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Customers want what they want, and while they might not always be “right,” making them feel valued, respected, and heard are important pieces of great customer service.

In today’s digital world, personalization plays an important role in customer service, too. Whether that’s delivering customer-specific content or facilitating speedy ways to engage more frequently, communication is key for attracting and retaining loyal customers.

And customer service is quickly evolving past just meeting customer needs. It’s also all about the total customer experience — everything from what they perceive about your brand and reputation, to how they feel when they engage with you.

In one recent survey, almost 50% of respondents said that customer experience is the top business priority for the next five years, outranking both products and pricing.

Whether you’re a small company gaining new customers or a large enterprise trying to respond to an increasingly long list of customer needs, figuring out how to deliver the best customer service can be challenging, even for customer service pros.

And great customer experiences are increasingly important in today’s competitive markets. One customer experience survey indicated that some 32% of respondents will walk away from a company after just one bad customer service experience. That same survey also revealed that 73% say customer experience is important for purchasing decisions, but sadly, they say less than half (49%) of companies actually provide a good customer experience.

But there is good news. Good customer service not only works, customers say they’re willing to pay more when they have a great customer experience.

So what can you do to improve your customer experience and improve your company’s approach to customer service? You may be surprised to know you already have a great tool in your arsenal, and if you don’t, it’s easy to add it to your operations and get on the right track.

What’s the linchpin? It’s your customer relationship management tool (CRM).

First, what’s a CRM?

CRM stands for customer relationship management. In modern business operations, this is usually a software solution that meets a range of functions, from managing your customer database to delivering customer-specific marketing and sales information.

Beyond serving as a contact database, most companies use their CRMs to manage their customers’ journeys, where everyone starts as an inquiry or lead with the goal of eventually being nurtured into a customer, and, if done well, a returning customer for the long-term.

Insight Leads to Success

CRMs give companies insight into their customers — from demographics to other relevant buying and relationship data — that just can’t be obtained through other client management processes, like simplified email programs or databases.

A CRM is more than an address book. It helps you automate processes, from identifying your relationship with your customers to establishing a persona — or buyer type — for each customer. Knowing who your customer is and what your customer wants and expects from you is a solid foundation for building your customer relationship over time.

Here are 9 ways your CRM can help you deliver exceptional quality customer service:

