Startup Guide: Business in 2021 - Beyond CRM

Post the pandemic's occurrence in 2020, 2021 is the year of revival for all businesses. Be it brands or start-ups, all of them are working to recover the losses and eventually earn profits. For any business to succeed, ensuring their customer base is extensive, happy, and satisfied is essential. As the saying goes, the customer is the boss, hence, their needs and desires must be taken care of. To ensure customer satisfaction, one of the effective ways has been to have a quality CRM process in place.

Using data analysis to connect and engage with customers is something that has been utilized optimally by businesses and is one of the key elements of the organizational growth strategy. However, experts predict that in 2021, businesses will step up their game and move beyond CRM to attract their customers, provide them satisfaction and a good user experience, and boost their sales and revenue. CRMs today can quite easily be integrated with third-party tools like CallHippo, Active Campaign, Zapier and many more. Such integrations are designed to improve the productivity and efficiency of the team. Such a step is essential to give them a competitive edge and will help businesses secure their position in the market.

Tools to boost business in 2021 beyond CRM

You need to have the right tools and strategies catering to the various departments to ensure the overall growth of the company. Here we share with you some of the ways to boost your business in 2021 beyond CRM.

Remote communication and project management tool

With the work from home concept being the new fad, it is the need of the hour for any business to have a remote communication and project management tool in place. This will not only facilitate smooth communication despite being the geographical barriers but will also enable the team to stay updated with the recent developments in various projects on having the access to the project management tool. Tools like Callhippo are extremely effective in scenarios when your sales or support agents need to communicate with potential clients, prospects and also within the team.

Email tracking tools

Irrespective of whatever industry we are working in and whichever designation we are at, a lot of our time is spent on drafting, sending, and replying to emails. Emails are required for all types of internal and external communication- be it to connect with existing and prospective clients and customers, with the employees, or even cold emails to garner leads, all of them are time-consuming. However, analyzing how your emails work and perform is extremely essential for the growth of your business.

In such scenarios, email tracking tools are a major help to gauge the bulk emails’ inbound-outbound rate, manage the email data, performance, and success rate. The best part is almost every popular email marketing tool can seamlessly integrate with CallHippo. This allows the traditional email marketing tools to have a call button right within the interface thus eliminating the need to switch between multiple software thus increasing team productivity.

Tools for feedback and Survey

To stay ahead in the race to excel, one needs to know their shortcomings and the possible areas which offer scope for improvement. This can be done with the help of surveys and feedback by the team and customers. Hence, having the requisite tool is critical that will help provide the required honest feedback highlighting the areas that are performing well and those that require improved performance. The best bit about this aspect is that it can be undertaken for any element of the company- be it employees, product, services, customer interaction, etc.

Security and privacy tools

In the present times, where frauds are super easy to happen, customers have apprehension about their security and privacy of data in the online space. To boost your business, you need to invest in good security and privacy ensuring technology so that your customers are satisfied. Investing in a GDPR-ready CRM system, switching your website to an HTTPS domain, removing their irrelevant personal information, along with assigning a data protection officer to ensure that there is compliance with GDPR are some of the additional ways that can be combined with the security tools to ensure the privacy of the customers and their data. The task of finding the right security and privacy tool for the organisation can be daunting and thus software discovery platforms can be extremely useful.

Personalization technology

With the increased digitization, personalization has also come at the forefront of businesses. If used effectively, personalization can help achieve the desired objectives. Not only it facilitates one on one communication and engagement with the customers but also extends high-end services on behalf of the brand.

Sending exclusive offers, promotions, and communication directly to them in real-time via personalization will help you develop a deeper connection with your customers. Additionally, knowing about their history, their interactions with your business, and providing them with the flexibility to interact with your brand the way they want to when they want to, and how they want to, will further help in increased customer engagement and loyalty. This will eventually contribute majorly to the growth of your business.

We are thriving in a digital era. Hence, we must adopt state-of-the-art technologies to give us a competitive edge in the market. Suite for processing documents, email marketing, content curation, and marketing are some of the additional important tools that businesses would be increasingly preferring and requiring in 2021 to facilitate smooth functioning.

Summing Up

Of course, CRM and real-time CRM are critical, but being limited to just customer relationship management won't help organizations to grow and prosper. Every market is competitive and time-sensitive and hence they need to offer something unique to their customers to differentiate them from the other players. They need to move beyond the basic CRM strategies and come up with innovations to expand their customer base and ensure that the existing one is content, satisfied and loyal.

While there are various other tools for accounting, IT, and communication aspects to facilitate seamless working, it all depends on your industry, your goals, and your requirement along with your preferences as to which tools do you wish to stress upon. For this, it is also essential that you conduct a thorough analysis of your organization, its present scenario, and its working. It will help highlight the areas that are performing well and the areas that require improvement for which you need to introduce certain tools and policies.

Complementing the use of ergonomic technological solutions along with CRM will extend the requisite push to drive businesses’ growth in 2021.

The author of the article is Ankit Dudhwewala, Founder of CallHippo and SoftwareSuggest.