The benefits of upgraded customer relationship management (CRM) software are immeasurable. The time, money and effort saved for both agents and customers is notable. With 72% of consumers expecting their problems to be solved instantly upon contacting customer service, you need a CRM that can keep pace with increasingly complex consumer preferences. Investing in upgraded CRM tools is a worthy cause that can streamline your support team’s efficiency and provide rich insights for the rest of your business.
The demand for automation and self-service options in customer service is significant. Eighty-one percent of consumers under the age of 35 have used chatbots and we anticipate that number to continue rising. By intentionally connecting your CRM and chatbots — two crucial elements of your CX strategy — you’ll allow your support to team to increase productivity and bolster customer relationships.
In this blog, we’ll dive into the features of a modern CRM that you may be missing out on and ways to measure the success of your chatbot.
Features of a Modern CRM and Chatbots
All chatbots are not created equally. Modern chatbots boast features that save agents time, make customers feel heard, and can save your business money. A great CRM delivers end-to-end service automation across all channels, fostering more brand-customer communication and a more seamless routing and agent handover experience. Businesses need to tap into technology to eliminate the repetitive tasks with intelligent automations that can detect intent, collect relevant information, automate agent interactions, and route conversations based on customer data or request type.
Here are just some of the top features of a modern-day CRM:
SMS Integration
The best way to help your customer is to meet them where they’re at — on their mobile device. CX professionals identified SMS as one of the channels they anticipate will become increasingly popular, according to recent Kustomer research. By up-leveling the importance of SMS in your CX strategy, companies can easily scale support by delivering a personalized chatbot experience based on real-time data and trigger actions. For example, integrating SMS or a social messaging tool like WhatsApp, throughout your process can help you communicate with customers more frequently and more reliably.
Trigger actions are another step forward in chatbot automation. These automations create experiences that work for each channel, but be sure to keep in mind how the interactions and experience will be perceived by end-users in each channel. The steps to setting up your triggered action are as simple as creating a draft, adding a dialog and adding interactions. Plus, there are existing resources and tutorials specific to the Kustomer CRM designed to empower your organization in implementing automation.
Intelligent CRM chatbots are now able to deliver contextual and personalized information that feels human, and can seamlessly hand off to agents when necessary. With the right technology, agents can focus on building relationships with customers and fixing complex issues in a timely manner.
Social Listening
Your CRM should be the go-to location for all customer data gathered across every channel, including social media. Social listening, or monitoring what is being said about your company throughout social media, is a valuable tool when it comes to understanding the perception of your company and pain points that your customers have. This allows you to instantly engage prospective buyers and fuel social commerce by communicating with your customers.
The question becomes: “How do I effectively leverage the insights from social listening to be used in the future?”
The answer to this burning question: integrate your CRM into your social listening strategy. Many modern CRMs allow you to view and respond to customer interactions on a post or ad directly within the platform, including threaded replies on Facebook and Instagram. The data from these interactions are automatically stored within your CRM, for use in optimizing future communication.
Proactive Messaging
Beat customers to the punch by proactively engaging with them based on personalized attributes such as pages viewed, page URL, VIP status, and more. Utilizing this data from your CRM throughout your chatbot and virtual assistant allows you to hyper-personalize customer experience. For example, you can create rules to start an assistant with a different dialog based on whether the customer is logged in or anonymously browsing your site.
For chat conversations, based on criteria such as the page or amount of time spent on a page, proactive pop-ups can be triggered. This allows you to engage with your customers at the exact moment they show interest in a facet of your brand. And this conversation is stored within your CRM for future use.
Proactive messaging can also unlock business growth and up-sell opportunities. For example, a delivery service could send a proactive message to a customer about a few of their favorite restaurants, alerting them of new menu options to try. With the right tools this kind of engagement can be both completely personalized and completely automated.
Dynamic Form Fields
Streamline your information collection process by implementing a more dynamic inquiry form. Depending on where the customer is in their journey or what interactions they’ve already had, form fields can flex based on previous responses and preferences. This allows you to use just one form for several inquiry categories. Plus, dynamic form fields are a great way to save valuable agent time and impress your customers.
Measuring Your Chatbot’s Success
Like any good strategy, it’s imperative that you measure the success of your CRM chatbot. Taking a look at internal data and external feedback can paint a picture of the effectiveness of your chatbot. There are two primary ways to audit your success:
1. Chatbot Analytics
The back-end view within your CRM should give you a real-time glimpse into the use of your chatbot. To enhance the customer experience, there can be continuous tweaks and optimizations made. When it comes to monitoring the success of all individual assistants, modern CRMs come equipped with standardized reports to help you analyze your assistants to understand how users engage with them, how often assistants solve your customers’ problems without agent participation, and how often agents are hopping in to assume control of an automated session. By comparing various interactions — fully automated, transferred to agents, abandoned by the end-user, and more — you’re able to gain a greater picture of what strategies are and are not working for your customer base.
2. Multi-Question CSAT
A customer satisfaction (CSAT) score is one of the most insightful customer service metrics. It’s used to measure an individual customer’s feelings about a specific interaction with your support team using a Likert scale question. By presenting customers with ample opportunities for feedback, you’re opening the door to improved satisfaction and uncovering opportunities for improvement by asking different follow-up questions based on the rating received.
Chatbots and CRMs are powerful tools for any company. Combining these two tools can create a more positive customer experience and help your agents be more productive and effective with their work. Looking for more information on what to look for in a successful CRM? Download our Buyer’s Guide now.
