Why Modern CRM Can Be the Key to Delighting Your Customers and Scaling Your Business

HubSpot is a Business Reporter client.

The business world is undergoing the most dramatic transformation we have seen in decades, exponentially hastening the pivot to digital and leaving some businesses unprepared. At the same time, the customer experience (CX) bar has been raised, and buyers increasingly expect businesses to be easy to buy from, engage with and get service from.

The customer’s question is: If a business I was interacting with provided a great digital experience during the lockdown, why wouldn’t they be able to maintain it in a post-pandemic world? For them, being delighted isn’t just an added value to their experience as your customer; it’s the inner foundation that your relationship is built on.

The focus on the digital experience has led the most disrupting companies to see unparalleled growth; however, there are potentially devastating risks for those companies that are not willing to reconsider their digital experiences.

The survival mindset of 2020 led to processes and operations not suitable for scale. As CX has grown more complex, most companies have brought in a patchwork of disparate technologies from different sources, each with a completely different underlying tech stack: a CRM to manage customer data, a content management system (CMS) to build a website and marketing automation to scale the efforts. When these completely different systems are cobbled together, the burden of making them work as one is foisted onto the customer. This route is holding companies back, slowing them down and depriving them of having a complete customer view.

To scale without adding complexity, businesses need better data that gives insights into each customer’s experience and leads to action for a seamless and contextual experience across all touchpoints. But how do you accomplish this? You may think of CRM—but probably not as you know it today.

According to HubSpot, the leading CRM platform for scaling businesses, today’s businesses need a powerful and easy-to-use CRM platform that enables customer-facing teams to have access to a “single point of customer truth” that they can all feed into—and, crucially, pull from—removing friction in customer interactions, giving insight into their unique journey and leading to actionable insights for a seamless experience. HubSpot also urges businesses to start thinking about CMS as part of CRM because of how strongly linked customer experience is to websites today. If the customer experience bar has risen, so too must their digital experience.

However, there seems to be a tremendous gap between businesses’ aspirations to delight today’s demanding customers and the tech stack they have at their fingertips. According to HubSpot research, 50% of business leaders say their CRM is difficult to use and 76% report that their team doesn’t use the majority of their CRM tools. What’s even more alarming is that 47% believe their software is incapable of helping them meet their business goals over the next three years. What’s the point of having a “strong” CRM if you aren’t fully leveraging its benefits?

On this front, HubSpot made a conscious decision to invest in its own product team, and it has created a modern CRM platform that is fundamentally built with customer experience in mind, so its customers benefit from software that’s cohesive, customizable and empowering. HubSpot’s powerful and easy-to-use CRM platform is carefully crafted in-house, and complemented with hundreds of apps and tools that can be integrated out of the box and seamlessly work together as the building blocks of the user experience. From small startups to iconic brands, HubSpot helps front-office teams deepen relationships with prospects and customers and provide a best-in-class experience.

We all know that having a good product is no longer enough. Today, you need to build a customer experience that is 10 times better than the competition’s. People buy from companies that create incredible end-to-end experiences—not just incredible products. Brands need to prove that they can truly enrich their customers’ digital experiences at a juncture in history when ease of comfort is ever more important to our day-to-day lives.

If your business is looking to kick-start its post-pandemic life, getting on board with HubSpot CRM could be just what you need.

—Industry view from HubSpot

This article originally appeared on Business Reporter. Image credit: Adobe Stock 420654503