Is your CRM data making your business a “low performer”

According to research by Accenture¹, if you use accurate customer data, your business is five times more likely to be considered as “high-performing”; one that will substantially outperform your competitors over the long term.

Capturing and maintaining accurate customer data is an obvious goal for any CRM Manager, but why would that give your business such a significant competitive advantage?

Well, there’s certainly a demand for improved personalisation from consumers. For example, 73% of consumers prefer to do business with brands that use personal information to make their shopping experiences more relevant. And a study by Infosys² found that 86% of consumers say personalisation plays a role in their purchasing decisions.

So, these studies show that it’s likely that your customers would prefer your communications to be better aligned to their interests and purchasing history. Your business can only achieve this degree of personalisation by capturing your customers’ data accurately at the point of entry, maintaining it as it naturally erodes over time, and enhancing it with additional datasets.

The desire by your customers to be treated as individuals and receive personalised communications will likely impact sales beyond that initial purchase: reducing customer churn by just 5% can increase your profits by a whopping 25% to 95%, according to research by Bain & Company.

One of the key factors behind the growth of CRM is accessibility to accurate data. Companies want access to customer data in real-time, with mobile and cloud solutions leading the way. From customer service and email marketing to personalisation, you need to connect platforms and technologies with customer data to provide a more personalised experience.

So how can you make the shift from a low performing business to a high performing one by using your customer data more effectively?

We’ve pulled together these five tips to get you started:

1 – Increase your productivity & service levels

To engage your customers across multiple devices and multiple channels, you need accurate data and robust processes. With accurate address data in your CRM software, you can create a Single Source of Truth for each of your contacts and provide your organisation with a 360-degree view of their activity.

For many organisations, holding data across many physical or cloud locations and bringing all that data together in one database may be impractical. However, with a Single Source of Truth data policy, data can be held in different physical locations so long as they are synchronised to provide a single, trustworthy data source.

2- Streamline workflows and processes

Address lookup integrations within your CRM turns tedious manual steps into easy, streamlined activities. Processes that had previously required employees to switch between apps and input data manually become quick, easy operations that are less error-prone. And by using a cloud-based address lookup plugin updated from one central Postcode Address File (PAF), you can ensure consistency and accuracy across all your address data.

Software integration solutions often require hiring a costly IT team or having your current IT team dedicate countless hours to coding and creating a system. However, address lookup integrations specifically made for CRM solutions such as Address Lookup for Microsoft Dynamics, Sage and Salesforce from Hopewiser deliver a maintenance-free solution. In addition, you can download our software for free and only pay for the lookups you use.

3 – Enhance business analysis and decisions

According to Search Business Analytics, a major challenge cited by 41% of companies is tying customer data to business action. With accurate customer data in your CRM, you’ll be able to review customer behaviour, gain actionable insight, and pinpoint the best opportunities to support your business growth. For example, where to improve your marketing campaigns and identify high performing customer clusters – crucial information to help business decisions on new store/warehouse openings and logistic planning.

4 – Enrich your client’s data to use your CRM database for personalisation

Each customer has different preferences when it comes to communication and buying habits. Accurate and personalised communications will improve your customers’ perception of your brand.

You can apply numerous datasets at the point of contact to capture additional information as an address is verified. That may include standard reference numbers, grid references, SIC codes, and building type. This enhanced data will support business decisions and internal checks to find duplicates and link your customer data together.

5 – Stop your customers leaving!

As stated earlier, reducing customer churn by 5% can increase your profits by 25% to 95%. Maintaining accurate customer data within your CRM will enhance your service levels, highlight mistakes and reduce fraudulent activity on the account. In turn, this will help keep your customers loyal and avoid damaging your relationship with them and so minimise churn rates. In addition, the data you store in your CRM enables you to recognise behavioural patterns and predict when a customer is likely to leave. By having access to those insights, you can resolve your customer issues much more quickly.

Hopewiser can help you achieve your CRM success.

At Hopewiser, we’re passionate about data. We help businesses engage with their customers through self-service via our portal, purchasing online, customer service engagement, bureau services, software, support, marketing and analytics.

Our solutions integrate into many platforms, enabling us to accelerate your projects and the successful cleansing and continuous management of your customers’ data.

Hopewiser’s customer integration projects assist complex integrated multi-platform architectures.

When we created the first address data software back in 1982, we were the only Royal Mail Value Added Reseller in the UK. The knowledge we have acquired and the sheer amount of data we have processed in that time sets us apart from everyone else in the market. So if we do things a little differently from others, it might be because we have the information they don’t!