The Manufacturing Industry: 4 Ways to Improve Customer Service with Your CRM 

As a manufacturer, you sell your products to dealers or distributor networks. When they grow, so does your business. That’s why you must understand their needs and business requirements to provide the best customer service. 

It starts with tracking all the information about your marketing, sales, and customer service. How? Using a customer relationship management (CRM) system. 

In 2019, 49% of businesses plan to increase spending on CRM software to improve customer service, marketing and sales force automation, and knowledge management.  That’s because CRMs: 

• Give accurate ways of forecasting demand and supply rates 
• Show detailed overviews of customers’ needs and requirements 
• Allow you to seek customer feedback, understand your customers and make smarter decisions quickly 
• Increase productivity levels  
• Help improve customer service and business relationships 

Curious about the latter? In this post, we’ll discuss 4 ways your CRM can help you improve customer service in your manufacturing company. 

How to Improve Customer Service with Your CRM 

Like any other industry, manufacturing companies also need to focus on customer relationships. 

Every part of your CRM strategy provides your sales team with a boost while increasing profits. You can acquire, retain, and grow your customer base while helping your sales team deliver quality services.  

Below, we share four ways a CRM for manufacturers improves customer service. 

Provides an Accurate Forecast of Demand 

In the manufacturing business, determining the demand and supply rate accurately helps you prepare adequate resources ahead of time. 

Your CRM helps your sales and production teams to better collaborate in many ways. One example is by keeping time checks on production processes until they reach the market. This way, you can get accurate forecasts as demand arises. Also, you can have products readily available in the market before your competitors do.  

A CRM system also provides customer interaction and order history throughout the customer journey so you can: 

• Anticipate your manufacturing customers’ needs before they place their orders 
• Create new or better offers/deals at the right time 
• Deal with potential problems early on 

Continual Communication 

CRMs provide timely and continual communication with your customers. With a few clicks, you can know their complaints, how to handle their service requests, and their satisfaction levels. 

Plus, CRMs ensure consistency across all your texts, emails, and other corporate communications. You can also tailor your communication to specific audiences. As well as send personalized messages based on demographics like location, interests, and more. 

And with the increasing use and dependence on mobile technology, you can communicate with your team and customers at any time or place, using any device. In addition, all your sales conversations are centralized in one place, so your sales team is in constant communication with leads and customers in one system. 

Seek Customer Feedback 

Customer feedback is the backbone of your success.  

You can easily integrate customer feedback tools into your CRM to streamline customers’ data and keep it in a centralized platform to gain better insights about them. For instance, you can use: 

• Survey tools: Send data to your CRM so you can learn more about your customers and get insights into their experiences 
• VoIP phone systems: Let you communicate with customers from your CRM and turn their feedback into personalized marketing and customer service opportunities 
• Customer success tools: Give a 360-degree view of your customers so you can create detailed profiles and boost your marketing, sales, and customer support efforts 
• Customer lists: Slice down contacts into narrower segments based on behavioral, psychographic, and demographic data so you can design more targeted marketing campaigns 

Improves Relationships with Customers 

With a CRM, you can send automated emails to customers and remain in touch with them through relevant content, deals, incentives, and seasonal promotions. 

You can create wow moments for your customers between sales visits and deliver personalized messages based on events like purchases, product inquiries, customer service calls, and more. 

Automated messages also help you respond to each customer in real-time to let them know you heard them. As a result, your sales team gets time to analyze the customer’s previous interaction with your business, find out the cause of their frustration, and deliver a personalized response. 

The result: Better and stronger relationships with your customers. 

Delight Your Customers 

Manufacturing is becoming more customer-centric. So, it’s important to have an effective and efficient way to manage your client relationships. 

At Faye, we help manufacturing businesses like yours improve their customer service by optimizing their CRMs. So, whether you want more accurate demand forecasting, enhance the customer feedback processes, or improve on communication and customer service, Faye can help. 

Reach out to us today, and let’s discuss how we can optimize your manufacturing CRM to improve your customer service.