Salesforce is the world leading CRM which can offer retails businesses many capabilities, meeting all of their CRM requirements such as: record and track customers’ purchase, as well as carrying out targeted email marketing campaigns.
One of the questions that get asked the most by retailers is how and what they can do to get the most out of Salesforce CRM? Clearly, Salesforce CRM is a powerful system. Properly implementing and utilizing Salesforce CRM can offer many attractive advantages to businesses, for example: from business data gathered, retailers can produce deep customer insights information in order to provide a custom tailored, and personalized service that customers have come to expect across all channels.
Here are three ways Salesforce CRM can help improve customer experience for your retail business:
Achieve a 360-degree view of customers
In addition to the traditional in store shopping experience, many customers are now also accustomed to online shopping, and their shopping experience is also evolved as a result. Thus, retail business owners need to adopt a 360-degree view of their customers in order to adequately respond to the change in the demand and expectation of their customers.
Many of the times when customers shopping at a store, it’s very likely that they have already conducted research on the product items they intend to buy. For store employees to effectively selling to an educated buyer, they are required to have immediate access to the latest product information, and market trends. Further, they should be able to offer a level of custom tailored that are not available online. This requires a CRM system capable of providing store employees personalized and accurate information about each customers and the associated products which they intend to buy, any time and wherever they need it.
Salesforce CRM solution, when integrate with ERP and POS system, can offer a 360 degree view of customers providing personalized information, thus enable store employees to bring personalized offers and custom tailored shopping experience to customers at the right time and place, whether online or in the store.
Monitoring and tracking sentiments over Social Media
Social media has changed the ways people shop, and – at the present time – almost all businesses have already had a social media presence in order to connect and engage with their customers.
Salesforce CRM provides many functionalities that are actually required and enjoyed by retailers including Social Studio which helps retailers meeting all their need for social listening of their brand in real-time market. Social Studio also helps engage with customers by responding to social posts as well as other features such as providing customer service care via social media.
Actively tracking social media sentiment provides valuable insight to businesses, includes helping retailers to understand how effective their social content is performing, and spot the latest emerging trends on a number of social platforms (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and etc.). Moreover, Social Studio (by Salesforce CRM) provides an easy ways for retailers to respond to their customers and prospects during their shopping journey, overall improving customers’ satisfaction.
Not only Salesforce CRM (Social Studio) enable retailers to track customer sentiment, but it can also help business to track their competitors by creating news alerts including new sales or promotion coupon offers. Such information can be feedback to the sales and marketing team to help them have a timely respond to competitor’s actions.
Enhance Sales Team capacity through mobile devices
As mentioned above, Salesforce CRM can help retail employees provide a custom tailored experience to customers for a deeper and more personal shopping experience. Moreover, when the in store sales associates are equipped with a CRM system integrated with ERP and POS on mobile devices, they can definitely enhance customer interaction in a more personalized way.
Salesforce CRM is available on a wide range of devices including desktop and mobile (e.g. smartphone and tablet) to enable sales staffs to perform their tasks better, in a more innovative ways, for example:
- Immediate access to products information enables sales associates to provide missing information which helps to close the sales or increase services values.
- Access to customers’ purchase history and shopping preference at their fingertips to help recommend complementary items or substitutes based on inventory available in-store.
- Offer appropriate discount and promotion program for customers ready to buy in-store.
- And many more
Closing Thoughts:
Salesforce CRM provides many powerful functionalities to retail businesses helping them improve and enhance customer engagement. However, one of the important things retailers need to take into consideration is to carefully define and understand their customers’ expectations – whether it’s online or traditional stores shopping.
Retailers who integrate their Salesforce CRM system with other business applications such as ERP (Enterprise resources planning) and POS system will be the successful ones getting the most out of their Salesforce CRM system. In the long run, those retailers will be able to improve customer loyalty across all channels, providing sales team the opportunity to increase sales and profits margins.
