Reasons why you need a unified CRM for your moving business

When starting a moving business, people are often unsure of why they need a CRM solution. Even modest ones can seem fairly expensive, especially when your funds are limited and you have to be careful with every expense. Well, to help you get a better understanding of what value moving company CRM solutions offer and why they are necessary, we are going to go over the top reasons why you need a unified CRM for your moving business.

Understanding why you need a unified CRM

CRM stands for Customer Relations Management. CRM solutions, in short, are digital solutions (programs, apps, methods, etc) that help you manage your customers long-term. In the modern business climate of personalized marketing and complex customer retention strategies, CRM solutions have become more and more important.

With this in mind, it is usually a good idea to incorporate CRM solutions from the start. You can do so once your company picks up. But that is usually less efficient, and more expensive, and CRM solutions can do wonders for your marketing and customer relations. We will now go into further detail on how CRM solutions help and why they are necessary for every moving company.

Optimizing your customer relations

For most moving companies, every customer is quite valuable. You are not looking, nor could you be able to handle, thousands of different customers every month. So, it is in your best interest to have the best possible customer relations system available. Luckily, that is precisely what CRM solutions provide. With them, you can research your customers, understand their needs and address their concerns in an efficient manner. A good CRM system gives your customers the impression that your whole company is dedicated to providing them with everything that they need.

Dealing with customer data

While you have only a customer or two, it might seem that it is easy to deal with customer data. There are plenty of spreadsheet programs out that that you can use for easy data input and transport. But, relying on spreadsheets can only take you so far. After a while, the sheer amount of customer data will become impossible to manage without a CRM system.

And, once you implement it, you will realize just how much data you’ve missed. Without prior experience or advice from experts, you simply cannot know which data is relevant and which reports you are supposed to create and monitor. Luckily, CRM systems come with premade templates and data-gathering recommendations to make your job easier. By utilizing them you can get a better understanding of how to gather customer data and what to do with it later on.

Streamlining requests

In the modern area of constant internet connections and near-instant availability, people have grown to expect an efficient response from businesses. To make this clearer, let’s go back some 20, 30 years. Back then, if you have a request or a complaint with a company, you could expect them to answer within an hour or two.

Depending on why they called, on average, customers consider 30 minutes as a reasonable waiting time. And a company that actually managed to give you a decent answer or solution after 30 minutes was considered to have top-notch customer service. Now, that time has come down to 3 minutes. There is hardly an industry out there that won’t verify that customers are less patient than ever. If you do not respond to customer requests or complaints within 3 minutes, you can pretty much consider them gone.

This is another aspect of customer relations where CRM solutions become valuable. Through them, you can reliably respond to your customers and give them the necessary info. Answers to FAQ can be made automatic. And, you can even have rudimentary chatbots answer your customers in order to give your agents more time to respond. To handle most requests or complaints you will have to communicate with different departments within your company. Luckily, CRM solutions go so far as to even make this easier and more streamlined.

Tackling marketing with efficiency

One of the things you quickly learn after starting a moving business is that marketing is hard. There seems to be endless competition out there, all looking to steer attention away from your business to theirs. Well, this is another aspect of running a moving business where you can utilize CRM solutions. Namely, most modern marketing efforts rely on knowing your customers. As a moving company, you simply cannot afford to market your business to everyone. Doing so is expensive, and often ineffective. Instead, you need to outline your customer base and find a way to effectively engage them. And, to truly make the most out of your efforts, you need to use modern technology to engage each customer on an individual level.

In marketing terms, this is often referred to as personalized marketing. There are different ways in which you can utilize it, but it mostly relies on monitoring customer behavior and orienting your efforts accordingly. For instance, by gathering customer data through various methods, you can learn about their age, the reason for relocating, common relocation issues, and needs. With such info, you can then present your services so that they seem tailor-made for their needs. After a while, your customers will have the impression that you’ve offered your services before they even knew they needed them.

Final thoughts

The main reason why people refrain from getting CRM is the cost. As we said, even a modest CRM system can seem expensive, especially for a starting moving company. But, the long-term cost-effectiveness is precisely why you need a unified CRM system. It alone will give you solutions, recommendations, and guidelines without which to stand to spend a lot of time and money. And, the sooner you implement a CRM system, the longer it has to help you make money. All in all, a CRM system is a smart solution for any moving-related business.