Customer Relationship Management
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the process of managing interactions with existing as well as past and potential customers. It is one of the many different approaches that allow a company to manage and analyze its own interactions with its past, current and potential customers. It uses data about customers’ history with a company to facilitate and enhance business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on customer retention and ultimately driving sales growth.
One important aspect of the CRM approach is the systems of CRM compile data from a range of different communication channels including a company’s telephone, email, live chat, marketing materials and more recently, social media. Through the CRM approach and the systems used to facilitate it, businesses-starting from sales, customer service, development, recruiting, marketing to any other form or line of business, learn more about their target audiences and how to cater to their needs at the optimum level.
A CRM tool enables you to store customer and prospect contact information, identify sales prospects, record service issues, and manage marketing campaigns, and that too in the epicenter or one central location – and gather up information related to every customer interaction accessible to anyone at your company who might feel the need to know and act upon it.
With greater visibility and easily approachable data, it has become quite to collaborate and accentuate productivity. Everyone in your company are always on the lookout for how customers have been communicated with,, what they’ve purchased, when they last bought, what amount have they paid, so on and so forth. CRM acts as a facilitator and a major boost to the companies of all sizes to drive business growth, and more specifically, it can prove to be a turning point to small business ventures, where teams has to find ways and means to make them more visible and accessible with less or limited resources.
Why CRM is of Paramount Importance to Your Business
As per Gartner’s predictions, CRM will be the one aspect to look forward to and will emerge as the single largest revenue area of spending in enterprise software, providing you with a clear overview of your customer in all aspects. You can visualize everything falling under one roof-a simple customizable dashboard telling you about the nitty-gritty of the customers’ history, the status of their orders, any notable and prominent customer service issues and a host of other things.
As a layman, you always have the privilege of singling out information and include them from their public social media activity platforms-their likes and dislikes, comments and shares related to you or your competitors. Marketers can employ CRM solution for a comprehensive and better understanding of the pipeline of sales or prospects coming in, making business predictions a simpler and more accurate affair. You will get a clearer picture of every opportunity or lead coming your way thereby showing you a transparent graph from inquiries to sales. Some of the biggest gains in productivity can have its origins from moving beyond CRM as a sales and marketing tool, and embedded it in your business venture-from HR to customer services and supply-chain management.
Through CRM, systems have been used conventionally as sales and marketing tools and mediums, with customer service teams benefitting the most out of its implementation. In today’s age and changing times, customer might have the guts to raise or highlight an issue/issues that needs to be addressed via a channel/channels-say, Twitter, Facebook-and then switch onto emails or telephones to resolve it in private. A CRM forum enables you to get hold of the inquiry across channels without losing track, giving sales, service, and marketing a single view of the customer.
CRM Features-
E-mail Marketing, Sales Calls, Relationship Management, E-mail integration, Follow-Up and Projects & Documents.CRM Benefits in a Nutshell
- Collaborate through integration.
- Manage pipeline effectively.
- Automate for maximum productivity.
- Engage to build lasting customer relationship.
- Improve customer experience.
- Increase revenues.