Customer experience is now defined as the battleground to acquire and retain more customers.
According to a recent study by Walker [1], 86% of buyers will pay more for a better customer experience. And, surely by 2020 customer experience will become the key brand differentiator beating price and product.
More specifically, this is extremely true for organisations dealing with claims. In fact, claims represent a pivotal moment when customers are closely evaluating their experience, observing the organisation's behaviour and are more inclined to develop negative feelings.
Businesses are yet to find a common ground on which department is responsible for customer experience. However, we believe that, because of the complexities of the customer journey and the number of factors influencing it, this must be an effort involving the entire organisation.
Daniel Newman in an article for Forbes [2] explains that maintaining good communication with customers and taking into account their feedback are the basis for understanding the consumer journey and are critical to building an effective strategy. For this reason, businesses can find the use of a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool highly effective when changing their approach to customer communication.
CRM tools have multiple benefits as they focus on supporting the relationship with customers. But, what are these benefits and how can they impact our CX strategies?
Let's look at the main advantages using a CRM tool can provide to your organisation's efforts.
1. Keep your customers feedback organised in one place
Listening to your customer feedback is very important in order to make sure your product or service is fulfilling their needs. Having feedback recorded under each customer profile in your CRM tool along with their history will build a precious bank of knowledge raising your team awareness and helping to inform decisions.
2. Make communication with customers easier and faster
Communication is an important element of building a positive customer experience and using a CRM tool allows you to retrieve contact information, build contact profiles and communicate from one consolidated platform.
3. Share valuable information at every level of your organisation
Collaboration is key to providing a uniform level of service across your organisation. Giving your team access to customer information and history of previous communication enables everyone to stay on the same page and provide a consistent service.
4. Provide customers with what they want
The knowledge stored in the CRM tool - such as previous communications, products purchased and claim history - will help you offer relevant products or services and further captivate them.
5. Create customers' profiles and help with segmentation
A CRM tool will help you categorise your customers in to different segments. Having this categorisation will help you target your marketing efforts and communicate on a more personal and specific level. For instance, effective customer segmentation will make it easier for you to share different marketing messages with each customer depending on their preferences or past behaviour.
6. Allow meaningful communication with customers
The more you know about your customers and the better you can relate to them and personalise their experience. If a customer just arrived back from holidays, asking them about it and spending a few minutes on that topic will make them feel cared about and help build a rapport.
7. Monitor the consumer journey
Every customer is different but monitoring their path can help you highlight common patterns to analyse and make informed decisions. For example, you may discover that customers perceive appointing an adjuster to their claim as an excessively long process. Digging deeper into this can reveal some inefficiencies in your operations or even disclose new opportunities to improve the level of engagement during that phase.
8. Make the customer experience a responsibility of everyone
Using a CRM tool across your organisation will make everyone more familiar with your customer base and able to contribute with valuable information. Customers' feedback and history should influence every aspect of your business and your company should share a common objective: Make Customers Happy! 🙌
Our claim-focused CRM tool, completely integrated into Claimable, supports our users in their customer relationship strategies. To learn more about it, you can read our blog post.