1. Team-wide customer journey insight: Have you ever worked in a company where one of your top salespeople is working a great lead, where you know about it because he or she shared information in a recent meeting, but, other than tracking that person down, you have no idea where how the lead is being nurtured or where it is in your sales journey? What happens if that sales team member gets sick or gets promoted or leaves the company? How do you get insight into all the emails sent, phone calls exchanged, and meetings set? Understanding that relationship, and what has been communicated to the customer when, is critical for great customer service. A CRM means that anyone with your team's established permissions can check on a customer’s status, and, where appropriate, jump in to take the sale over the finish line as needed.
2. Company-wide sales data: Sales are more than just financing your company. There are a lot of related moving pieces, like purchase orders and billing, accounts receivable, and shipping. A CRM with integration into your business management solution (BMS) can give all of your related teams insight into the status of all your sales, from leads, to processing, to successful deliveries, and even reorders. That means, at any time if a customer has a question and needs service — for example, did you receive payment? — anyone on your team can get the data they need to respond and keep your customer happy.
3. Eliminate redundant tasks and duplicate entries while decreasing human error: As a customer, have you ever patiently waited for a product to arrive, only to be frustrated when it never shows up? You know your order went through because you received a confirmation email and then someone followed up to confirm your order and let you know it would go out soon. When it never arrives, you follow up and realize that when the person who processed your order entered your shipping information into the shipping software, they swapped two numbers, so your product got lost in transit. A CRM with BMS integration can keep your customers (and your employees) happy by eliminating the need to duplicate manual entries throughout disparate systems and automatically share relevant data within all of your related systems — like orders, payment, and shipping.
4. Always in stock: Customers are happiest when they get exactly what they want when they expect to get it, so integrating your CRM into your enterprise resource management (ERP) solution can also help improve your customer experience. By integrating sales information, for example leads and a historical perspective of sales over time, with your ERP that manages inventory, you can feel confident you’ll always have the products you need on hand, when your customers want them. 
5. Respond in real time: Because most CRMs have a gamut of automated communication features, you can improve your customer service by using your CRM to handle a range of customer service issues. For example, look for a CRM that will integrate with your existing website. Instead of having customers open up an email, send it in and wait for a response, you can use your CRM to embed a customer service form right on your website. Then, by setting a range of parameters within the CRM, (for example, if and when rules) you can automatically generate a response for some of your most common customer service issues. You can even use it to automatically escalate more difficult service needs and communicate across a variety of platforms like email, social media, text, chat, and more.
6. Send customized communications: Like the customer service widget we mentioned for response, not only can you speed up communication delivery with a CRM, you can also personalize your communications. By automating and personalizing your emails, for example, you can pull data from a variety of database combinations to deliver customer-specific messages to your leads and clients — you can ensure customers are always delivered relevant and timely information to help them along on their customer journeys.
7. Reports and analytics: One of the greatest benefits of using a CRM is the ability to see and report on customer metrics that matter to your organization. Not only can you use the CRM to see how many new customers you have, where they are in your pipeline, and how you’re doing on retention, you can also use your CRM analytics for insight into your customer experience. Did your customer email a question that’s never gotten a response? Did your customer place an order and it wasn’t received? CRM analytics can give you real-time insight into your entire customer process, enabling you to identify and resolve any gaps or issues long before your customer gets frustrated and complains.
8. Ensure consistency: Even if you prepare your customer service teams with scripts and role-playing exercises, there are commonly varying customer experiences for people based on which employee they engage with. And, regardless of training, it’s difficult to ensure consistent communication and experiences when they’re primarily person-led. Instead, your CRM can help ensure consistency by automating tasks for your employees (for example, sending a pre-approved email) and tracking your required processes with insight and reporting capabilities.
9. Track meetings and other important dates with reminders and alerts: Your CRM can also help ensure customer satisfaction by ensuring you never miss an important date. For example, if you promise a customer you’ll return a call or send a reply email by a certain data, you can use your CRM to send you reminders (or automate the response) so you can be sure you never miss an important task and don’t frustrate customers.

There are a lot of CRM solutions on the market. How do you know which is right for you? How do you know which has the most (and best) integration capabilities with your existing systems, services, and applications? If you need help selecting a new CRM or think your existing CRM is struggling to keep up, register for an aACE webinar today to learn how we can help.

You don’t have to be a veteran e-tailer to understand the value of loyal customers. They’re not only repeat purchasers, but they have higher average order values than one-time buyers. They’re also brand advocates who consistently refer new customers to your online store. And they increase your average customer lifetime value. Considering all these benefits, it’s no wonder why e-tailers are looking to boost loyalty amongst their customer bases.

With 20% of your customer base driving 80% of your revenue, increasing your number of loyal customers will make a massive impact on your bottom line. Here are some powerful ecommerce tools that help improve long-term loyalty.

Improve Customer Service with Live Chat

Customer service is a core function of every ecommerce business, and it should be an area you aim to improve whenever there’s an opportunity. Your customers can provide valuable feedback about your products and their experiences shopping with your brand. It’s also more cost-effective to focus on retention rather than acquisition — up to 25 times more economical, in fact. In the long run, focusing on the customer has massive benefits for e-tailers.

So, how can you go about improving customer service? Consider adding live chat to your site. It’s quickly becoming the top choice of support channel with 41% of consumers preferring it to phone or email support. Shoppers love the convenience and immediacy of digital chat, which lets them skip the instrumental hold music of a phone call but still communicate with a human representative. Adding live chat to your site is as simple as installing a widget or plugin, and you’ll see a major return on investment.

