In this digital-first era, the importance of maintaining direct communication with your customers via online communities cannot be ignored. To facilitate a smooth customer experience and streamline community activity, integrating your online community with your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) becomes the need of the hour.
A critical reason to initiate this practice is to simplify processes and obtain a hawk-eye view of your customers. This is possible only when the community platform and the CRM are in perfect alignment. If not, the collected information will only create inter-departmental confusion, lead to data loss, poor communication, and bring forth tracking challenges, hampering the customer experience and CSAT.
Let’s take a look at 4 key reasons to integrate your community with a CRM system:
1. Track Customer Activity: There’s a ton of activity that goes on in an online community. Tracking these activities enables community managers in extracting insightful data. On funneling this information into the CRM, the sales personnel can hugely benefit by identifying numerous upsell opportunities. The needs, demands, and expectations of customers can be easily assessed as they move along the buyer’s journey. A close assessment of activities enables businesses to develop personalized solutions and cater to the needs of the customers.
2. Enable Automatic Permissions: Wondering how you, as a community manager, can put your customer’s purchase history to good use? On integrating the community with a CRM, the hassle of manually setting permission subsides. A CRM system comes with the functionality of allowing automatic permissions based on past purchases. Imagine the amount of time you will save! Having this integrated feature allows community visitors to instantly access information relevant to their interests. Furthermore, businesses are also able to facilitate faster conversions.
3. Develop Customer-Centric Strategies: Acknowledging the needs of your customers enables you to build a virtual bond with them. This motivates them to convey their ideas about a particular or synonymous feature and engage in meaningful discussions on the community platform. Integrated with a CRM system, this information also helps the product development teams in analyzing if they can introduce the demanded feature.
4. Fuel Business Processes: CRM integration can prove to be incredibly valuable for a business’s overall processes. Tracking business activities ensures that every customer is heard and necessary strategies are curated to meet their expectations. Sales, product development, and support staff can immensely benefit from the data received from increased customer engagement.
An online community is a herculean tool that can carve an impact on your users and add value to businesses. It becomes an even more powerful tool when integrated with the right CRM system.
Integrating community activity with CRM empowers businesses to serve their customers better and achieve diverse objectives. Businesses can obtain a 360-degree view of their customers and the activities happening in the community with advanced tools. CRM integration also aids in doing a comprehensive performance analysis leading to better conversions.
Want to integrate your community with your CRM? Talk to us!
