Customer Relationship Management (CRM) refers to business systems and processes designed to manage customer interactions. Correctly designed and implemented, a CRM software system can provide a central place where businesses can store customer and potential customer data, track every customer interaction, every question, every service request, every preference, and every past contact detail about every customer an organisation has had. It supports sales management, marketing, and customer relations staff and delivers actionable insights. It integrates with social media and facilitates team communication across the whole of an organisation.
Customer Relationship Management
How CRM Helps Businesses
One of the main benefits of CRM is to help organize customer information, account details, and sales opportunities in one centralized database, thereby making it easier for you to manage your data. It also helps to improve work productivity, by allowing access to information to various departments across your company. By having all your data stored in one single unit, you are also able to quickly access valuable information, enabling you to make faster decisions, leading to speedy implementation.
CRM helps businesses gain an insight into the behaviour of their customers and allows businesses to modify their operations to ensure that customers are served in the best possible way, allowing every new interaction with a customer to be personalised, relevant and up to date – in turn creating loyalty and customer retention. Learning about your customers, including who they are and why they purchase your products, their opinions, and their preferences, as well as trends in customers’ purchasing histories, will allow an organisation to better anticipate their customers’ needs and, as a result, fulfill them, ultimately increasing sales.
Retaining Your Customer
In the commercial world, the importance of retaining existing customers is paramount. The costs associated with finding new customers can be extremely high – so retaining your existing customer base is so important – hence the need to manage your interactions.
A well-developed CRM system can reduce customer churn – ensuring that your good reputation in the marketplace continues to grow. Understanding customers better also empowers cross-selling and upselling opportunities – giving organisations a much better chance to win new business from existing customers.
Another key benefit of a CRM system is its ability to segregate key buyers. By segmenting and identifying your best accounts, CRM software helps you to devise marketing plans that will directly appeal to your targeted groups. This will also help your employees to serve your key customers or clients more effectively, thereby strengthening the bond between the customer and your company – greatly improving customer engagement.
To improve customer engagement you need to ensure that your customers have a positive experience every time they interact with your company, and this can be achieved through a good CRM system. Since CRM provides detailed information on each customer, your employees are able to effectively engage with them, thereby providing quick and hassle-free service which results in customer satisfaction, leading to enhanced engagement, loyalty, and hopefully, repeat purchases.
Efficiency Through CRM
As a centralized unit that provides data to various departments through a single source, a CRM system helps to seamlessly integrate marketing and sales functions. It helps various teams to easily collaborate with each other, thereby assisting employees to address customer inquiries faster, which in turn, can help increase sales. CRM also allows businesses to become more efficient by organizing and automating certain aspects of a particular job function or business unit. From sales processes to marketing campaigns and business analytics, as well as customer data, CRM automates and streamlines these processes.
CRM provides you multiple options through which you can capture and enter prospective sales leads into the system. This helps you to reduce manual data entry, thereby saving your employees precious time. It also helps minimize the risk of duplication, thus ensuring that your data is error-free and accurate, reducing repetitive tasks that can be frustrating for employees.
From effectively managing internal team communication – to keeping track of what your team is up to – a CRM system offers a complete overview of what task each team member is carrying out and how effective they are in closing a deal. A CRM makes all these activities visible throughout your business so that everybody in your various teams can stay fully informed about your customers’ status, history, and activity.
CRM - Not One to Ignore
Employing a CRM system ultimately leads to enhanced customer satisfaction and retention – this, together with increased value from your existing customers, and reduced costs associated with supporting and servicing them, yields overall efficiency improvement together with a tangible reduction in the cost of sales. It allows you to focus on the most profitable customers – and deal with the unprofitable ones in a more cost-effective manner.
CRM provides you with dashboards, reports, and query facilities. It will help you make sense of your sales, marketing, and service operations. It will monitor the performance of your whole sales and marketing cycle. It will determine where performance is strong or weak and help you decide how to improve performance in priority areas.
A CRM system is also especially beneficial for small businesses, as it helps employees improve their productivity, which in turn, helps you to achieve your business goals, and generate maximum return on at times a limited budget.
endeavit & CRM
At endeavit, we utilize Salesforce, a leading cloud-based software company, to bring our clients customer relationship management software. We help our clients to make CRM a part of their strategy. We advise clients on the latest software and digital technologies to help implement an effective CRM strategy and process. Benefiting from CRM is not just a question of buying the right software, however. You must also adapt your business to the needs of your customers. We are well placed to help organizations understand this and implement a tailored, well suited, and effective CRM.