Personalize Experiences with Artificial Intelligence

Personalization is the name of the game in ecommerce, where there are no face-to-face interactions like in a brick-and-mortar store. Today’s consumers are looking for a way to get that same recognition, and e-tailers are responding by curating personalized experiences. Everything from emails to product recommendations are tailored to each shopper, and the results are overwhelmingly positive. Eight in ten shoppers are more likely to buy from a brand that offers personalization, and 44% will become repeat buyers after having a curated experience.

Artificial intelligence will help you bring this ecommerce personalization to life and improve long-term loyalty. It’s a broad category that covers everything from chatbots to “smart” search results, and it’s already changing the game for e-tailers. There are plenty of tools available to personalize your customer journey and digital marketing, so do some research and determine what’s right for your business.

Boost Consumer Confidence with Returns Software

Purchasing from an online store always comes with a bit of risk because shoppers can’t touch or try out products before buying them. They have to rely on photos, descriptions and product reviews to get an idea of whether they want to make a purchase. Sometimes orders arrive damaged, or the e-tailer sends the wrong items altogether. Like we said, there’s a risk, especially when ordering from a brand for the first time.

E-tailers can assuage this consumer uneasiness by offering shoppers a forgiving returns policy and hassle-free process for sending items back. Studies have shown 58% of consumers want a “no questions asked” return policy, and a whopping 92% said they’d buy again if returns were easy. Thus, hassle-free returns are your key to long-term loyalty. The simplest way to revamp your returns system is with ecommerce returns software, which gives your customers an intuitive self-service portal and streamlines the back-end once returns are initiated. And everyone gets to breathe a sigh of relief knowing the days of jumping through hoops to return an order are behind them.

Stay Top-of-Mind with Retargeted Ads

How many times have you had a customer make one purchase and then never buy from your store again? If you have good prices and a solid email marketing strategy, it’s probably not your fault. With so many online stores on the market today, it’s easy for your brand to get lost in the noise — and buried in a shopper’s inbox. Instead, try retargeted ads to stay top-of-mind so consumers buy from your store next time they shop online.

Tools like the Facebook Pixel make it incredibly easy to set up retargeted ads. Once the code is added to your website, shoppers get served ads on social media platforms and on other sites they visit. Each ad is a subtle reminder to circle back to your online store, and it can turn one time purchasers into longtime customers. Research backs it up: ecommerce stores see a 128% increase in conversions from retargeting, as well as a 1046% jump in brand awareness.

Long-Term Loyalty Is Just a Few Tools Away!

Even the best e-tailers can use a little help from technology, especially if it helps them win over more shoppers and convert them to lifelong customers. Try these loyalty-boosting ecommerce tools in 2021 to supercharge your bottom line.

About ReadyCloud

ReadyCloud is a suite of connected systems designed to improve the way you work. Shipping, Returns, Growth Marketing and more are all connected through ReadyCloud for better communications from Admin to Operations. To learn more about how aACE+ ReadyCloud can help you accelerate your operations, check out our aACE+ ReadyCloud ReadyShipper video.

Learn how to set your business up for success this spring with our March webinars. Last month, we covered topics ranging from the basics of aACE to transactions and sales orders. Here's what we have in store for March:

Shipping and the aACE Pick App – March 2nd

Your customers depend on you to get them the right products at the right time. Learn how aACE streamlines the pick, pack, and ship process with our Pick App and shipping integrations, and take a sneak peek by checking out our feature highlight and demo video.

Templates, Campaigns, and Rate Cards – March 9th

Learn how to save time and prevent errors related to duplicate data entry with standardized orders, purchase orders, pricing, and more. Before the webinar, check out our feature highlights on rate cards and campaigns.

