Long-Term Relationships With Customers Without CRM?

Find out what smart ways of converting sales leads and nurturing the relationships with current customers are there for service businesses.

Table of Contents

What is Customer Relationship Management Software?
Is RemOnline a CRM system?
How Can a CRM System Boost Customer Engagement?
Final Thoughts

What is Customer Relationship Management Software?

CRM software is a management solution that is designed to maintain customer records and automate the sales cycle. Its basic feature set includes:

• collecting and structuring data on purchases, work orders, and payments
• informing customers about the current status of their work orders
• tracking communication history (instant messages, calls, and SMS)
• sending automatic notifications to employees
• keeping track of promotional activities’ results
• building loyalty programs with customizable discounts
• generating reports to see the overall picture of sales productivity.

After implementing a CRM program in your company, you will be able to store contacts and histories of interactions in a unified customer base, automate business communication, and measure performance. As a result, you will better understand the needs of your clientele, increase the level of satisfaction with the services you provide, and improve the overall profitability.

Benefits of CRM Platforms

If you hesitate about whether it is worth digitizing the customer management processes in your business, just think about all the advantages you will get in the long run: 

• All customers and suppliers in one place — less time for record-keeping and searching for the necessary information;
• Cross-platform access to contacts, work order, and payment history — important data available 24/7 from anywhere;
• Automatic data collection and classification — understanding your target audience's needs and building long-lasting customer relationships through marketing.

You won’t be able to achieve these through paperwork or XLS spreadsheets. Going digital is the only solution that will help small and midsize businesses remain competitive in the modern world. 

Drawbacks of CRM Solutions

Although CRM software is a good thing in general, there are still some challenges and pitfalls you may face when implementing and using it on a daily basis. Let’s have a look at some of them:

• Resistance of your team to digital changes. You have to be ready for some negative reactions from your employees regarding your decision to automate business and sales processes with software. It is not an easy task to replace the routine they go through every day with new workflows and tools. Just be patient and let them take their time to adapt.
• The cost. Good solutions require some investments so be ready to plan CRM subscription payments within your budget. Of course, there are some platforms that are “free” and you may not resist the temptation to cut software expenses. However, when saving on CRM fees, you will sacrifice sales productivity, face lots of limitations, and in the end “pay” with your customer success. So, remember that you will always get what you pay for.
• Time for proper configuration. Sales and marketing automation don’t happen overnight. You have to realize that to make things work as you wish you need to learn the system and set up all the important functions and all that will take some time and effort. To make your life easier some software providers offer onboarding assistance, support service, and a self-service knowledge base with step-by-step guides.
• More work for managers at the start. After a proper setup, your CRM system will need data. Encourage your employees to start using new software as soon as possible when dealing with real-life work orders and customer information. This means more time for data entry at the beginning but so much less time for routine tasks in the future.

These are just a few of the challenges that you may be dealing with after deciding to go digital. But don’t get discouraged by them and always think of the final goal of this innovation — the sustainability and constant growth of your business. Find more tips for small business owners on adapting a CRM program in this article.

Is RemOnline a CRM system?

RemOnline is more than just sales CRM software, it is an all-in-one business management solution specially designed for local companies that provide different types of services. RemOnline automates processes in all business areas: relationships with customers, work order processing, inventory management, finances, payroll, KPI monitoring, and analytics. There are also free mobile apps for field teams and executives available in all subscription plans. You can test the entire set of features during your 14-day free trial. Sign up here.

Key Features of RemOnline For Building Repeat Business

To store information about customers and suppliers in RemOnline you need to set up customer profile templates first. This will help save time on registering new clients in the CRM system as well as make the record-keeping routine easier in the future. Customer profiles store names, contacts, history of work orders, purchases, payments, calls with recorded conversations, and SMS. Besides this basic functionality, you can also:

• Create personalized discounts for goods and services, and generate discount card codes. It is enough to configure them once so the program will automatically calculate the personalized cost of all future work orders.
• Tag customer profiles and organize them into groups so the system displays customers, vendors, individuals, and businesses in separate tabs. Display statistics on customers with a minimum of effort and filter them in the table by creation date to identify the most loyal ones. In addition, they can be filtered by: marketing channels, payment details, addresses, and phone numbers.
• Use smart search capabilities to find customer and supplier information. If you tag clients with tags or smiley icons, they will be displayed next to their names. This way, you can navigate through a big stream of names, titles, and numbers with ease. 
• Assign tasks for employees.

With RemOnline, keeping records of customers in your service center will take no more than a few minutes so creating a unified customer base will be a comfortable and fast process. There are no technical limitations to its expansion. The complete CRM functionality is available in the trial version of RemOnline.

Third-Party Integrations

RemOnline has a wide range of capabilities for integration with third-party platforms to help you reduce communication costs, avoid double data entry, use more sales opportunities, and work in accordance with the law. Here is a quick overview of the available integrations:

Communication. Connect your RemOnline account to an SMS gateway like Twilio and BulkSMS to send automatic notifications and reminders to your customers. You can also integrate with WhatsApp and Viber instant messaging. This way, you will keep customers informed of any changes in their work orders and remind them of upcoming events to avoid downtime and time overlaps. And of course, the entire communication history will be saved on one platform.

Online Sales. Sell more products and find new customers thanks to the Custom Integration with online stores. This feature helps you set up the unloading of products from the RemOnline warehouses to any online store that supports importing products via an XLS file upload.

It is possible to set up any number of integrations with any number of online stores.

Business Automation. You can connect RemOnline via Zapier to 200+ tools to increase the efficiency of your marketing efforts, sell products on eCommerce platforms like Amazon and Shopify, and improve workflows with Google products.

 
Payments and Accounting. These integrations are about to come in RemOnline. Our team is working on synchronizing accounting data with QuickBooks Online as well as on adding online payment options via Stripe now. Stay informed about their implementation status on the Home page in the “In Progress” section.

All available integrations of RemOnline with third-party services are listed here.

How Can a CRM System Boost Customer Engagement?

With a good CRM solution in place, you will be able to streamline customer interactions and win more business without leaving a single program interface. Your sales and marketing teams will get effective tools to attract and retain potential customers as well as cross-sell and upsell the existing ones. For example, you can extend your email marketing activities with automatic review requests after the technician’s visit, and schedule “on my way alerts” and thank you emails. To reward your loyal customers use a flexible discount setup system in RemOnline.

Another useful feature for entrepreneurs is the Company Insights Report. Here, you can analyze the overall business performance and find interesting patterns: track the seasonality of customer inflow from different channels, changes in profit, and average work order value. Determine the time when your marketing campaigns are losing effectiveness, and when, on the contrary, are bringing in more and more revenue. Inform your decision-making to appropriately adjust the current business strategy.

Final Thoughts

It is important for a service business to monitor the quality of service, automate as many business processes as possible, and organize proper record-keeping of customers and sales. Otherwise, there will be constant chaos in the company’s daily workflows and no opportunity to increase profits and customer loyalty. Your helping hand here is a CRM system with a wide range of functions. RemOnline is just such a solution.

With RemOnline, you can build a customer database, keep track of work orders and sales, control the transfers of goods, make returns, automate purchases, and generate insightful reports. Sign up for your free trial today.