CRM – Concept and Technology of the Modern Customer-Centric World
What is CRM?
CRM is an intermediate manager between you and your potential or existing clients. It widely uses the data from all sources such as feedbacks from various social media handles, marketing campaigns and analysis that data to facilitate the businesses to fulfill the needs of their target audiences.
Well, all that said in a broader contrast, let’s dig deeper in to the acronym:
The CRM in its expanded form means “Customer Relationship Management”. An organization has to deal with various strata’s of customers and for a human it is not possible to keep track record of all possible situations and feedbacks. So, to manage all the customer reviews and feedbacks and do an in depth analysis, we use a tool called as CRM.
So, to build out a healthy relationship with your customer, to organize the work of the various departments of the company, to provide a central means of communication for your prospects, customers and employees this tool can prove to be highly beneficial to grow your business.
So who should adopt CRM based Strategy?
There isn’t a one word answer for who in particular should adopt the CRM based strategy or saying that “any business with a customer base should go for it”, is also not correct.
So, here is the list of businesses that can benefit and stand out by using CRM:
• As the primary motive behind CRM is keeping a track record of customers, so those businesses that have a sales team or are mainly sales oriented can use CRM.
• It can also help businesses in driving their marketing campaigns as it manages sales data of various departments, so a CRM strategy can used to drive marketing campaigns in right direction.
• As it proves to be a customer centric approach, with a centralized mechanism. So, this can be used to avoid the chaos between various departments and put customers as a first priority.
Apart from these benefits, there are companies that are based on either B2B or B2C model and they too leverage on its data and analysis to scale-up their business.
Components of CRM
There are several components of CRM, while some may be important for one business perspective and some for others:
• Salesforce Automation: It collects the sales related data and streamlines that by doing a proper analysis thus forming an important integral part of CRM.
• Customer Service: Customers are the focal point of CRM, and there are two types of customers; namely those are happy with your service or those are unhappy with your service. Managing record of both the customers is important and this is maintained by CRM, this helps in dealing with various customers and helps in learning from past experiences.
• Marketing: The main motive of the marketing campaigns has always been to turn visitors into potential customers and then convert them to leads. With a streamlined CRM strategy, marketing team can easily go through the past stats and analyze that group of customers that can be easily driven.
• Business Reporting: It plays an important role in managing the work driven at the higher hierarchy level, the various analysis reports when collected and put together by CRM, it becomes easy for managers to look after various business processes and the position of company.
Is there a suitable time to adopt a CRM Strategy?
Now, considering all the above factors, if you are convinced that CRM is the right strategy for you and your organization then sooner is always better. As it may have become hard for you to handle all the worksheets and excel sheets, so better to switch to one central platform to fulfill all your business requirements.
This tool will aid in to your sales and marketing campaigns and drive the sales growth leading to customer acquisition, better delivery of services, and better coordination among various teams. So, as soon as you find your organization needs one such tool that would be the right time to go for CRM.
How CRM helps in your Business Growth?
Building a strong customer relationship is essential for your organization’s growth. With the help of customer relationship management technology, you can easily improve your organizations performance and help it to scale-up to new heights.
As you have been trying various social media campaigns and going through various marketing tactics to increase your customer base, CRM is a tool which connects both sales and marketing and collectively delivers your sales team with new prospects.
It not only reduces cost of sales but also improves sales efficiency and boosts sales effectiveness and finds the untapped opportunities and and lets your team come closer to crack any deal.
It helps in improving the customer service, as we have already said that every product in itself is attached to a certain experience and this is either positive or negative experience. When we deal with customers by taking into account their past feedbacks, it helps in providing quick solutions along with the right resources.
Keeping a past record of the customers and dealing with them accordingly shows that you value them. And this surely helps them to do more business with you and is proved to be a customer retention strategy in the long run.
Conclusion
Henceforth, we can say that, the CRM software can prove to be a powerful ally on the ever-shifting market.
Now, B2B and B2C buyers need not you to tell them what they need or want anymore.
They are already acknowledged of what they want since they’ve been searching on the internet, through forums, technology blog website , social media, and so on.
Customers want to be treated as individuals. They want to have a feel like their business matters to you and also you care.
Considering B2B sales, in general, a CRM system can make all the difference in whether or not you gain a new customer or retain an existing one. Customers, when they are made feel valued, tend to be a happy customer which in turn means repeat business – not to mention, improved bottom lines.