Production and the aACE Job Shop App – March 16th

Your production process has a lot of moving parts, and your business depends on keeping them all running smoothly. Learn how aACE can help save time and reduce data entry errors with our robust production tools, including the aACE Job Shop app. Before the webinar, check out our feature highlight and demo video to get an advance look at the app.

Commissions – March 23rd

Discover how aACE's comprehensive commissions tools can help you incentivize your sales team and reward your affiliates for referring new business.

Made to Stock Inventory – March 30th

If you build products to stock according to anticipated consumer demand, this is the webinar for you. Learn how aACE handles MTS inventory from replenishment to cost application and beyond.

Register now to save your spot! We look forward to seeing you in our webinars and hearing your questions during the presentations.

In 2021, customer satisfaction is no longer just about great customer service: it’s about the entire customer experience. And just when we thought we may have had a handle on exactly what we need to do — and when and how — to improve our customer experiences, along came the pandemic of 2020 and everything we thought we knew went right out the window.

If you’re like most businesses, the coronavirus has changed just about everything that once felt normal. Your offices or facilities may be vacant or at minimal capacity. Your Monday morning water cooler chats may have been replaced by Slack messages and Zoom calls. Your brick-and-mortar storefront likely sees fewer customers, and you’re probably looking for more technology solutions to facilitate sales and transactions while giving your clients more contactless services and product delivery.

In the era of COVID-19, how can you deliver exceptional customer service and improve customer experiences when it’s increasingly challenging to engage face-to-face? How do you make customers feel important — even essential — to your success? If you’re not already using customer relationship management software, or you're not using your existing CRM solution to its fullest capabilities, you’re likely already setting yourself up for a big challenge. That’s because many businesses don’t understand exactly what a CRM is or what it can do for you. Because of that, it can be difficult to know which core features you should look for in a CRM.

What’s a CRM?

A CRM is a customer relationship management tool. It’s primarily a software solution that enables you to automate and manage a number of customer-related functions, from management of your customer database to the ability to create and deliver customer-specific marketing and sales information such as emails, website messaging, social media targeted, call reminders, meeting scheduling, and much more.

Why do you need a CRM?

A CRM can give you insight that’s difficult to achieve with spreadsheets, calendar reminders, sticky notes, and disparate word processing tools, email clients, and contact lists. Think of it as a one-stop shop for all of your customer data and engagement tracking.

CRM Features to Improve Customer Experiences

Here’s a quick look at an example of how you might use a CRM to manage a customer engagement, highlighting some of the key features your CRM should include:

• A potential customer sees a targeted ad on social media, clicks the ad, and goes to your website.
• If your CRM uses tracking codes, you can track the potential customer’s engagement from the ad to your website.
• If your CRM is integrated with the CMS for your website, you can even track your potential customer’s journey through your website. Which pages did the person view? How long did the person engage with your website?
• As the customer clicks through your site, you can use your CMS and CRM integration to deliver a user-specific pop-up message. Because this is the first time this customers’ IP has been logged on your website, you assume it’s a first visit so you can deliver a message featuring a special savings — 15% off the first purchase or services.
• To get the savings, all the person has to do is enter an email address.
• Hopefully at this point, because the potential customer wants that coupon, you’ll get a real email address. Your CRM can now associate that email address with the customer’s engagement as a potential lead.
• Now it’s time to nurture that lead. What will it take to move that customer from a few clicks on your website to a purchase?
• As the customer engages with you more, (opens emails, clicks links, returns to your website) you can use your CRM to gather more data. For example, you could have the person provide you with additional contact information, such as name, address, and phone number. All of this data can be stored within your CRM. If the person moves to a sale, and your CRM is integrated with your invoicing and accounting systems, you can even use that data to help speed up form-filling to ensure you’ve got the right data in the right place to complete everything you need from payment to shipping.
• If your CRM has a lead-scoring feature, you can have it automatically score that person’s engagement with your company along the buyer’s journey. For example, which web pages were viewed, which emails were opened, which links were clicked, which forms were filled out? With a lead score, you can gather more information about how likely it may be that this person will move from a lead to an actual sale.
• Let’s say a person scores high on your lead-scoring metrics. If your CRM has automated reminders and task-setting, you can send an email or text alert to someone on your team to reach out to the potential customer to facilitate the buyer from consideration to purchase.
• With CRM integration into your ecommerce site and point-of-sale solution, once the person makes a purchase, you can update the buyer’s information in your CMS system and then use it to provide customer support, like help desks or FAQs. You can also generate a new email campaign to move the customer to another purchase, upsell, or get feedback about the experience.

