8 Best Customer Relationship Management Examples You Should Know

Best Customer Relationship Management Examples You Should Know cover

Looking for customer relationship management examples to inspire your brand? This article shows you eight examples and lessons to learn from each. But that’s not all. Toward the end of the article, we explore different CRM tools that might be helpful to you.

After reading this article, you’ll see how a good CRM helps to cultivate healthy customer relationships that lead to higher customer retention, loyalty, and lifetime value.

Feel free to read the whole piece or use the table of contents to find specific information.

TL;DR

  • Customer relationship management (CRM) refers to the strategies, processes, and technologies used to build and maintain relationships with customers.
  • The key to effective CRM and customer communication is tailoring your approach to the different stages of the customer lifecycle.
  • The impact of customer relationship management on your business:
  1. More user engagement
  2. Improved customer experience (CX)
  3. Higher customer satisfaction rates
  4. Better decision-making
  • There are three different types of CRM software, namely Collaborative CRM, Operational CRM, and Analytical CRM.
  • 8 customer relationship management examples:
  1. Tracking customer behavior
  2. Automated feedback collection
  3. Data-driven decisions
  4. Personalized customer experiences
  5. Automated customer service relationships
  6. Omnichannel service
  7. Strong social media presence
  8. Marketing automation
  • Top tools for better customer relationship management:
  1. Salesforce: Analytical CRM software used for sales automation. The software also includes analytics from support, IT, and marketing, thus making it easy for different teams to collaborate.
  2. Hootsuite: Operational CRM built for social media automation. The software allows you to work with multiple social media platforms from one dashboard.
  3. HubSpot: With its vast features and the integrations it allows, HubSpot helps to design, build, and track customer relationships. The platforms also align support, sales, and marketing teams to streamline business processes.
  4. Userpilot: A tool with extensive features to help you learn about customer interactions and improve customer experiences. It offers analytics, feedback, and onboarding features to name a few. Book a demo to see it in action.

What is customer relationship management?

Customer relationship management (CRM) refers to the strategies, processes, and technologies used to build and maintain relationships with customers.

The key to effective CRM and customer communication is tailoring your approach to the different stages of the customer journey. Your users will feel valued, and you’ll increase your customer retention rates.

Customer-Experience-Lifecycle-Map_Userpilot

Customer experience lifecycle

The impact of customer relationship management on your business

CRM is not only about building but also maintaining customer relationships. And the benefits are enormous. Some of the things you stand to gain include:

  • More customer engagement: CRM involves studying user behavior and optimizing interactions to meet customer expectations and needs. This will lead to an increase in user engagement.
  • Improved customer experience (CX): Good customer relationship equals positive experiences. With a better customer experience, you’ll also be able to build customer loyalty.
  • Boost customer satisfaction: Customer satisfaction happens when you consistently meet user expectations. Your exceptional service and continuous product improvement will make this possible.
  • Better decision-making: Modern CRM platforms enable businesses to gather extensive data on each customer. You can segment this data and use it to make more informed business decisions.

What are the 3 types of CRM systems?

There are essentially three types of customer relationship management systems, each with its uniqueness. Knowing the different types will help you decide on the right CRM tool, so let’s briefly go over them.

Collaborative CRM system

This CRM system aligns business activities and facilitates collaboration between marketing, customer support, and sales teams. Collaborative CRM systems also make it easy for different departments to share customer data, creating a holistic approach to customer relationships. This function is useful for large teams, especially ones that are spread across multiple locations.

Operational CRM system

The main goal of this system is to streamline business operations, customer interactions, sales, and marketing processes all in one place. Operational CRMs are the most common because they are used when companies aim to understand and nurture users at every point in the customer lifecycle.

Analytical CRM system

This is more technical and mainly focuses on using customer data to improve the user experience. Analytical CRMs analyze raw user behavior data to reveal customer preferences, preferred channels, touchpoints, trends, sales forecasting, etc. This CRM system is most useful to mid-size and large companies that need to analyze huge data volumes.

8 examples of customer relationship management worth knowing

There are multiple ways to study and interact with customers, each with unique advantages. Below are eight customer relationship examples to inspire you.

1. Tracking customer behavior

Behavior tracking is key to understanding your customers and how they interact with your product. You’ll uncover valuable data on purchase intent, causes of friction, etc., to see what works and what doesn’t with your existing audience.

There are different ways to analyze customer behavior, depending on the data you want to gather. You could track on-site or in-app, measure engagement with a specific feature, track the behavior of a certain user group, etc.

With all this data at hand, you’ll be in a much better position to increase customer retention and end up with more loyal customers.

Analyze user activity with Userpilot.

2. Automated feedback collection

Customer feedback lets you know what users think and feel about your product. Feedback is also a reliable way to eliminate guesswork and collect data that will enable you to make improvements customers will actually appreciate.

Implement surveys like CSAT or NPS to collect qualitative and quantitative feedback, then analyze the results to extract actionable insights.

It’s tasking to go about this manually. So, save time by using CRM software or a dedicated feedback tool to automate the process and collect feedback at scale.

With a tool like Userpilot, you can analyze both quantitative and qualitative feedback. Quantitative data is visualized through an interactive dashboard. You can even segment users to see how they responded to your surveys.

NPS dashboard in Userpilot

NPS dashboard in Userpilot

In the case of qualitative feedback, you can find themes in responses and tag common ones together. What’s more, Userpilot is working on an AI feedback analysis feature that’ll do all the hard work for you.

Example of qualitative NPS analysis

3. Data-driven decisions

With enormous amounts of data widely available to businesses, it’s easier than ever to make sound decisions.

Customer data will help to spot trends, analyze performance, predict user behavior, and much more. These will allow you to make smarter decisions to build good customer relationships and drive business growth.

