What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and what can it do for your business?

What is CRM

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an approach for better management of communication with customers, to increase company sales and to save time. CRM helps businesses and salespeople effectively manage leads, contacts, deals, customers, and more.

Specifically, when people are talking about CRM, they mean CRM Tool (or CRM System). This tool helps in managing workflow process, customer management, sales management, etc. Sales are not the only agenda for CRM, it goes beyond that by providing better user experience, giving attention to the relationship with each individual (customer, employee, service users).

In the earlier days, large organizations were able to use CRM and it was difficult to learn and implement. But now the Customer Relationship Management system has become affordable for all lines of business with various CRM Tools being available in the market.

What can CRM do for your business

Initially, when the company is small, it is easy to maintain or track all the emails, contact books, spreadsheets or other logistic information. But when the organization grows it becomes a daunting task to keep a track of all the records. You may lose track of email-conversation, a customer contact, it becomes difficult to always update sheets.

Here comes CRM as a savior. CRM helps in:

Centralising all the data to a single location: All the customer data can be stored and managed in a single platform. Customer information is accessible to the employees from one location.

Information such as the following is accessible in the CRM tool:

• Customer History – Captures the duration of the customer with the company, purchasing history and how customers were able to find your business.
• Contact Information – Information like contact number, mailing address, email address, website, and social media handle is available.
• Chat or conversation data – Having a track of all the conversations that are made through support tickets, phone calls, online chats.
• Customer Satisfaction: In a survey, conducted by Caperra, it was noted that 47% of polled CRM customers said that CRM had a great impact on customer satisfaction. As the tool is accessible to all, your support team can help in solving problems quickly as soon as an issue (support ticket) is requested. This becomes another way to track and foresee your customer needs and interest. Your company’s sales and marketing team can collaborate together to create proper content and deliver it to the right audience. This way, the sales are personalised and there is always a direct focus on the customer experience.
• Automated And Quicker Sells: It is always dismaying for your executives to manually enter the data. This takes a lot of quality and productive time. CRM helps in automating most of the repetitive tasks so that the time is saved and utilised for sales.

Using CRM, you can build a sales process, that helps in giving a step-by-step map for deals and reduces the length of the repeating sales cycle.

The built sales process will help you in:

• Improving Sales Strategies: Utilising the built process can help in recognising the main reason for delayed sale. Necessity strategies can be taken to deal with the reason and respond to the problems. Incorporating sales process can help in increasing revenues for the company.
• Customer Prospect: It becomes the default for your sales team to provide the customer with a better experience. Data that was gathered through the process helps the sales team to identify the customer interest and make wise decisions before approaching to the customer.
• Forecast your sales: Maintaining a precise count of sell rate helps the sales management team to predict the sale and plan for revenue generations.

On the whole, CRM can gather all the data to a single location and it becomes easy for the support, HR, product, sales, and marketing team to access the data. CRM is an effective tool for time-saving, to do organised work, manage customer interaction and data, and increase sales to your business.

If you’re looking to get started with CRM system, Get in touch with us or try Zoho CRM for managing your sales, marketing & support in one platform.