One of the great things about using these CRM features and the ability to track your customers’ experiences with your company is that you have insight that otherwise would be difficult to get. For example, you can see which email and marketing campaigns generate the most leads and which campaigns generate the most new customers. This will help you fine-tune your engagements for future scaling.

And if your CRM has reporting and analytics, you can access the data you need when you need it, using easy-to-understand dashboards that help you communicate success and gaps to your team and upward to senior leadership and other key stakeholders.

You can even share data from your CRM across multiple teams enabling cross-departmental collaboration, for example with your marketing and sales teams.

CRMs are also great because with their power of automation, you can always engage your customers when they come to you, no matter what time, day or night. And, you can ensure the messages you’re delivering to their needs are tailored so they have a unique and memorable customer experience.

Are you considering a new CRM for your company or do you think you could benefit from one that has more features to meet your needs?

Here are some other features you might want to consider:

• Can act as a document repository: One of the important components of collaboration and organizational culture is making sure everyone speaks the same language and shares the same message. A CRM is a great place to house and share customer-focused documents, for example, an FAQ or pricing list, so others on your team can access that data and share as needed.
• Enables forecasting: Earlier we mentioned the benefits of reporting and analytics, which are critical, but you may also benefit from a CRM solution that enables forecasting based on that data (and other data integrated into your CRM).
• Ease of use
• Has the features you need now and as you grow
• Has a simplified pricing model that clearly explains user limits, maintenance fees, upgrade costs, licensing, and more
• Security: Data is king and data is valuable. Threat actors know that and they’ll do what they can to get to your data, so ensuring your CRM meets all of your legal, regulatory, and compliance standards for data security and privacy is a must.

Interested in learning more about how a CRM can make your business more efficient? Register now to save your seat in one of our upcoming webinars!

Because of the pandemic, we may never return to the business-as-usual we used to know. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. With social distancing mandates and government-set lock downs, many businesses have broken through innovation barriers at an unprecedented pace, especially when it comes to more rapidly selecting, implementing, and adopting technologies that save time and money and improve operational efficiencies.

But if you’re a small-to-medium sized business (SMB), you may wonder just exactly where you should target your investments. Everyone these days seems to have a solution for a work process. Departments and employees often make so many recommendations to senior leadership that it gets too hard to weed through them all, especially if you have a limited budget.

Salesforce’s Small and Medium Business Trends report, for example, points out that SMBs that embrace technology and that are “digital-forward” may be a key differentiator in dealing with market volatility, and technology plays an important role in influencing successful operations.

Here are a few highlights:

• 51% of respondents said technology drives customer interactions, which is important to note because almost half of respondents (48%) also said that due to the pandemic, contactless service options (i.e. digital commerce, mobile orders, etc.) are now areas of focus
• 46% say technology influences an SMB’s ability to stay open and operational
• 42% say tech drives customer growth
• 40% say it drives employee productivity
• 32% say it drives collaboration

But having technology at hand doesn’t necessarily contribute to operational resiliency. It’s about having the right technology to meet your organization’s unique needs — and ensuring that it can scale with you as you face new challenges and grow your services and offerings.

Unfortunately, as small businesses evolve into mid-size, and mid-size businesses grow into large enterprises, those technology stacks can grow larger and often increasingly disparate.

This leads to data that is siloed within one department, location, or sometimes, even with just a single employee.

