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Tools that can boost conversion rates by 300%, sales by 29%, productivity by 34%—yes, these are powers of customer relationship management (CRM) systems. A technology that is the cornerstone in customer relationship marketing provides a helping hand for most sales and customer support teams. Still, a proper CRM system can assist in all the departments, including marketing, logistics, IT, finance, or other employees—better internal communication and increased productivity are just a few among many benefits. And even though there is a large variety, there are websites like Sofware World that provide software comparison and make choosing best lead management software an easy task.

A simple fact: 91% of businesses with ten or more employees use CRM software. The number witnesses that CRM can be beneficial for almost any company, despite its activity. Plenty of possibilities allow you to choose software that is the best fit for your business. A CRM tool helps in storing and organizing customer/prospect/lead contact information, identifying sales opportunities, scheduling appointments, recording issues, managing marketing campaigns, and so on. And all this information is centralized in one database that is conveniently available to any employee who might need any data.

CRM has a lot to offer. But how to get the best out of it? Here are the four best CRM practices that can boost your business success.

  1. Live and targeted communication

Integrating a customer communication solution, such as Intercom, opens up the way for more efficient and successful customer relations. First of all—with Intercom, you can run targeted live communication: chat real-time with the customers on your website or Facebook. Integrated products also allow you to interact inside your web and mobile apps, by email, SMS, etc. A few numbers about live chats: one reply in a chat increases a visitor conversion to 50%. Besides targeted communication that pays off, another pro is convenience: all communication is in one place. That leads to smooth and effective communication with any customer. And we all know the power of positive customer experience, right?

Here is how it looks from the Intercom’s side:

Also, live communication helps you have a more detailed view of customers: not only salespeople but also the customer support team collects the information about the clients. So you double your resources of customer knowledge!

  1. Efficient customer support

When you have a lot of information about your customers, it gets easy to meet their needs. Managing requests properly is one of the key factors in successful customer service relationships. Integrating a request management tool—e.g., Zendesk—is a huge help here. It allows seeing all the data about customers and their requests in one place—including who and how solved particular questions. It is super convenient if you want a smooth collaboration between customer service and sales teams. They both have access to the same data, everyone can see the newest information, and close the cases faster. So you can keep high-quality customer relation way easier.

  1. Exploiting custom fields and tagging

Segmenting customers is another CRM practice bringing benefits for sales. For example, Teamgate CRM makes this process super easy, smart, and highly customizable. There is plenty of possibilities to exploit custom fields and tags functions. You can create them according to the company’s needs—some may find useful tagging by marital status, for others access to the client’s LinkedIn profile would be invaluable. Tags may refer to the customer lifecycle stage (lead, prospect, customer), action taken (filling contact form, downloading an ebook, making an order), interests, and so on. They are generally used for info that can quickly change. Meanwhile, custom fields are convenient for a more permanent data: name, phone number, birthday, employment status, social network profiles, membership duration, subscription type, company size, revenue (continue as desired). In Teamgate CRM, there are four main custom field categories—People, Companies, Leads, and Deals—which you can fulfill with further detailed info about each of them.

In any case, segmenting customers generously assists in reporting, filtering, searching, and—of course—targeted marketing. If you send an email with a personalized subject line, the open rate increases by up to 26%. What’s more, researches show that targeted emails generate around 58% of revenue for a company. Personalization is not the future of marketing—it is present already.

  1. Leveraging analytics

Nowadays, marketing is data-driven. A CRM system is made to collect and organize customer data, so why not using this to the max? When you have a clear picture of your customer, it gets way simpler to present a customer-specific offer. And modern CRM tools are capable of generating data-driven decisions that are based on the most recent, real-time information. They can perform analysis (thus saving your valuable time)—so you can instantly see and interpret the metrics, spot the weakest points, and the most promising ones.

Any company can make the best fit

These customer relationship marketing best practices show that CRM tools bring benefits to companies of all sizes. Convenience, time efficiency, better customer relations, better customer experience, profitable marketing, bigger revenue—these are several advantages of how CRM can help. It is especially useful for small or medium companies that often need an effective solution for streamlining the processes. The mentioned practices testify that CRM can be customized and adapted precisely to each company’s needs—and this is an efficient way to achieve maximum results.

