where do they live, shop, and hang out?

All of this information can be used to shape your content, and content includes everything from web design to colors, photos, and logos. It also includes the words on your site, from the text on your homepage to the subject and titles of your blog posts.

The User is the Queen

If content is king, then the user is the queen, and if the queen is not happy, nobody’s happy. This has never been truer. It used to be that you could game the system, make Google and search engines happy, and create other content to satisfy the user, but the more Google learns, and the larger part machine learning and artificial intelligence play a part in the search game, the more search engines see your site exactly how a user would.

Besides, the ultimate goal in ranking higher in Google is to get more organic search traffic. This traffic will not stay and become customers if you are not giving them the content they want. And you have a ton of information at your fingertips about who your customers are. This tells you a great deal about how to reach them, and how to make them happy.

When it comes down to the end of the day, the most frequent reason cited for not doing content marketing is that “it doesn’t work” or that “it’s hard to track ROI.” Both of these things are true if you are not using the data you have now to keep your current customers coming back and reach new ones as well.

Are You on Target?

Your marketing team probably has a persona, or better yet several personas they developed before embarking on marketing and advertising campaigns. Your CRM can tell them one simple thing: are they on target?

The questions to ask are twofold. One, does the customer profile you are reaching match with the original persona? If it does, great! Your marketing is on track. If it does not, then the next set of questions becomes relevant.

If your target does not match who you are reaching, you have two choices. Number one is to “shift fire” and start aiming for more customers like the ones you are actually reaching. This is the answer if the customers you have are the kind of customers you want.

The other option, if you are simply not reaching the right customers or experiencing the growth you are looking for, is to determine why your message is failing, and correct it. This means determining what resonates with your current customer that you want to resonate with a different group, and then changing your message instead of your target.

Either way, your CRM can help you determine what is going wrong, what is going right, and informs you what to do about it. Your CRM is really your enterprise data about your customer, and is much more vital than simple industry data or even social media listening.

Pretty much everything you do in customer service comes down to one thing: user experience. Whether that experience is online, in person, or on the phone, what happens to the customer and their perception of that will determine if they keep coming back, if they become an ambassador for your brand, or they become a detractor and share their negative experience with others.

Conclusion

Your CRM can help every department, from sales in building relationships to customer service in repairing them, to serve your clients better. It can also help your marketing team in determining if targeting is working, and refining their message and target audience. Once you have the best CRM in place, be sure you are using it to its fullest potential.

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Samantha Acuna is a writer based in San Francisco, CA. Her work has been featured in The Huffington Post, Entrepreneur.com, and Yahoo Small Business.