Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

What is CRM?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is software used to manage interaction between the organization and its customers.

CRM software covers broad areas of sales, marketing, support and customer services. It captures the customers’ data into a single repository so that the users can easily analyze and access customer information which will help in expanding the business.

An effective CRM software should not only satisfy the current needs of the company but should also be flexible enough to evolve with time and technology enhancement.

How does CRM help sales managers?

Customer Relationship Management system enables sales manager to:

• Assign tasks to sales representatives
• Monitor performance
• Access data for goal setting
• Provide a strategy for improvement in performance
• Monitor revenue metrics
• Organize team meetings
• Managing data categorically

Some examples of implementation of CRM in Large companies

• Apple
• Coca-cola
• Amazon marketplace
• Tesco

These companies use CRM for targeted marketing. Based on client historical data, recommendations are made for clients. For these big industries, CRM provides insights on customers’ likes and dislikes and helps in making data-driven decisions to grow their businesses.

Types of CRM

For any growing business, the primary goal of CRM is to enable organization to understand customer’s behavior, needs, preferences, psychology which will enable the organization to provide the best quality services. It helps in customer retention and building strong customer relationships. Based on applications, CRM is categorized into

1. Operational CRM
2. Analytical CRM
3. Collaborative CRM

1. Operational CRM

Operational CRM is the most important type of CRM. It supports business automation. The purpose of this type of CRM is to generate leads, engage clients, increase contacts and capture relevant client data. Operational CRM is further categorized into

• Sales automation
• Services automation
• Marketing automation

2. Analytical CRM

Analytical CRM helps senior management to analyze customer data and make data-driven decisions. For marketing, it helps to measure the effectiveness of campaigns. For sales executives, it helps to generate leads and increase sales.

3. Collaborative CRM

Collaborative CRM also called Strategic CRM helps the organization to distribute client data among different units of the organization such as sales staff, marketing staff, technical and support departments. In a general business setup, every business unit hesitates to share data with other units that result in indirect huge business losses. Collaborative CRM helps to unite all organizational units to work on the achievement of the main goal. How to gain customer loyalty, increase sales and bring more customers towards the organization are a few of the points in favor of strategic or collaborative CRM.

What are the Advantages of using CRM?

Customer Relationship Management provides easy solutions to major business problems. Whether a business is on a large scale or very small. Problems that every business face at some stage of development include

1. Low customer retention rate
2. Data mismanagement
3. Sales tracking
4. Complicated reports
5. Slow business growth

Let’s explore one by one, how CRM systems can help to solve these major business issues.

1. Less customer retention rate

Bringing customers is not an easy task however retaining the customer also requires additional efforts. Retention ratio of the customer increases when the product / service offered by the organization meets their needs and in case of any issue the customer service department timely address their concerns pertaining to the product / service.

It is where CRM plays a major role, based on the available data in Analytical CRM identifies buying behavior / patterns, make recommendation to the sale staff for next best possible product for their clients. Further it provides the platform where sales staff can record their interaction with customers which enables the Sales Manager to monitor their teams’ meetings with the clients.

2. Data mismanagement

Data gathered from different sales representatives and different business units become difficult to interpret. Nowadays there are many applications and software used to manage data. Some prefer using spreadsheets, others notepads or slides. It becomes hard to collect data accurately at one forum. CRM helps all business units in data mining, cleansing and makes data synchronization easy across the whole organization.

3. Sales tracking

Sales representatives often miss to record their meetings with clients as a result they do not perform adequate follow ups and miss potential business opportunities. CRM can fix all these issues instantly by providing a mobile access facility to the agents so they can use it any time at their convenience.

4. Complicated reports

Disorganized and misleading data makes sales reports difficult to understand. Taking decisions on misleading data results in huge business losses. CRM helps in data consolidation and provides centralized reporting which enables the users to make timely decisions.

5. Slow business growth

No matter what the company size is, every business requires growth to survive in the market and competitive atmosphere. Equipping the Sales Representative with the right tools results in better performance and business growth.

Tops Sectors that use CRM

Banking

In developed countries, the banking sector mostly relies on CRM. CRM Solutions provide customized data handling based on needs, behavior, identification, and potential of clients. The CRM solutions designed for the banking system are more customer-oriented and based on detailed insights.

Hotels

The hotel industry is the second biggest to use CRM to align customer databases. Marketing automation, services automation, auto mailing, potential client data maintenance, are some of the CRM solutions for hotel management.

Asset management companies

Companies offering financial services are one of the major beneficiaries of CRM solutions. Rising technologies help this sector to make targeted offers for their clients. In asset management companies, CRM helps sales representatives to identify potential clients and helps businesses to gain the trust of customers by their automated dealing and processes.

Insurance

For insurance, CRM solutions help in machine learning and comprehensive data analytics. It helps to maintain a complete database of every client.

Consulting firms

Other than the skills and working approach, the success of consultation service providers depends on operational management and processes. Right CRM for consultation helps to manage the clients, daily tasks and builds a focused approach.