Trend analysis in Userpilot for data-driven decision-making

4. Personalized customer experiences

This is one of the most important customer relationship management examples in SaaS. From reaching a prospect with a targeted marketing message to nurturing them through personalized support and closing a sale, your company should focus on delivering tailored interactions.

Personalization makes customers feel seen and understood, leading to a strong bond between them and the company.

Begin your personalization journey by segmenting users according to similar characteristics or behavior. All customer-facing departments in your organization should have access to this data. That way, no aspect of the customer experience will be overly generalized.

Advanced audience segmentation with Userpilot.

5. Automated customer support

In simple terms, automating customer support is using technology to enhance your customer service. Your support will be fast and available 24/7—which is what modern customers want. Automated customer service doesn’t just make your users happy; it also reduces support costs since it means fewer human agents.

Chatbots are popular among SaaS companies that are big on CS automation, and it’s something you might want to consider if you haven’t.

The image below illustrates how you can integrate live chat in Userpilot to assist your customers.

Zendesk chat integration in Userpilot

Chatbot integration in Userpilot

Aside from bots, self-service resource centers are another way to automate support. These are collections of helpful resources available to customers at all times to make sure they are never stranded.

As an example, you can see a resource center created in Userpilot:

Userpilot resource center editor

Userpilot resource center editor

6. Omnichannel service

Even if you’re super responsive, providing support on one channel only won’t cut it. Every user has a channel they prefer to use for communication. Asking them to switch to your preferred method will add friction to the user experience, so it’s best to be flexible by providing multiple communication channels.

Most SaaS businesses integrate web, in-app, social media, and email as their main communication channels. But choosing the right ones for you will depend on your audience. Test various channels and analyze user responses before deciding which ones to stick with.

Keep in mind that multichannel support doesn’t automatically make it omnichannel. Being omnichannel means your platforms are integrated, and the customer can switch from one to another seamlessly—that’s what you should aim for.

Also, consider customer touchpoints across the different user journey stages when designing your omnichannel support.

HubSpot-omnichannel-support-CRM-example

Omnichannel support example from HubSpot

7. Strong social media presence

We can’t discuss customer relationship management examples without mentioning social media—the 21st-century powerhouse of relationship building. From connecting with long-lost friends to finding love, people use social media daily to build quality relationships.

Business isn’t left out; most people depend on social media for value-driven activities like customer support and finding good products.

You can’t afford to be absent on social media. Utilize it to connect with customers, deliver product updates, listen to what people say about your brand, and so on. Used well, social media platforms can help you create customer loyalty, improve brand perception, and generate free word of mouth.

Here’s an excellent example of social media engagement from Moz:

Moz-twitter-reply-customer-relationship-managment-example

Source: Moz on Twitter

8. Marketing automation

So far, we’ve only talked about support automation, but your marketing efforts could also be automated to save time and increase efficiency. The right automation tools can help you create effective workflows and reduce repetitive tasks.

Common use cases for marketing automation include lead management, content planning and distribution, social media scheduling, etc. Most marketing automation tools will also include analytics to help businesses keep track of campaign performance.

Another use case of marketing automation can be automating surveys for different user segments.

Survey automation in Userpilot

Top tools for better customer relationship management

We’ve considered different customer relationship management examples and the common types of CRM systems. Now let’s look at popular CRM tools and how they can help you implement the examples you read above.

Userpilot

Engagement analytics on Userpilot’s dashboard

Userpilot is a tool with extensive features to help you learn about your customers and optimize their interactions with your product.

Userpilot can help you to:

  • Automate customer onboarding with strategic user flows and in-app communication. Your onboarding flow is the first experience a customer will have with your brand, and how you optimize it determines whether that experience will be a deal breaker or not. Userpilot helps you ensure it isn’t.

Creating onboarding flows in Userpilot

  • Segment your audience and personalize the in-app experience. Recall we mentioned segmentation as the key to effective personalization. Userpilot’s advanced segmentation feature enables you to do that with ease. You’ll also get performance reports to see how well you’re performing.

Segmentation criteria in Userpilot

  • Design custom microsurveys. You can deliver these microsurveys contextually and gather user feedback. Our software also lets you analyze the results through an intuitive dashboard.
CES survey in Userpilot

CES survey in Userpilot

Userpilot AI-powered writing assistant

Userpilot AI writing assistant feature

Salesforce

Salesforce-sales-automation-tool

Salesforce CRM

Salesforce is an analytical CRM tool used by sales reps for sales automation. However, the software also includes analytics from support, IT, and marketing, thus making it easy for different teams to collaborate. One of the upsides of Salesforce is its data visualization feature, which makes it easy to track sales growth, manage leads and contacts, create workflows, manage marketing campaigns, etc.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite-social-media-automation-tool

Hootsuite CRM

Hootsuite is an operational CRM platform built for social media automation. The software allows you to work with multiple social media platforms from one dashboard. You can schedule and publish posts, keep track of conversations, monitor engagement, gain insights on brand perception, etc.

HubSpot

RM-automation-tool_customer-relationship-management-examples

HubSpot CRM

HubSpot is another useful CRM tool. It’s a comprehensive platform that offers marketing, sales, customer service, CMS, and operations solutions. With its vast features and the integrations it allows, HubSpot helps to design, build, and track customer relationships. The platforms also align support, sales, and marketing teams to streamline business processes.

Conclusion

CRM isn’t limited to software products. It’s a holistic approach that also involves having the right strategy, developing processes, and tracking results to make better decisions. This article has delivered on its promise to show you customer relationship management examples and CRM tools to begin using. Go ahead and implement the examples that stood out to you.

Userpilot can help if you need a CRM tool to manage your onboarding flows, create personalized experiences, and survey customers to generate feedback. Book a demo to get started!

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