How the customer engagement software can complement your CRM?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an effective software to capture, analyze and make adequate use of all your customer related data from a single platform. But there are some limitations of CRM.

With the advancement of cloud computing, you will get several CRM options available in the market and almost all of them offer sales automation, social insights, contact management, accounts, and other features. But customers now want real-time assistance through multi-channel communication. Apart from traditional phones or email, nowadays people prefer other modes like live chat or social media to contact and communicate with the company.

So, here I would like to discuss how several customer engagement tools like live chat, co-browsing, video chat can complement the CRM and fill up the gap to manage and deliver excellent customer experience.

1. Real-time multi-channel communication

CRM offers communication over phone and email. You will not be able to use live chat, voice/video chat for internal purpose and to communicate with customers. These are some of the cons of CRM. Apart from that, in case of social media communication, CRM does not allow you to communicate with customers coming from other social media channels like Facebook and Viber.

But customer engagement software can fill up the gap!

• Live chat software offers real-time assistance on the website which enables visitors to live chat, voice/video chat with the support agents.

• As you can easily integrate live chat software with Facebook, customers can live chat with the team from your Facebook company page itself or through Facebook Messenger.

• It allows businesses to engage with customers through messaging based communication like Viber. After the integration with Viber, your support team will receive Viber messages on the live chat dashboard itself and also can reply from there.

[Tweet “56% of shoppers prefer Live Chat over other communication methods.”]

2. The human touch in customer communication feels good

With CRM software, you can automate the whole process but your business communication loses the human touch. There is a difference between talking to a real person over the phone and just listening to the recorded voice. Sometimes it also feels great to get personalized assistance.  Take a look at some of the CRM systems examples that offers humanization in customer communication. 

How the customer engagement software personalizes your engagement?

• Live chat software allows the support agent to get detailed information like geographic location, past page visits, contacts of visitors because of which he/she can personalize the chat greetings and whole communication process.

• Any preferred image can be added for showing the human side of that agent. It helps to engage with customers in a better way.

   

3. Lead generation

Through CRM, you and your team get notified regarding a lead when someone fills up an inquiry or a contact form or any other CTA (Call to Action) forms created by you. After that only he or she becomes your prospect lead. Then one of your team member gets in touch with him for further discussion.

But what about all those customers who visit your website, may be get interested about your products or services but don’t contact you? They also may have some queries regarding your services and want to talk to you. You should also contact them.

[Tweet “Live Chat increases recurring purchases by 300% and average cart size by 40%.”]

Well, the customer engagement software offers the solution!

• With ‘Visitor Monitoring’, you will be able to see how many visitors are browsing your website at a time. Next, with the help of ‘Proactive Chat’ function, you can reach to them directly for offering instant help and discussing about your offerings. You never know, he or she may end up buying the services.

• Before visiting your website, customers may check your company pages on social media channels like Facebook. Don’t forget that they also can be your prospect customers. So you also need to engage with them. Through ‘Facebook Messaging’ they can reach you for any kind of assistance. Real-time communication is possible here on the company page itself and also through Facebook Messenger.

How real-time engagement enhances the customer experience?

So, let’s use the best of both. Some of the disadvantages of CRM can be covered up by the customer engagement software. Several live chat solutions offer Developer API by which live chat tool can be integrated with desktop or mobile apps. It also can be integrated with your current CRM system. The advantages of clubbing these 2 software will be:

• When your support agent will get any chat invitation from the website visitor, the visitor’s personal details like name, email address, geographic location etc will be captured by your CRM. You can manage the whole thing from a single platform.

• The visitor information which you will get from live chat will be stored in CRM. From there, by using those data you can create separate customer profiles for reference. Agents can use those customer profiles while chatting to those same customers.

• Once you integrate live chat software with CRM, chat history will be available. In many cases easy access to old chat conversations will be useful.

• After the integration, the sales team also will be able to see all the information collected from chats and they don’t need to leave CRM for it. Apart from that, they also can send mails to those customers from CRM independently.

   

Let’s hear from you!

Do you know any other engagement software for providing better customer experience? Share with us in the ‘comment’ section.