Customer Relationship Management

Customer relationship management, or CRM, is an info business term that applies to methodologies, software, and, in general, Internet capabilities that help a company manage relationships with its customers in an organised way.

A CRM combines practices, strategies, and technologies that companies use to manage and analyse customer communications and data throughout the customer lifecycle. The goal is to improve customer service relationships, assist in customer retention, and drive sales growth.

What does the term Customer Relationship Management comprise?

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Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the methodology that focuses on storing, analysing, and using all relevant customer information. What considers relevant customer information naturally depends on the type of company and customers. In some companies, it consists of maintaining a contact data structure or the clients’ actions. Other companies require more advanced functionality and business intelligence (BI) within the CRM to better understand the customer.

The number of different customer relationship management strategies and packages makes it difficult for companies to choose the best fit for their business. Therefore,  a comparison of the other existing systems initiates in the CRM Guide. With this information, you can check which method best suits your company’s needs.

Why is Customer Relationship Management Important?

CRM enables a business to deepen its relationships with customers, customer service users, colleagues, partners, and vendors.

Building good relationships and keeping track of leads and customers is crucial to customer acquisition and retention – this is the concept behind CRM. You can see everything in one place: a simple, customisable dashboard that can show you a customer’s past history with you, the status of their orders, pending customer service issues, and much more.

Gartner predicts that by 2021, CRM technology will be the highest performing area relative to enterprise software spending. If your company has plans to stay in the market in the future, you should know that you need a strategy for it. For forward-thinking companies, CRM provides the framework for that strategy.

What Possibilities and Functionalities does a CRM system offer?

Implementing a CRM system can offer some significant advantages to a company. However, these advantages are not always very relevant. Therefore, whether the investment is worth it must be checked when selecting a plan. First, you must calculate the return on investment (ROI). Companies that decide to invest in a customer relationship management package do so for (one of) the following reasons:

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1. A single point of information for Customer Service

Customers are increasingly demanding when hiring a competitive service. A company that can quickly and effectively resolve doubts or problems gains an immediate advantage over the competition. Therefore, companies want to remedy or prevent customer information from being distributed between different systems and people. When all customer information, such as orders placed, previous communications, feedback, and customer meeting minutes are in one place, this also ensures a consistent and seamless customer experience. Of course, employees can see what a colleague has discussed with the customer in the previous contact.

2. Customer loyalty is promoted

An investigation indicates that the priority of commercial companies should be on the retention of existing customers. A long-lasting customer relationship results in more purchases by the customer and requires less effort and capital investment. A consistent connection is also essential for companies that do not have traditional customers but members. After all, a stable member base guarantees a much smoother business management than the continuous connection of new members. In this way, you save time and money.

The degree of retention of existing customers depends mainly on customer service performance. Effective customer service relies above all on the satisfaction of existing customers. However, customers have increasingly higher expectations. They also want personalised treatment. For example, customers or members expect to receive offers or communications that concern them. Therefore, general newsletters or calls from representatives slightest increasingly. Therefore, marketing and sales are increasingly using CRM to obtain more excellent knowledge and thus increase sales or collaboration possibilities.

3. The Transfer of Reports from Marketing to Sales promotes

Many companies have a sales and marketing department that works together to maintain or boost sales. Generally, the marketing department is the first to start using CRM. Based on CRM data such as customer reviews, (personal) preferences, and history, marketing campaigns and activities create to retain existing customers and attract new customers.

With this addition, the sales department is back to work. Depending on the reactions received by marketing activities, sales employees carry out specific actions, such as following up on requests for information or getting up close and personal with potential customers.

4. Design and Fulfillment of new Marketing and Sales Plans

To get closer to both prevailing and potential customers, companies also keep coming up with new strategies. With this, the data of existing customers turns out to be a gold mine. The success of previous campaigns can be directly related to purchasing behaviours. CRM helps the marketing and sales departments of a company by collecting and analysing information about:

  • What campaigns produced interest from new customers?
  • Which campaigns had a positive result on the notice of existing customers?
  • What communication channels were the ones that made customers loyal or the ones that made them buy something? (calls, e-mails, social networks.)
  • What (internal) communication forms have resulted in a purchase or closer collaboration?
  • Is there a difference between new and existing customers?
  • Is there a difference between the customer groups? (for example, families and singles, generational differences, commercial or private clients.)

Second, the strategies of the marketing and sales departments often base their strategies on market research. For example, you can do research on what is the ideal language for advertising posters in Spain. Likely, this is not the same as in the United States.

5. Choosing a Suitable CRM System

Usually, when choosing a specific CRM system (vendor), it is not only the industry or the size of a company that is careful. Instead, the type of customers of the company is more important. Therefore, they determine the range of customer management. In addition, it must decide whether the CRM is implemented as a separate solution ( satellite system ) or as part of other business software. Finally, the structure of the company and the level of security desired are also decisive factors.

Conclusion

For the next few years, here will be the talk of Customer relationship management. But unfortunately, many companies will only acquire technology believing that this is the remedy to all their ills without realising that the key and the most outstanding effort lies in convincing their human resources of the importance of CRM. And while that cultural change does not occur, which will be complicated, it will not be possible to talk about CRM strategy, at least in a global way as we understand it.

Also Read: 5 Tips to Engage more Web Traffic.