Enhance Customer Experiences and Increase Revenue by Storing Live Chat Information in Your CRM

A century ago, the world was buzzing with excitement about a new lucrative industry that promised to transform the way we live – oil. In the digital era we live in today, that industry is data. In business, analyzing data allows us to action evidence-based business decisions in a way that was never possible in the past. It grants us deeper insight into how our customers behave and what they really feel about our products and their experiences with our brands. It’s a smarter way of doing business. One that leads to improved ROI, increased customer loyalty, and better customer experiences.

Today we’re going to delve into how including live chat information in your CRM supports these goals of a data-driven future. We’ll be discussing the importance of live chat CRM software, specifically focusing on Intercom CRM integration. Let’s take a look.

The Importance of Having Live Chat Information in Your CRM

CRMs have been continually evolving both in style and functionality in recent years. Advanced and varied integration options are now a common feature of CRMs. In recent years there has also been an increased focus on offering multiple communication channels to customers. The logic is simple: people are a varied bunch, and as such, our communication preferences vary. This shift goes hand in hand with the increased focus on shaping customer experiences.

While companies of the past would predominantly compete on price, today companies compete by offering excellent customer experiences. Convenience is a huge commodity in the digital age, and consumers have made it clear that if you can make their interactions with a company easy, convenient, and painless, they will keep coming back. Customers also favor companies who have a thorough understanding of their wants and needs, and this is something that can only be achieved through data analysis.

Today, live chat is the leading digital contact method. Customers expect to be able to talk to companies in real-time over chat. Live chat solutions benefit both businesses and customers. One study by Kayako found that 79% of businesses reported that implementing live chat resulted in increased sales and revenue, as well as increased customer loyalty.

The usefulness of live chat goes beyond simply offering a different communication preference that customers enjoy. All live chat conversations can be easily collected, stored, and analyzed. This means you have a continuous historical snapshot of your customers at all times. This becomes possible with Teamgate and Intercom CRM integration. A fully integrated Teamgate and Intercom CRM allows you to see the full picture and take a dynamic approach to supporting your customers.

The Benefits of Collecting Live Chat Information in Your CRM

  • Centricity – Client information can be better analyzed if it’s all in one place. Sales and customer support agents have instant and comprehensive access to customer information. They can use this information to inform their upsell or support strategy.
  • Cohesion between teams – Both the customer support team and the sales team have access to all information. This means that the salesperson can gain a deeper understanding of the day to day struggles of the customer and use this to empathize and build a rapport with them when going for the sale.
  • Communication styles – By its nature, live chat is a great way to have fast and less formal interactions with your customers. A more light-hearted approach to communication allows customers to share their thoughts and feelings more freely. The benefit of this is that customers will often tell you how to best help them. They will tell you what they want. They will tell you what they like about your products, as well as any negative experiences they’ve had. This information is invaluable.
  • Access to Information – The average customer service response time on live chat is 2 minutes. When you compare that with social media (10 hours) or email (17 hours), it’s easy to see why live chat is often preferred by customers. For businesses, the quicker you can respond to customers, the better. Not all customers will wait for a response, some will simply move on and forget about it. When this happens, you’ve missed the opportunity to learn more about that customer.
  • Analysis Made Easier – It’s easier to analyze text data than recorded voice data from calls. Although voice recognition software is improving each year, it’s still much easier to gain powerful insights from text data.

What Does Intercom CRM Integration Look Like?

When you integrate Intercom with your CRM, all chat information from your clients will be attached to the client’s contact card in the CRM. This means you will have a complete communication history right in front of you when you need it the most (each time you interact with that customer).

Who Benefits From Intercom CRM Integration?

We’ve already established that live chat is a convenient way to connect with your customers in real-time and offer more value. But where does this integration have the most impact? Is it primarily for large businesses, or do small and medium-sized businesses stand to make huge gains too?

The truth is, while businesses of all sizes can experience great benefits from Intercom CRM integration, small and medium-sized businesses stand to gain the most. For small and medium-sized businesses, curating excellent customer experiences is how you set yourself apart from the competition. When you cultivate convenience, create positive memories, and deliver the customer exactly what they want, you can greatly increase customer loyalty and boost your retention rates. Although studies on this topic vary considerably on the exact numbers, the pattern is clear: customer acquisition is always more expensive than customer retention.

Get Started Today!

Teamgate CRM offers an exclusive and direct integration that is unique in the market. With Intercom and CRM integration, every conversation with a customer via live chat is automatically displayed as part of the communication history on your Teamgate CRM. We are committed to empowering businesses to achieve their goals of effective and efficient communication with customers.