When you drive a car, you know intuitively how to operate it to get to your destination. Even if you’re not sure what’s happening under the hood, you can tell whether your car works, and you might only think about the machine when something goes wrong.
Similarly, your customers might not know whether your organization’s full workforce uses one seamless, integrated customer-relationship management (CRM) platform. But they can probably tell if it doesn’t.
When they need to contact your representatives repeatedly, providing the same data to multiple points of contact, or when they interact with representatives who can’t solve their problems on the spot, your platform for managing these relationships may be getting in the way.
The unsung heroes at your organization are your operations teams, whose processes greatly influence your customer experience (CX).
But when organizations grow fast by acquiring businesses with legacy infrastructure, they may wind up with a patchwork of tools and platforms that lock data within silos instead of letting it flow across the organization, so your entire workforce gets a shared understanding of your customers and their needs.
Combining legacy platforms and tools into one infrastructure may feel like a wise move internally for a company with growing pains—but you may wind up sharing that pain with your customers.
Operations teams themselves also often work within siloed practices, potentially duplicating work and obstructing the flow of information, rather than as one unit that shares data, analytics, and insights. (More than 60% of operations professionals say team misalignment causes them to duplicate their efforts.)
Such organizations may view their operations teams as problem-solvers and not as key players with insights that can guide company strategy. In an era with heightened customer needs, overlooking their untapped insights may be costly.
Revolving around RevOps
One key to unlocking your operations teams’ full potential to serve your customers and boost your growth is in your revenue operations (RevOps).
Your organization’s revenue concerns every employee. And by placing RevOps at the center of your organization, you can better unify your operations teams: eliminating friction, discovering efficiencies, and freeing up bandwidth so operations can innovate and help all teams share a unified mission to improve CX and grow business.
An expanding organization can expand faster by delivering optimal CX through a powerful, intuitive CRM that puts operations at the front of that experience.
A CRM that helps your operations teams automate time-consuming, repetitive tasks; easily improve your data hygiene; and remove friction both internally and for your customers helps your RevOps team build a united operations practice whose leaders can focus on shaping your organization’s growth strategy.
Sectors Growing at Speed
The time to align your organization’s operations has never been more critical. As the pandemic abruptly exploded the demand for app- and service-oriented sectors, some organizations used the opportunity to build up their RevOps with a better CRM.
One recent area of growth has been the wellness industry. Apps have introduced millions of additional customers to vital healthcare services in the pandemic’s first year.
Headspace, founded in 2010 as a meditation-oriented app, has expanded into a multimedia organization that had 2 million subscribers in February 2020, when the coronavirus was spreading rapidly. In the first weeks of lockdown, its downloads surged by 100%; today, that growth rate is still brisk, at 20%.
In this time of lightning-speed expansion—for Headspace, for mindfulness practice, and for the wellness sector—the company’s CRM helped it scale quickly by keeping CX at the heart of its operations.
Under the pandemic’s emerging lockdown rules, the recreational-vehicle maker Airstream served its customers by repositioning its value proposition with a customer-centered strategy to introduce resources relevant to the experience of remote work and living. That change in strategy helped support a 45% year-over-year sales increase in May 2020 and a 100% increase in June.
Using a unified CRM helped Lemonade, an insurance provider that donates its unclaimed premiums to nonprofits, surface and build on the insights that its customers expected it to support social and environmental justice. The provider also allowed customers experiencing financial hardships to cancel their policies for full refunds.
Lemonade has scaled quickly: In December 2020, four and a half years after launching, it announced its millionth client and had donated $1.1 million to nonprofits its customers choose.
How Your CRM Can Boost Operations
Headspace, Airstream, Lemonade, and thousands of other organizations rely on a CRM with functionality that helps RevOps teams manage operations and boost their efficiency in several ways, including:
- Keeping customer data and all organizational data aligned and accurate across the organization.
- Enabling operations teams to customize and automate processes and workflows.
- Ensuring their technology infrastructure scales to keep pace with growth.
With one CRM that meets each of these standard practices, RevOps can connect all operations teams on the data and insights that help your organization improve CX. Even if your customers don’t see the CRM under the hood, they’ll know they feel good when you help them get them to their destination.
Learn more about how HubSpot’s Operations Hub can help you scale your customer experience.