Companies invest a lot of time, effort and money acquiring and retaining new customers. However, it takes more than just a great product or service to capture and keep a customer’s loyalty. Developing meaningful relationships with prospects and customers requires resources from sales, marketing and support to help them throughout their interactions with a business is something we should need to do.

Properly managing customer relationships often requires businesses to overcome years of incremental purchases of channel-specific solutions:

- Marketing automation system

a customer service tool there, none of which tie directly into the transactional record. Since it requires significant investment to thread together this patchwork of separate systems, many businesses forgo this effort altogether, leaving customer data stuck in silos.

- Managing Multiple Sources of Customer Data

Many businesses fail to provide consistent and relevant experiences because they are unable to bring together the multiple sources of customer data throughout the company—from sales and marketing to commerce, professional services and support.

Marketing teams create campaigns to attract new leads, engage and convert visitors into buyers, and promote long-term customer loyalty. It is difficult for marketers to foster brand engagement if they are only communicating in one direction to the entire audience with the same universal messaging. Without customer data to drive targeted, personalized marketing campaigns, brands stumble in the dark with a planned schedule of promotions and special events to drive sales.

Customer support and professional service organizations are vital to ensuring customer success and long-term retention.

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Read: Sunk Cost Fallacy

-Building Stronger Customer Relationships

A customer relationship management (CRM) solution provides a single repository of customer data. Although different parts of the organization use CRM in different ways, everybody benefits from having access to one central place to access all the details on customers and prospects. The benefits a CRM provides each team includes:

• Sales has visibility into every aspect of the customer relationship, including marketing campaigns, support cases, contracts and orders. Sales force automation (SFA) provides unified­ sales processes from opportunity, upsell and quote management to sales forecasting and commissions.
• Marketing can utilize customer profiles and buying history to tailor more consistent and relevant campaigns. Marketing automation delivers these brand communications at the right time and channel for maximum engagement.
• Support is able to provide better service by easily referencing a customer’s recently sent marketing campaigns, estimates and completed orders. Automated case management processes improve customer satisfaction and lower service costs.

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