What is the most important asset to every business? Undoubtedly, it is customers! No matter what type of industry you belong to, what your focus is or what kind of services or products you are offering, customers are at the core of almost every business. Customers spell the direction and purpose of your company. Therefore, customer satisfaction is the prime consideration of any organization. The relationships that a business cultivates with its customer-base drive the success of the business. However, translating many streams of data coming in from social media monitoring, customer service staff, sales teams and marketers into useful business information is an important yet tricky task. CRM system offers a clear and clever overview of your customers. Several technologies have transformed the landscape of sales and marketing and CRM (Customer relationship management) is one of such platforms that offer multiple benefits to your business.
CRM system is the most efficient and strongest approach to create and maintain customer relationships. It helps develop strong personal bonding with customers and drives the business to achieve new success levels.
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What is CRM?
As its name implies, Customer Relationship Management is a system for managing relationships with customers. It refers to the strategies, principles, technologies, practices and guidelines that a company follows to manage customer interactions, data, and information tied to leads, prospects and customers. From the business’s perspective, this complete relationship encompasses all interactions and touch points throughout the customer lifecycle like sales and service-related processes that can help ultimately to improve the customer’s overall experience and boost business growth.
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- Houses complete customer information –
CRM software refers to the software designed to store and manage data for all your business contacts. It consists of almost every detail of a customer including the activity information for meetings, email correspondence and phone calls. It as well includes a historical view and analysis of all the existing or potential customers. CRM tools simplify the searching, tracking and correlating customers and help in forecasting their needs effectively.
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- Customer-centric approach –
CRM platform features customers grouped by diverse aspects based on the type of business they do or the physical location they belong and are assigned to different customer managers usually known as account managers. It proves beneficial in focusing on every customer independently. Effectively dealing with all the customers and providing them what they exactly need improves the customer satisfaction and in turn, improves profit and turnover. It also leads to customer loyalty that results in improved customer base and further enhances business net growth.
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- Tapping potential customers –
Besides being beneficial in dealing with the existing customers, CRM system proves helpful in acquiring new customers. The process initially begins with recognizing a customer and maintaining all the related details into the CRM platform. It is known as a ‘Business Opportunity’. The Sales and Field representatives follow up with them; try to get the business out of them and thus, finally close a winning deal. An integrated CRM system helps accomplish it with great ease and efficiency.
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- Cost-effectiveness –
It is the strongest aspect of CRM platform. An effectively implemented CRM system means less paper and manual work. It means lesser resources to deal with it and lesser staff to manage it. Furthermore, as compared to the conventional way of business, the technologies used in implementing a CRM system are very smooth and affordable.
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- Centralized repository –
As all the details are kept centralized in CRM system, making the details easily available whenever required. Thus, it increases efficiency and productivity with a significant reduction in processing time.
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- Cloud-based CRM –
Thanks to the recent advancements that have combined CRM with cloud computing. Cloud-based CRM has opened the immense benefits of cloud technology to the core advantages of CRM such as
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- Automatic software updates
- Scalability
- Reduced costs
- Faster deployment
- Increased collaboration
- The ability to work on any device, from anywhere
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All the benefits listed above, certainly make it essential to have CRM system for every business. However, it is also important to understand best CRM practices to get the most out of your business.
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Select a CRM that fits your business needs
Finalize on a CRM solution with proper research. Invest your time to understand what your business needs exactly, weigh all your options and then choose the most appropriate one.
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- Workforce Training –
You can reap the benefits in its true sense by properly educating your employees on how to use CRM software. Help your employees know all the information about CRM. Testing your workforce on what they have learned can prove helpful. Also, focus on regular retraining and testing.
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- Establish a list of rules –
Remember, CRM system is only as effective as you, your workforce and your business lets it be. If your employees can use it to its full potential, then the CRM will surely perform its functions effectively. Setting a list of rules to use CRM effectively can help everyone who works with it along with forming a more unified team.
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- Automation –
Take advantage of the automation wherever possible. It will minimize human errors while allowing your employees to use their valuable time on important tasks, rather than repetitive errands. Workflow automation helps the managers track productivity and performance-based information such as tasks, calendars and alerts whereas marketing automation facilitates automating repetitive tasks across various marketing efforts. Sales force automation tools aim at tracking customer interactions along with automating sales cycle business functions required to follow the lead and acquire new customers. On the other hand, Artificial Intelligence (AI in CRM) built into the CRM systems take care of many repetitive routines along with many other tasks including predicting future customer behavior and identifying the buying patterns of consumers.
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- Focus on collaboration –
Improving cooperative efforts is one of the key benefits of CRM. As the CRM makes the same information accessible across various departments, there is no chance of ambiguity.
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Turn the data into actionable information
Capturing and organizing massive amounts of data is one of the crucial functions of CRM systems. The best CRM has built-in analytics features to analyze the data properly.
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- Keep it simple –
With all the benefits listed above and the plethora of available CRM options on hand, one might tempt by something more complicated than the business needs. Be clear about your requirements. The best CRM is the one that most perfectly addresses your business wants. There is no point in choosing a CRM that has features that are not useful to your company, go for simple options that are best suited for you rather than the complicated ones that are difficult to handle.
In today’s highly competitive and commercial world, it is imperative to focus on successfully managing existing customers and getting more consumers into a business loop to further enhance your company. Implementing a CRM system can help in dealing with the challenges of the modern ways of marketing and the business in an effective way. Every business needs to have a full-fledged CRM solution to deal with all its needs and further organizational growth.
