How CRM Software Impacts Customer Engagement

It’s easy to assume that once you’ve turned someone into a customer, your work is done. But that’s simply not the case. To keep them a customer, you must continue to engage them. If you don’t, there’s a good chance they’ll eventually leave.

For that reason, you’ll want to measure customer engagement continuously. You’ll want to monitor the impact on customer engagement that your customer relationship management (CRM) platform has by:

  • Tracking customer interactions
  • Analyzing customer data
  • Measuring customer loyalty

You can do each of those things within your CRM to save time and resources. Keep reading to learn how.

Tracking customer interactions

One of the best ways of measuring the impact on customer engagement is tracking customer interactions with your business. You can do this by using your CRM to monitor different customer touchpoints, including:

  • Email
  • Phone calls
  • Online chat
  • Website visits
  • Social media

By monitoring how your customers interact with you, you can identify areas to improve engagement. For example, maybe you’re sending out occasional emails to a certain customer, but they’re not opening them or clicking the links inside.

In that case, you could reoptimize your email campaigns through your CRM. Alternatively, you could try contacting them via another channel, like by phone.

Analyzing customer data

Another way to measure customer engagement impact is to analyze your customer data. There are plenty of different data points you can analyze, including:

  • Customer demographics
  • Purchase history
  • Website behavior

Your CRM can collect this data and generate reports to help you assess and identify trends and patterns. These reports can also show you the best way to segment your customers into different groups.

Why segment your customers? Simple—customer segmentation allows you to create more specific, personalized marketing campaigns for each group. Since personalized marketing will be more specific to each customer, they’ll interact with it more, leading to higher customer engagement.

When collecting customer data, make sure you’re careful about data privacy. Store your customer data in a secure location. Any good CRM will have data security features, so make sure yours does. Then you can integrate your CRM with different data sources and tools to gather the data you need.

Measuring customer loyalty

The third major way to measure CRM impact on customer engagement is to monitor customer loyalty. How can you define customer loyalty? Well, there are a few metrics that contribute to this measurement, including:

  • Customer retention rate
  • Customer churn rate
  • Customer lifetime value (CLV)

All three of these metrics give you insight into the customer lifecycle. They show you how many of your customers stay with your business, as well as how many leave. CLV also shows how valuable your customers are to your company. 

You can track these metrics in your CRM, but they have limits. These metrics can tell you when customers are leaving, but they can’t tell you why. That’s where the previous steps come in.

If you see a lot of customers jumping ship each month or quarter, you can then look at customer data and interactions to see what’s causing them to leave. Likewise, you can look at the interactions with the customers who stay to figure out what’s keeping them around.

Using data and insights to improve customer engagement

Once you’ve used all the types of data listed above to measure customer engagement impact, you can use that data—and the insights you gain from it—to drive customer engagement higher. Your data can show you all the areas where your customer engagement could use improvement.

For example, maybe you find that your customer support could use more personalization. In that case, you could go into your CRM and spend time segmenting your customers into more specific groups. Then you could create campaigns that more directly target each of those groups.

Alternatively, you might find that a particular campaign could benefit from automation or customer feedback loops. Whatever it is, your data can point the way. By consistently monitoring CRM impact on customer engagement and reoptimizing as needed, you’ll be able to drive far more success for your company.

Challenges and best practices

When measuring CRM impact on customer engagement, a few issues could arise. For one, if you’re not careful, you could experience problems with data quality and privacy. That’s why it’s crucial to use a CRM that can ensure those things with data security and validation features.

You shouldn’t just rely on your CRM, though—take the time to perform some basic data cleaning and train your team on how to properly manage and migrate data. That training should be ongoing as you continue to reoptimize your data process.

By choosing the right CRM and effectively training your team, you can ensure accurate measurement and interpretation of your customer engagement metrics, helping you more effectively drive customer engagement.

Improve your customer engagement with Nutshell

Analyzing customer data, tracking customer interactions, and measuring customer loyalty are all ways to help you determine customer engagement and how your CRM is helping drive it. You can use that info to reoptimize your marketing and your CRM workflow.

You shouldn’t wait to get this process started—the sooner you start drawing insights about your customer engagement, the sooner you can make improvements that drive more revenue for your company. And the first step of that process is to choose the right CRM.

With a variety of data categorization, sales automation, and reporting features, Nutshell is the perfect CRM for your business. You’ll also get access to our world-class customer support team. 

Want to see for yourself how Nutshell can help you improve customer engagement and grow your business? Check out our 14-day free trial today!

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