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Tag: business technology

Four Must-Have Ecommerce CRM Integrations

Today, ecommerce CRM systems are indispensable tools for any digital retail business that strives to grow and prosper. Implementing CRM integration with ecommerce, merchants can manage customers’ data and analyze their purchasing behavior. In the long run, ecommerce CRM allows them to continuously increase their operational efficiency and make more informed and profitable business decisions.

However, a retailer can only gain the maximum advantage from its ecommerce CRM if they make the solution an integral part of their digital commerce ecosystem. The best way to do this is to set up integrations between CRM and other business solutions. In this article, we will discuss how exactly CRM integrations can benefit your retail and provide the examples of business software that can be tied in with your ecommerce CRM.

The Benefits of Ecommerce CRM Integration

By linking your CRM with other business technology, you can enrich your ecommerce ecosystem, thereby expanding its technological capabilities and increasing its overall efficiency. As a result, you will be able to reap the following business benefits:

Increased Employee Productivity

Given that employees from your sales and marketing departments will be able to work via a single digital solution, they won’t have to spend time switching between multiple tools, creating and entering different logins and passwords, and searching for data across several software systems.

Consequently, your employees will be able to work much faster and concentrate on more strategic tasks instead of wasting time on routine activities that benefit neither them nor your enterprise. This way, you can also save money on staffing since fewer people can perform more tasks and spend the same amount of time.

More Intelligent Decision-Making

By connecting ecommerce CRM with the rest of your digital toolset (such as ERP software, data analytics, and so on), you synchronize multiple data sources, thereby helping your sales and marketers to get a more comprehensive picture of your customers. Now, being able to access any information about customers, including their preferences and purchasing history, your employees can dramatically improve the speed and quality of decision-making.

Enhanced Customer Experience

As we have mentioned, by implementing CRM integrations, you help your salespeople and marketers to get any customer data faster and easier. Thus, they can respond more quickly to any customer requests, launch more accurate and effective advertising and marketing campaigns, and create more attractive and relevant offers. As a result, your enterprise can increase customer satisfaction and, consequently, profits.

4 Ecommerce CRM Integrations to Consider

Now that we’ve discussed the general benefits of ecommerce CRM integrations, let’s see which integration types can help you establish a more robust and powerful ecommerce ecosystem.

ERP

Integration between ecommerce CRM and ERP is the key option on our list since ERP systems are the backbone of any modern retail business. Being connected to a wide range of enterprise operations, ERPs gather and process vast amounts of data related to such business aspects as supply chain management, procurement, compliance and inventory management, and many more. That means you can synchronize customer relationship management with many back-office operations, thus enabling more efficient and transparent communication between departments.

Here’s how it might work in practice: members of your sales and marketing teams use CRM to view basic customer information, which is enriched with the data about previous purchases and transactions. Taking into account these details, your employees can personalize communication and create more targeted offers, thereby improving the service quality and, as a result, your enterprise profits.

Ecommerce Portals

Given that ecommerce portals primarily work as unified points of customer interaction, integrating the data from web portals with CRM may be essential for improving the efficiency of your sales. For example, you can connect live chat on your web portal to CRM so that the data gathered during communications is immediately added to customer profiles.

Due to the CRM-ecommerce portal integration, your employees can continue to convert prospects into buyers without wasting time on manual data exports. At the same time, your marketers can utilize data from CRM to create more personalized content for your customer portal.

Customer Data Analytics

By synchronizing data flows between your CRM and analytics solution, you can use customer data to predict buyers’ behavior better, run more accurate marketing campaigns, and identify more effective sales channels. With the proper data analytics functionality on hand, you can also set up custom KPIs to monitor the performance of your marketing and sales departments by analyzing the data from CRM.

Marketing Automation

If your existing CRM does not have in-built functionality for automating sales and marketing activities, you can link the system to a marketing automation solution. Thus, your employees will be able to run marketing campaigns in just a couple of clicks and automatically deliver targeted content to potential and existing customers.

Of course, this is not a full list of retail solutions that can be integrated with your ecommerce CRM system. Depending on the needs and specifics of your business case, you can develop APIs or build connectors to integrate CRM with collaboration, document management, accounting software, and many more. To discover more future-proof and viable CRM integration options, get your in-house team or third-party consultants to conduct a comprehensive business analysis of your digital retail ecosystem.

The Value of Ecommerce CRM

We can’t underestimate the value ecommerce CRM systems can bring to a modern consumer-oriented business. However, the usefulness of these solutions can be increased even more by making CRM an integral part of the digital ecommerce ecosystem. Retail enterprises can leverage APIs and connectors to tie in their CRM systems with other business systems like enterprise resource planning, data analytics, or ecommerce portals. These and other integrations will help you boost employee productivity, foster cross-department collaboration, and enable more data-driven decision-making.

 

RdRoman Davydov is an Ecommerce Technology Observer at Itransition. With over four years of experience in the IT industry, Roman follows and analyzes digital transformation trends to guide retail businesses in making informed software buying choices when it comes to commerce and store management automation.

