State of CRM Study Reveals How Team Alignment Drives Customer Experience and Growth

Insightly, a unified customer relationship management (CRM) platform that elevates the customer experience, is sharing new data revealing how more than 500 sales, marketing and customer service professionals are leveraging their CRM to ensure a best-in-class experience for their customers. Among the findings, Insightly found that improving the customer experience was a top strategic priority in the year ahead for 55 percent of respondents, second only to growing revenue.

Further research found that less than one in five respondents rated their organization’s customer experience as exceptional, which is important to note because companies that report the best customer experiences are 2.5 times more likely to report significant revenue growth than all others.

“The data could not be clearer: if your customers aren’t happy, you’re not growing,” said Chip House, CMO of Insightly. “In theory, everyone wants a great experience for their customers, but it comes down to what you’re willing to do to make it happen. That’s why we’ve been focused on building a platform that helps our customers centralize their data across sales, marketing, and service teams so they can deliver superior customer experiences.”

The study also found that over one-third of organizations will be shopping for a new CRM in the coming year and 45 percent of respondents listed improving customer experience as a top priority in driving the consideration of a new CRM. And for those who currently use a CRM platform and are looking for a change? The biggest complaints about current platforms being used are missing or inadequate features, cost, and difficulty of customization.

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Other survey highlights include:

• Alignment drives growth: Only one-in-five organizations surveyed report having aligned technology and customer data used by marketing, sales, and customer support/success teams. On the flipside, over one-third of companies with completely aligned technology and customer data across their marketing, sales, and customer success teams saw a significant increase in revenue last year.
• -Benefits of an effective CRM: The top benefits of effectively utilizing a CRM according to those who are extremely satisfied with their solution, include better customer data (44 percent), more organized/streamlined processes (43 percent) and higher sales/faster growth (40 percent).
• -The problem with enterprise solutions: Two-thirds of enterprise CRM users are part of organizations with 50 employees or less. This signals that these organizations have likely over-invested in a solution they likely underutilize.
• -Integrating with existing systems: For 40 percent of those surveyed, integrating a new CRM into existing systems is a major challenge during the implementation process. A CRM that is fully integrated with your technology stack ensures data accessibility throughout your organization and enables a unified view of the customer.

To help solve some of these exact challenges, Insightly launched Insightly Service, a new helpdesk and ticketing product for managing customer support, last year. The product has already seen huge growth and adoption rates, and the company is continuing to make the product even better with a few critical updates and features, including a brand new mobile app that allows for customer responses from anywhere. Users also now have access to the ability to create CRM opportunities right from a service ticket, as well as updated navigation within the app to show the number of tickets in progress for any given customer. These features are examples of sales, marketing and customer service using technology to collaborate and serve customers.

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