By integrating your CRM to a community platform, you get access to dynamic Reports and Dashboards that help you track and effectively improve member engagement on multiple levels.
As an association, understanding your members and how they are engaging with your community can be a game-changer. By marrying your CRM with your communication platform, you provide a platform to facilitate communication and networking and gain powerful insights into specific member preferences. With this integration, you can:
Improve Time Management – With the availability of essential information on a single platform, team members can easily organize and prioritize tasks.
Streamline Workflow – Group teams according to campaigns to help them access relevant information and collaborate easily.
Accessible workstation – Irrespective of where your work setup is, stay updated about all the essential information and easily connect with your partners and team without any difficulty.
Increase Engagement – Easy to create online communities that keep your members active and let you track their engagement levels to assess their relationship with your association.
Improve Product/Services – With integrated analysis of member communities, you get access to insights that can help you with targeted campaigns and improve your services.
This is made possible when already existing member history and data stored in your CRM lets your community platform make relevant suggestions and help you track activities. By leveraging the powerful features generated by this integration, you can effectively monitor community activities, gain insights into engagement and trends, and segment members based on their engagement levels.
Along with digging deeper into engagement metrics, you can even group teams based on events or projects to streamline core functions. This lets your staff quickly access files and align projects to empower collaboration and foster an innovative workplace environment.
Read More: How to maximize member engagement using the Power of Salesforce Einstein AI
5 ADVANTAGES OF INTEGRATING YOUR ONLINE COMMUNITY
A community platform integration lets your members connect, network, and collaborate. Let’s dig deeper into the advantages of data generated from CRM and community platforms:
1. Reduce Staff Workload with Automatic Permissions
Long-term reliability and member relations are built on the foundation of how well you understand their preferences and likes. When you integrate your CRM/AMS with a community platform, member permissions based on membership level or purchase history automatically flow into the portal. This integration lets you get away with the manual task of setting permissions and allotting specific communities to specific members. Hence, saving your time and labor so your staff can focus on sectors that need more attention.
By setting up automatic permissions, your members also get a smoother experience on your portal. You won’t make them stumble around irrelevant communities and forums; instead, directly suggest them to the ones relevant to them. This integration makes sure your members have access to valuable content and conversations that matter to them.
2. Facilitate Seamless Experience with Single Sign-On
In case your systems are not integrated, every time your members sign in to any of them, they would have to manually insert and update personal information multiple times. Just how it sounds – this can be a lot of work for your members and drive them away from entering your community.
However, integration can help you counter this situation with single sign-on and smooth communication paths so that when members log in to your community portal or any other site, they will be automatically signed in to your CRM. Throughout this, your staff members are actively updating information in both systems, which triggers a streamlined change due to the integration. This cuts off the manual task of making changes in multiple systems and makes you capable of delivering a smoother experience to your members.
3. Create a 360-degree View of Members
To take an edge over your competitors, always place customer intimacy as the priority. Metrics that give you extensive information about your member’s and donors’ interests, priorities, and problems will lead you to long-term success.
Using online communities, you can track activity data on your members from pages, discussions, forums, and content they are most interested in. You can also track their full member lifecycle to gain insights into their preferences throughout the journey as prospects.
By tapping into a 360-degree view of your members, you can deliver content, products, and benefits tailored to their specific needs. Providing such personalized suggestions and offers comes around with greater results. Here are some reports and dashboards that show the detailed information of members engagement :
Dashboard for Engagement:
Read More: Know how to track member engagement with scoring & dashboards.
4. Facilitate High-Value Interactions with Customers and Members
With an active community, you can easily empathize with your members and provide more meaningful messages. This happens when you dig deep into their problems. By integrating your community portal with your CRM, you see possible loopholes and where they are rooting from.
Taking an example, think about a loyal member you have had for years who recently lapsed their payment. Through your integration, you notice missing employment information from their demographic data. Additionally, they have also been active in the community looking for job opportunities. This can likely be a scenario where your loyal member probably lapsed their payment because they are currently unemployed and looking for a job.
Now that you know the possible cause of their issue, you may opt for a more empathetic way while reaching them. For example, offering them a grace period and assistance with their job search. Doing this can help them solve their issue and also ensure you a lifetime loyalty.
5. Align Your Online Community with Business Goals
Every business action and initiative should come with results and impact. No matter how big or small it’s important to step back and analyze how your initiative is impacting your business goals. By integrating your community portal with CRM, you can track down how engagement activities influence your goals, like increased donors and retention. Track spikes in sales as community forums become more active. Doing this lets you drill down into topics and sectors that are gaining the most attention among your members so you can suggest targeted content.
Using this data, you can effectively align your member engagement strategy with organizational goals. Empower your sales team with data so they can identify upsell and encourage more members to visit your product demo and reach out to members who often visit your help sections. Here are some reports and dashboards:
With the tech revolution, we as organizations are fortunate to work and serve our members with content and preferences that fit their needs. Combining the dynamic benefits of your CRM with Community Platform uncovers the essential data on your members – that, when leveraged at the right time in the right way, helps them succeed and lets you deliver the best possible service.
Organizations that jump on the data train at the right time witness game-changing efforts, and we have a list of names we can pick out from history. When your right data is piped through the right integration channel, it not just reduces the painstaking workload of your staff but also personalizes the member experience like never before.
If you haven’t already, now is the time to integrate your online community platform with your CRM. Deliver a personalized member experience now so that your members promise a lifetime loyalty during the next renewal period instead of heading for a better lookout.
About Aplusify
Aplusify provides associations, nonprofits, and higher education institutions with the capacity and capability of maximizing their Salesforce platform. Our team of Salesforce-certified experts alleviates the technical weight of managing and implementing Salesforce so that you can focus on strategy and organizational mission. Find out how we can save you time, money, and stress with our Salesforce Managed Services.
