5 Tips to Revamp Your CRM and Customer Experience

This summer was a summer of records. Record temperatures, record sales, and record prices. With so much going on, it’s easy to feel like letting everything coast. Don’t fall into complacency. Now is the time to make time to revisit your customer experience.

Throughout my career, I’ve found myself to be the unofficial CRM expert for various dealerships. Workflow and task outcomes came naturally to me and I often enjoyed looking under the hood of the systems that help dealers keep track of their customer records. When a CRM is structured well, it can be a great tool to improve communication and customer follow-up. When structured poorly, it can be a meaningless task monster and unapologetic noise.

I recently was helping a BDC manager begin incorporating customer service follow-up to a post-service visit to her department’s scope. Prior to setting this up, we discussed going through the existing communications to make sure there were no redundancies. We carved out some time and began looking behind the scenes at some of the workflows present in the CRM. It was shocking to see some of the holes that were present.

There were email templates and call structures that had not been updated since 2011! Workplans were piled high with meaningless, irrelevant tasks. If a customer didn’t show for their scheduled appointment, all communication ceased. Irrelevant emails fired off automatically based on the age of the opportunity. There was no cohesion between sales, marketing, and service. Needless to say, it was messier than we imagined.

How can a dealer begin to revamp their CRM and customer experience? We’ve put together 5 tips for you to get started.

1. Get your marketing together: Sounds simple enough, but have you checked to see exactly WHAT and WHEN you market to your customers? Often, when a dealer deploys a new technology or lead provider, there is marketing and communication structured within that company’s own ecosystem. The result is the customer getting fragmented communications through multiple channels and all the messages representing your dealership. Begin compiling and reading through all the communication your customer receives and eliminate redundant follow-up.
   
   
2. Examine your CRM communication workflows: Dealers will often only think about sales and service workflows at the initial CRM install. If you’ve been using the same CRM company for more than two years, it is time for a spring (or fall) cleaning. Make sure your communication processes are still relevant to what the customer experience needs to be today.
   
   
3. Eliminate unnecessary tasks: If your CRM is regurgitating follow-up tasks without any prior results triggers, you’re creating a culture of completion of the follow-up task for the sake of the task. This does not benefit the customer whatsoever and often leads to your team simply completing their outstanding tasks instead of having real communication with your customers. Decide as an organization what you can trim down and what is relevant for your business interactions.
   
   
4. Set deadlines for revamping your CRM: A common pitfall is to start on the work of updating your CRM, but other day-to-day obligations get in the way of timely execution. Decide timelines for completion and hold each other accountable. If a deadline passes, identify why it was unable to be completed, then reset priorities and strategy to ensure the necessary changes are made.
   
   
5. Create an omnichannel customer experience: Regardless of what technology you use in your dealership, examine the customer touch-points and ensure your team has the skills to adapt their communication based on the needs of the customer.