Consumerism in the modern age dictates that businesses need to have an eCommerce solution in place to stay competitive and satisfy the growing demands of customers. People want the convenience of shopping from their PC or mobile without having to visit a physical store. This, combined with technological advancements has led to the growth of ecommerce industry.
Today there are many ecommerce platforms that provide scalability & flexibility to help exploit online sales channels. Many organizations usually experience a major increase in traffic, conversion rate and sales growth following their deployment. Although this is great news for businesses, it can also create new challenges.
One of the major challenges is repetitive data processing between systems –It’s simply bad time management and a waste of resources. Hence such online stores needed to be integrated with other systems, most importantly with CRM system. Seamless CRM & ecommerce integration means that the data collected by the online store will be automatically pushed into existing CRM systems to help sales staff with cross selling and upselling. An important sales approach that can lead to improved cash flow and an increase in turnover and profit.
Given below are few competing reasons why you should integrate your CRM system with ecommerce system.
Sales Force Automation
A sales representative organizing a portfolio of accounts may not have the bandwidth to consistently communicate with every customer and prospect. Sales reps may get much greater visibility into products or services when CRM is appended to your ecommerce store; improving sales effectiveness.
Additionally, integrating your store with CRM provides a base for customer self-service, encompassing certain features such as a combined view of account status; returns; and order status. Traditionally, this self-service capability has been difficult to implement because the required information lies partially in the ecommerce system and partially in the CRM system. An integrated system eliminates the need to reconcile data across two applications whereas improving the customer experience and, likely, sales.
Single View of the Customers (SVC)
Customer Interactions nowadays happen over a number of channels from, but not restricted to, social media, online marketplaces, ecommerce stores, and mobile devices. Businesses these days want to observe and measure every small activity of their customers across channels, with the hope that it will help them close more sales. Hence, with such requirements the concept of Single View of the Customers came into the picture.
Single view of the customers (SVC) means ability to use large amount of data from various channels into one place, and that in a meaningful way. Across every channel it offers businesses the ability to track customers and their communication. Such integration improves customer service levels, better customer maintenance, and growth in conversion rates and overall development in the customer lifetime value.
Segmentation
Integrating CRM with ecommerce system allows for better understanding of customers through segmentation on the basis of demographics, geography, device type, past transaction history, etc. This means that
- You can send more targeted marketing messages, and handle your budget more efficiently.
- You can send an email to a definite set of customers who purchased from you before, or have always liked a particular brand etc.
Targeted messaging gives rise to higher engagement of those customers. Higher level of engagement will, in turn, increase the overall profitability of the business. And if you keep track of referrals & shares, this is a remarkable one because you can utilize those as incentives and then drive more action on your site.
Better Personalization Capability
In the B2B world, personalization brings various challenges. B2B sales is more complex with clients demanding their individual pricing plan or discounts. Individual customer data becomes more important than ever to achieve the personalized communications for B2B customers. For instance Browse behavior data for personalization is as important as past product or category data.
Better Customer Insights
A CRM system integrated with your online store keeps track of all micro-interactions to sell better online. Such interactions may not be significant, but taken together are helpful in determining the customer’s purchase intent. Without an integrated platform, it is improbable that such micro interaction would be accurately captured.
Once CRM capabilities are implemented in your online store, the ability to record all transactions and interactions, highlight best selling products and create attractive offers based on past purchase history will only be enhanced.
Integration of the standalone CRM and ecommerce can be daunting. Hence, searching a vendor that offers both capabilities which is integrated natively will increase your returns and more so when you integrate both further with an ERP system.