Why investing in this software can be a business game changer

In case you didn’t know, the world is in the middle of “Industry 4.0” or the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This era is defined by automation and big data–businesses cannot do without the internet and technology.

We are in the midst of a tech dispensation where you have to rely on cyber-physical systems to run your business.

Businesses stand to lose big in terms of revenue generation and growth opportunities if they refuse to leverage mobile apps in marketing and user experience, as well as management software in staff and customer management. 

In the case of salon businesses, salon software has taken over tedious repetitive tasks from the front desk. Your software will, among other things, help you streamline both your internal processes and customer interactions.

It will make booking and managing appointments easier and, consequently, make it easier for your salon to penetrate and thrive in the online marketplace. This is, without a doubt, a business game changer.

Here are 5 more reasons why investing in salon software would be a game-changer for your salon business:   

  1. It’s key to salons bouncing back in the “new normal” 

This goes without saying: The beauty and hair industry has for almost two years now been among the hardest-hit victims of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Beauty clients have changed how they consume services and products, with many still skeptical about crowded closed spaces such as salons. You must now get creative, change tact, and adapt your salon to the “new normal” if you are to succeed in 2021 and beyond. 

Online booking salon software is one tool that has come in handy for the hair and beauty industry.

Firstly, it makes booking easy for clients by giving them the freedom to self-book your services at their most convenient time.

Secondly, you can even use the software to automate email or text reminders to clients as a way of minimizing no-shows and late coming. Late coming and in-person appointments are the top contributors to unnecessary crowding in your premises.

Thirdly, investing in scheduling software is one way of streamlining day-to-day processes in your salon. It improves efficiency in your team, makes your management job easier, and frees up time for you to strategize for the “new normal”. It is hard to be creative and innovative when you spend your day sending emails or answering phone calls, after all. 

Perhaps the biggest reason for investing in salon booking software in the new normal is to improve your customer experience. Studies show that the significance of customer experience has grown from 35% before the pandemic to 59% Post-COVID in terms of influencing customers’ purchasing decisions.

A good online booking system makes it easy for clients to read feedback on your website, give feedback, make appointments, cancel appointments, and access your contact & location address. Easy access to such info and features is good for customer experience.   

  1. It is one way of earning the trust of new clients 

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is anchored on efficiency and convenience. That’s exactly what your salon clients expect when booking appointments with you.  They want instant gratification. They have no appetite for phone tags with your receptionists, or the patience to wait for email responses after making inquiries. Such customers will not trust a business that makes them do most of the work when booking a service; a service that they will then have to pay for. 

There is more: Phone appointments are ineffective because there is no guarantee that someone will always be available to answer incoming phone calls at your salon. Sometimes you will take longer to answer or forget to respond to voicemail messages, and that is a recipe for distrust. 

  1. Out goes manual diaries, enter centralized databases 

Collecting, analyzing, and storing customer data is critical to digital marketing. Salons need to at least know their customers by name, their physical and email addresses, phone numbers, products’ purchase history, feedback records, and transaction history, among others. You can use this info to create targeted ads, understand your clientele better, improve your services, attract new customers, and generally make intelligent online business marketing decisions. 

Traditionally, salon owners saved this information on excel files or even manual diaries. None of the two storage options is safe from physical theft or cyber-attack. Salon booking software is a game-changer here because it is by itself a centralized, secure database for salon customer data. It will collect and analyze the data for you, making it easy to retrieve and consume.

Furthermore, the software creates databases on the cloud; authorized individuals can access it from any location, on any internet-enabled device. 

  1. Employee management hasn’t been easier 

Do you know which one of your employees is the most hardworking? Who is the “celebrity” stylist at your salon? Who misuses beauty products and who is most vigilant?

These are questions that quality salon management software will help you answer. It will, for example, tell you which stylist brings you the most money by analyzing how many times each stylist is booked. That enables you to create an informed, unbiased employee recognition program.

On the other hand, the software’s scheduling features will tell you which employee is engaged and to whom extra tasks should be assigned. Your employee management work becomes so much easier as a result. You can even manage workflows at your salon from a remote location.   

  1. Revolutionizing inventory management for salons   

Poor inventory management leads to disappointments and lost business. Think of a situation where a hair client wants to get her hair colored, but you realize at the moment that you don’t have her preferred color. She will probably seek services elsewhere and write a negative review online.

Your software will save you such embarrassments and bad press by analyzing your purchase history and notifying you about inventory levels in real-time. Your stock will never again completely run out and blindside you in front of clients. It will also tell you which products are fast-moving and the ones gathering dust on the shelves so you don’t overstock on products you don’t need. 

Investing in an online salon management system can just be the game-changer you need to stay afloat in 2021 and beyond. It can boost your revenue collection in so many ways and help you manage your salon better and more professionally. What remains now is for you to find reputable booking software for your specific current needs and budget.