Shopify is one of the most popular ecommerce platforms around. For businesses large and small, it’s versatile, scalable, and powerful. Yet the true power of Shopify for retail businesses is truly unlocked by coupling it with the right Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.

This is because retail businesses do not do their business strictly online. While Shopify can help brands sell through their website and collect browsing data to some extent, a good CRM will help your team know your customers better, provide more personal data, and help manage communications in-store as well.

In short, a CRM really amplifies and supports the ‘relationship’ part of its moniker.

And in the modern retail era, that relationship with the customer is arguably the most crucial aspect of the success of your company. Just look at this retention metric: 32% of all customers would stop doing business with a brand they loved after one bad experience. A full third of your customers are just one bad sales interaction away from never coming back! With so much competition today, your business simply cannot afford to neglect the all-important customer relationship. Full stop.

The key to creating and maintaining great customer relationships today is all about clienteling, a way of personalizing your customer’s journey that goes beyond your typical customer service. Clienteling uses your CRM data to create a proactive relationship, not a reactive one. Instead of check-out being the sole point-of-contact with a customer, clienteling makes the entire shopping process, even if it starts online and ends in-store, a guided experience.

Research from Boston Retail Partners has shown that 79% of consumers say that “personalized service from a sales associate is an important factor” in choosing their brand loyalty. Leaning into clienteling strengthens relationships and leads to an increase in sales as well as Customer Lifetime Value.

Many CRMs will do the basics, but if your brand is all about fostering great, lasting relationships, then your CRM should understand and help your team action around clienteling. This can include personalized 2-way messaging via email and text, omnichannel sales & marketing tracking, and data-driven product recommendations.

Endear is the first and only clienteling Shopify CRM in the Shopify app store. One example of better clienteling through our CRM comes in the form of Campaigns:

Campaigns are a quick way to segment your customer base into highly specific groups in order to send more personalized messages, on a large scale. Your team could send a Birthday 20% off in-store promotion text message by creating a Campaign around customers with birthdays in May, with known phone numbers, that live within 5 miles of a store location.

Your CRM should empower even a small sales team to provide a great customer experience through its features.

Another way your Shopify CRM can improve customer relationships is to make the shopping experience as easy and smooth as possible. As an article on Forbes points out, a high barrier to buying can turn off your base and sour the customer experience. Even having too many options hurts, as research shows that in some studies, quadrupling the number of options reduced sales by 50%!

We’ve used the word ‘personalization’ a lot so far, but one aspect of that is curation. Your customers don’t want to see all their options, just the ones that are right for them. And the better your CRM is at collecting and distilling data, the better the curation that your team can put in front of your buyers.

That’s the idea behind Shoppable Stories.

Your team can use CRM data to curate an interactive story of products that are specific to a customer group, and then email or SMS text that Shoppable Story right to their device. The best part is that your customer can swipe through, click, and buy right from the Story itself. Less hurdles, more curation. It’s a seamless application of your CRM’s customer data, actioned into a personalized offer, and transacted right on your Shopify website.

Of course, when it comes to customer relationships, your CRM should be able to help your team do the most direct method of assisting your customers: by solving their problems quickly and efficiently.

The clearest example of this may be in resolving customer returns, which can often be an arduous process. Yet 84% of respondents in a survey said that “a positive returns experience encourages them to shop with a retailer again.” So even when a sale has failed, a great customer experience after the fact can still lead to higher customer retention.

A great Shopify CRM should help your team address and resolve customer support tickets better by integrating with your help-desk platform. This integration between systems can provide deeper insight into each customer’s shopping history, and making the resolution process more personal – and therefore giving it a higher chance that a negative experience will turn into a positive, retention experience.

For example, your team may be using a help-desk app like Gorgias that integrates with Endear. Now your in-store associates will be able to easily view any support tickets when they pull up a specific customer’s profile. If they are assisting a certain customer with a purchase, they’ll be able to see that the customer may have recently submitted a couple complaint tickets with your brand. Knowing this, your rep can choose to offer an extra promotional coupon while refunding their order, keeping a high-value customer happy with a little extra incentive.

Once your help-desk platform can access your CRM’s customer profile, your team has much more information to improve each relationship. From knowing when their birthdays are, to approximately how far their shipping address is from your warehouse, to seeing an overview of their shopping patterns; this data can make each customer support ticket interaction another touchpoint that strengthens your clienteling relationship experience.

Can your Shopify CRM do all that? Endear can. Check out our free demo to see how Endear can improve your customer relationship for good.