Spoiler alert, yes!
CRM is essential, it is everything that your business does to acquire, develop and retain business relationships. I have often described CRM using a simple production process. When producing products from raw materials, the materials are loaded into a hopper that prepares them and shuffles them through a funnel, at the end of the funnel is a magic box where materials are combined and what drops out is a completed product, ready for packaging.
CRM is almost exactly the same, raw Input data is dropped into a hopper (Marketing), the data is nurtured and prepared for a funnel (Sales), the magic box takes over (Customer Service) and what drops out, along with your profits, is Output Data that when packaged (Dashboards) is easy to analyse and tells you everything you need to know about the business.
So why integrate a Survey Tool? Surveys are not new to any of us, we are hit with surveys every time we buy something, product or service. As clients ourselves, our suppliers are essentially farming data from us and are trying to ensure that they have their own CRM system oiled correctly. So, let me ask you a few questions.
1. How clean is your Input Data?
If your raw materials are poor quality, the produced product will be of poor quality as well. Everything in your business relies heavily on clean data, clean when you put it in and polished when you pull it out.
2. Is your client, supplier and partner information accurate?
This is a question that every business struggles with. It has a negative effect on the business as it cripples the workforce’s ability to trust the data in front of them. This lack of trust will slow the flow of data through your business processes, funnels are supposed to speed things up but they cannot do that if inaccurate data is mixed in.
Sometimes the data is not inaccurate, it is just not there and you wouldn’t know you needed it if you were not analysing the system. “According to recent LoopMe research, marketers in the US and UK deemed the average lifespan of data to be between 20 and 23 months.
3. How happy are your clients?
If you haven’t heard of NPS, give this blog from my colleague a quick read: What is Net Promoter Score and How Can You Use It? As the article’s name suggests, NPS stands for Net Promoter Score and is a mechanism that allows a business to understand the level of satisfaction attached to products/services supplied or rendered.
So, why integrate a survey tool with your CRM?
In short, it answers all three of the questions that I just asked you. Survey tools integrated into a CRM will feed the data on the surveys back into your CRM.
- Survey prospects when they show an interest in your products or services, collect every piece of information you need and have the prospect do the heavy lifting for you. No manual entry and no complicated imports.
- Survey your clients, suppliers and partners, always have the correct address, the correct email, accurate billing and delivery information etc.
- NPS is managed and processed using any well-structured Survey Tool. Understand how happy your audiences are and tweak your CRM accordingly to improve the scores. The higher the NPS, the more you know that your CRM is working well.
Businesses are essentially mechanisms to legally print money. CRM is your printer, don’t use dodgy ink or poor-quality paper, always ensure that the printer has had a proper service and don’t have your printer supplied to you by someone who has not taken the time to understand what you need.
Collier Pickard is already helping several of our clients integrate a Survey Tool with their CRM. Survey Mechanics have fully integrated their survey solution with Maximizer CRM and the potential use cases are astounding.
As business partners and solutions architects the team at Collier Pickard live by a simple mantra, we delight our clients by helping them to delight their own. The journey starts with the right business partner who understands data management and just how important it is.
