Why CRM Matters and How It Can Help You
Customer Resource Management, CRM, is both a tool and a management strategy. It matters because it helps build relationships with customers, and thereby create long-term revenue.
CRM matters because it helps build relationships with current and potential customers, and thereby creates loyalty, customer retention, and long-term revenue. As cloud-based technology, it refers to software that facilitates the recording, analysis and reporting on company-customer interactions. With its help, large companies and small business can organize and manage their marketing, sales, and customer service processes, and optimize their business.
CRM as management tool
Customer Resource Management, CRM, is both a tool and a management strategy. As a tool the CRM software creates a user interface for the collection of customer data. And this is more than storing contact info, like you would do in a ledger or a spreadsheet. CRMs log lead sources, salespeople’s interactions with prospects (emails, phone calls, voicemails, in-person meetings, etc.). Similarly, they can track deal stages and reasons for won or lost deals.
As you may have noticed, a CRM system is a complex network that involves websites, social media, telephone calls, chat, mail, email, and marketing materials. It’s safe to say that its use is the basis scalable sales and marketing. It matters for businesses, because it helps maintain a record of marketing and sales efforts, customer interactions, and the resulting success rate.
Why CRM matters for Organization
The recorded data in the CRM solution allows businesses to organize and automate some of their processes, including
- marketing campaigns
- lead generation
- sales activities
- customer data management, and
- business analytics.
The CRM system’s organization and automation capacities help simplify and streamline customer interaction processes, and thereby increases customer satisfaction.
Why CRM matters for Collaboration
With its overarching network, the CRM system facilitates information share between the various departments of an organization. By pooling marketing, sales, and customer support data, for example, it helps improve customer experience, and thereby contributes to overall success.
CRM as management strategy
Beyond its obvious benefits to business operations such as marketing, sales, and service, customer relationship management can influence management strategy in significant ways.
Learning
With complex customer data at hand, CRM systems help businesses learn more about
- who their customers are
- why they purchase the offered products, and
- trends in customers’ purchasing histories.
This knowledge allows businesses to better anticipate customer needs and to fulfill them. Thus, they can strategically select the correct recipients for promotions as well as for new products.
Why CRM matters for Analytics
An important function of CRM is to analyze customer data. Depending on the platform used, this may include data mining, pattern recognition, and AI. The resulting data help managers to better understand market trends and customers’ wants and needs.
Why it matters
CRM matters because it helps companies to increase process efficiency and customer satisfaction, and thus profits. It takes the overwhelming task of monitoring and managing customer relationships, and it turns them into simple business solutions.
CRM systems come with a variety of features and capabilities, to fit any business type. If you haven’t done so yet, start using a CRM platform, and take advantage of its benefits.