All You Need to Know About CRM

CRM or customers relationship management is a strategy that helps with the control of organizations' relationships with customers and potential customers as well as the interaction between both parties. The CRM system allows companies to stay I touch with their customers, improve their profitability and streamline processes. As a summary, the primary goal of the CRM system is primarily to develop a business relationship.

When people talk about CRM, they mean any of these three things:

CRM as a process: In this context, we are talking about a system a business adopts to manage and nurture business relationships.

CRM as a strategy: this is a philosophy about how the relationship with potential customers and customers should be managed.

CRM as a technology: this is a technology often in the cloud, which companies use to record, analyze and report interactions between users and company. This is also called a CRM solution or system.

What does CRM software do?

The CRM software records contact information of customers such as websites social media profile, email, telephone and many more. It also can automatically bring out other information such as recent news about the company, and it can as well store details such as personal preferences of clients on communications.

The CRM system organizes this information giving you a complete record of the companies, so a better understanding of the relationship with these companies.

CRM software improves customer relationship simply management by creating an all-aroundview of the customer capturing interactions with the business, and bringing out the information that would help with a better conversation with the customer.

Importance of CRM

CRM gives a business or company a deeper relationship between service users, partners, suppliers, and customers. Keeping track of customers and prospects is very good for forging good relationships.

With CRM, you can see every information in one place with a simple and customizable dashboard that can tell you the previous history of a customer with you, any outstanding issues and the status of your order.

Benefits of CRM on business functions

We know that CRM is traditionally a sales and marketing tool, but there are benefits of using CRM in other areas such as HR, supply chain and partner management.

Here are how other business functions benefit from CRM:

• Customer service teams can easily track conversations across channels
• HR teams can use CRM to speed up the recruitment process as well as monitoring employee performance
• Sales teams can use CRM to better understand their sales pipeline
• Marketing teams can use CRM for making simpler and more accurate forecasting

Advantages of CRM

By collecting and organizing customer interaction data and making it accessible, and actionable for all, CRM offers many benefits and advantages such as:

• Improved sales metrics
• Cross-team collaboration
• Heightened productivity
• Empowered sales management
• Increased customer satisfaction and retention
• Boosted marketing ROI
• Enriched products and services
• Enhanced contact management
• Accurate sales forecasting
• Reliable reporting

The efficiency of CRM cannot be overemphasized as it is beneficial for marketing too amongst others and according to Gartner prediction, by 2012, CRM technology would be the largest area of spending on enterprise software.