The Importance of Centralized Communications

Businesses have a substantial amount of communication. From communicating within their organizations to communicating with leads and prospects, the communication types are vast, and they vary.

CRMs gather the company’s entire communications into one platform, streamlining all communication into one centralized location, making it easier to communicate inside and outside your organization.

CRMs can have dedicated inboxes for all communications, including text, phone, email, and even social media.  With one location for all the important touchpoints with your customer, you save time, create better responses, and build rapport.

Risk Reduction

Reducing the number of places your sales team has to go to communicate can reduce the risk of missing clients' messages. Bouncing back and forth between platforms like Facebook and their email inbox takes time away from engaging with customers. With the right CRM setup, all communications can be tracked, seen, and responded to directly from the CRM. 

Centralizing your communication also reduces your risk of customers having to repeat requests or ask for things more than once. With all their communications in one place, your entire business can thrive. Your sales team can review other inquiries when trying to solve problems for current and future customers. Customer service can provide better service and avoid making the customer repeat themselves.

By reducing the risk of missing communications or inquiries and reducing the customer's need to provide important information multiple times, you can increase your sales and retention.  Good communication leads to lasting relationships, so it’s imperative that you have the platform to support it.

History of You 

You’ll have a complete history of communication with your clients that you can refer to at any time during the sales process, even if the client contacts you across different channels.

For instance, a prospective client may start a conversation by requesting information from your chatbot. Then, you might follow up with an email. Later, you and the prospect move to discuss details over the phone. A CRM could allow all of this to be done from one place and be recorded in one place, no matter which paths the client takes to contact you.

The sales process varies, and not everyone will take the same path. They could have contact with multiple people on your team, so the ability to view all communications, not just yours, is very valuable. In addition to not having the custom repeat themselves, the sales team member can prepare more accurately if they know what has already been discussed.

It also gives you the opportunity to personalize future correspondence with the client as needed. It should be a habit of your sales team to review communication history before contacting a customer.  The ability to reference past conversations in their follow up is beneficial. Customers feel heard and learn to trust your brand more.

Better Internal Communication 

In addition to improving external communication with clients, your CRM can also improve internal communications among teams and departments.  An efficient CRM platform allows sales, marketing, service, accounting, and IT teams to see what stage a client is in and all interactions with the client.

If someone in accounting has a question on a client's status for payment, they can see for themselves instead of emailing back and forth with sales. This saves time and allows team members to act faster, together.

Sales and service team members both benefit from centralized customer communication through your CRM.  Sales team members can add notes to clients’ profiles from meetings and set reminders to follow up. This helps build customer rapport and improves communication efficiency in your sales process.

Service employees can better assist customers by having an accurate view of the clients’ history of interactions with your company. This can save valuable time when addressing customer concerns. Customers don’t have to be placed on hold while information needs to be verified. With all information and communication in one place, the service team has what they need to provide the best experience.

Centralized communications through a CRM can improve your workflow and allow your sales teams to better support potential and current clients. Centralized communication also allows for in-depth analysis of customer information so you can track trends, improve customer service, and optimize sales performance.

Contact Rustbrook Agency with any questions about centralizing communications. Follow @RustbrookAgency on Twitter for more updates like this. You can also join our mailing list for more updates/offers.