The good news is, however, that an increasing number of businesses and their leaders are seeing the value of cutting the cord on so many disparate systems and instead unifying the operational core with a single solution that integrates cross-business functions.

According to that Salesforce survey, 72% of SMB leaders think a centralized application that tackles all core operations is helpful – and a growing number of businesses are actually decreasing the total number of applications they’re using as they move toward more technology consolidation. In March 2019, for example, the report estimates that on average an SMB used 5.2 applications for operations, compared to 4.6 in August 2020.

That push for consolidation goes hand-in-hand with the pandemic-push for technological efficiencies, where at least a quarter of SMB leaders are making more investments in tech.

When it comes to narrowing that technology stack, here are some of the key things the survey respondents said they were looking for when they’re considering a new technology:

• 74% Ease of use
• 73% Vendor trust
• 71% Price
• 67% Customer experience impact
• 66% Easy to maintain

And here are some of the many ways SMBs are using technology to streamline operations for customer relationship management (CRM):

• Email marketing
• Customer service
• Project management
• E-commerce
• Marketing automation

If you’re an SMB and you’re on your journey to streamline technological efficiencies without increasing the number of systems and software you need, where do you start? You may be surprised to know there’s one tool out there that can handle all of your needs — an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution.

An ERP is software that your business can use to manage operations, from inventory and production, to back-office tasks like customer management, billing, human resources, accounting, and more. And ERPs are no longer just for big enterprises. There are an increasing number of advantages and cost savings for SMBs who put an ERP to work for them.

Here are a few benefits of investing in an ERP:

• Task and workflow automation that removes the need for manual, repetitive data entry across multiple applications
• Decreased human errors and increased data integrity
• Confidence that your ERP follows approved processes and procedures
• Elimination of data silos across your organization so the right people can access the data they need, when they need it, in near real-time to make better data-driven business decisions
• Increased efficiencies by letting the system automation handle certain workflows so your people can focus on more important tasks
• Increased visibility into your sales process, from marketing lead to customer
• Better inventory and product management
• Streamlined invoicing, billing, and accounting processes
• Faster order processing
• Timely and accurate budgets and sales forecasts
• Improved tracking of benchmarks and KPIs, and customizable reports to ensure you always know how you’re doing and where you need improvements
• Insight to forecast potential issues, for example supply chain disruptions or product back-order, before a problem compounds
• Happier customers with improved customer experiences
• Simplified integration across a variety of systems and applications

These are some of the many benefits of using an ERP for your SMB. If you’re a small or mid-sized business and you’re not sure if now is the right time to invest in an ERP, register for an aACE webinar today and we’ll show you how an ERP can transform your business, save you money, and improve efficiencies.

aACE can help you streamline your operations and set your business up for success – learn how in our February webinars. Here's what we have in store:

February 2nd - aACE Basics

If you’re brand-new to aACE, this is the webinar for you! Learn how aACE’s system-wide conventions make it easy for new users to interact with the solution. Check out our video before the presentation to get a sneak peek at aACE’s user-friendly design.

February 9th – Managing Transactions

aACE makes it easy to track each step of a transaction, giving you the peace of mind that comes from having one solution manage every aspect of a sale or purchase. We’ll explore how users manage transactions in aACE using the Purchase Orders module as our example.

February 16th – Sales Leads and the aACE CRM App

Your sales team is moving fast to keep your customers and prospects engaged, and they need a solution that can keep up – even when they're on the go. See our CRM App in action and learn more about how sales leads move through aACE. Check out our sales leads and CRM App feature highlights for a sneak peek before the presentation.

February 23rd – Sales Orders

See aACE's sales order, drop shipping, and special order workflows in action and learn how aACE makes each of those workflows a breeze. Before the webinar, check out our feature highlight for a preview of some of these topics.

We look forward to seeing you in our webinars and answering your questions in real time during each presentation! Register now to save your spot.