Why Companies Adopting Mobile CRM Do Better
In September 2019, Apple and Salesforce jointly announced what came as welcome news to the mobile CRM industry. Working in tandem, the two companies will collaborate on the Salesforce Mobile CRM SDK to make more Salesforce services accessible on iOS devices, and allow the development of Salesforce apps for customers. Additionally, the service will emphasize mobile access to the company’s popular training platform Salesforce Trailhead.
Why should businesses be excited about this? In one sense, a focus on mobile by the world’s largest CRM company is obviously important due to the huge mobile market which exploded sometime after the company was founded. In 2009, the percentage of Internet traffic originating from mobile devices was 0.7%. Today it stands at roughly 53%.
While there have been issues integrating mobile devices into the workplace, the move has largely made a positive difference. In 2016, statistics showed that companies who allowed their employees to use mobile for work gained 240 hours of labor every year on average. Research has shown lots of other things: mobile raises productivity, increases collaboration, and enables remote workers to stay more connected.
Why is Mobile CRM Working Better?
Given all this information, it’s not surprising that companies who have already adopted mobile CRM (m-CRM) solutions are showing astounding results. As far back as 2011, research by Innopl Technologies showed that 65% of sales reps using m-CRM consistently met their sales quotas. At companies using more traditional approaches, only 22%.
While there are obviously many benefits to mobile which could explain why this is happening, it’s worth digging a little to connect them with what we already know about CRM tech and practices.
Back to The Basics
A double-blind study conducted in 2011 and published in the Spanish Journal of Marketing – ESIC investigated this very question, emphasizing the importance of basic CRM goals and ambitions. Companies employ CRM solutions to accomplish several goals, some involving revenue, others brand image, and others – of course – managing customer relationships.
The author states,
“From the strategic perspective and relationship marketing, m-CRM is seen as a long-term management approach that companies or organizations carry out via mobile channels in order to get very different benefits”
And this is definitely true, as we’ll see from three different angles:
- The end game of CRM is to raise a company’s bottom line by selling more products and services. This means it will register more sales/transactions and close more deals. M-CRM promotes higher sales in two ways:
- It makes a company and its reps more accessible to customers or clients seeking information. Mobile raises the communication bandwidth of every stakeholder from management to service agents to customers/clients.
- By allowing marketers to tap and collect analytics from mobile advertisements more easily, they are able to reach a broader group of people who primarily use mobile devices during the attraction stage of an outreach strategy.
- A major goal of CRM is to consolidate and trim company processes, reducing unnecessary steps, and in general utilizing labor more efficiently. All this raises a company’s profit by cutting down its budget. M-CRM reduces cost further:
- By providing better accessibility to all personnel and enabling information to be retrieved at moment’s notice, decisions can be made more quickly, improving the speed of on-call queries, meetings, executive decisions and similar processes.
- CRM builds customer relationships not just through recommendations and quicker access to support, but via personalization. Data is used to tailor the approach representatives take towards their clients for a more friendly and productive experience. M-CRM offers superior personalization for a few reasons:
- Public-facing CRM apps will log lots of data that can be useful for understanding a customer’s interests, how much time they spend on the app, click-through rates, etc. This enables more intelligent messaging and push notifications. In some cases, this has improved retention by up to 700%.
- The geographical data collected by phones with the user’s consent enable quick deployment of service visits when they are requested. Geographic data can also be used to send messages tailored to local businesses, services, or nearby
The Bottom Line
People who carry computers in their pockets work harder, smarter and more efficiently. They are also easier to understand and communicate with. These simple facts have a wealth of practical impacts on the efforts of a company to manage its employees and customer relationships more effectively, and all the benefits of traditional CRM are only amplified.
Rainmaker is proud to work alongside clients to develop and integrate mobile technology by building custom solutions on the Lightning mobile framework and other SDKs. With Salesforce doubling down on mobile, the future of mobile just got a lot more exciting.