What is CRM
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a strategy that companies use to manage relationships and interactions with their customers or prospects. Its main goal is to foster better relations with customer, helping to retain existing customers which will all eventually lead to increase sales growth and profitability.
CRM systems are designed to let you focus on relationships surrounding your organisation – whether they are customers, suppliers or employees. What makes CRM so valuable, is the fact that it is not only used as a sales and marketing tool, but is also able to gain productivity in other areas – from Human Resource and supply chain management.
Why do you need CRM
An active sales team receives a lot of data when they are interacting with customers. These details often get lost when they are not recorded properly. Thus, follow-up meetings did not happen promptly and prioritising customers is based on guesswork or convenience rather than facts. All these can be compounded when a key salesperson decides to move on.
On top of this, your customers may be contacting you via different platforms – social media, phone calls, emails etc. Without a system that helps you organise these interactions and communications, information can be lost which is absolutely bad for customer service.
Even with a good record keeping structure, you will still be faced with the challenge of analysing the data. It takes a lot of time and effort to scrutinise the informations and making sense of the data.
Benefits of CRM
Keeping a complete history record of your interactions with a client
Your customers will be more than grateful to you if they do not have to repeat any necessary details each time they are served by a different employee. It provides a full history of all communications, interactions and documents shared. Moreover, this history record can provide insights on how to approach future customers or what went wrong during an interaction.
Keeping information organized and in one place
It is easy to retrieve information, update and share with everyone on your team helping your company to run more effectively.
Helps in strategic planning for the future
CRMs programmes are able to generate reports for you, providing you with instant metrics on different aspects of your business. This valuable data allows you to make accurate forecast and plan for the future.
Integrate with calendars
It can send you important reminders of events or tasks with you clients or suggest appropriate times to contact customers.
Work from anywhere
The most recent development in CRM systems is the move into the cloud. Organisations around the world are able to move their data into a secure online environment, without having to install the software for every employee in the organisation. Information can be retrieved as and when required
instantly after a meeting or work from anywhere. The same information is available to anyone who needs it, from the sales team to the customer service representatives.
Placing your customers at the heart of your business strategy is the key to success. CRM is the platform to do just that. It allows you to focus on other areas of your business, while knowing that an automated system is in place to keep you and your entire organisation aware of your clients’ needs. To help you get started, feel free to contact us.
