May 12, 2016 11:03 AM / by Joshua Ballard
We recently asked one of our friends to write us up an article with their unique nterpretation of a CRM and it’s importance within any business. Kristy from WDX Web Development in Melbournewas kind enough to give us her time to share some insights.
To form an alliance with the progressively changing needs and expectations of a modern-day customer is quite a daunting tasks for organisations regardless of their size. Gone is the time when ways to improve the customer engagement were limited. Today you have numerous ways to enhance the customer experience. The only restriction is the time that it takes to collate the thoughtful conversations in order to create fully-fledged relationships. This is the limitation that is compelling organisations to start using Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools to carry through the recursive, consistent strategies for enhanced customer engagement.
Function of CRM
CRM primarily focuses on aiding organisations towards streamlined management of all the processes involved in winning customers and maintaining healthy relationship – to put simple, what’s their strategy to hunt, grab and retain the loyal customers for maximum time period possible. In spite of the fact that it’s critically prominent for CRM to upgrade internal processes and systems of data for the information of the customer, organisations are looking forward to their role as the systems of engagement that dynamically helps to create and sustain the existing relationships with the customers.
How CRM addresses the concern of Customer Engagement?
As already discussed above a CRM is a valuable tool that leverages businesses more flexibility to interact with and cater to the needs of their customers. The objective of CRM is to engage customers and build significant relationships with them, assisting lasting dialogues that help to improve the understanding towards the customer base and make them more loyal to your organisation.
CRM systems are programmed and designed such that they can track and analyse the market campaigns and can also perform a comprehensive customer analysis. They have extended their horizons beyond the crux of sales and marketing areas to include support and finance data for providing users with a thorough picture of individual customers as well the larger customer base.
Over and above developing and handling customer relationships, CRM systems comprise of three robust functionalities:
- Data Warehousing
- Sales Force Automation
- Opportunity Management
These functions boost up the productivity of your business processes.
Sales force automation helps to implement sales analysing, automate trailing of client’s account details, and clubbing together the sales and marketing, retail outlets and call centres.
Data warehousing leverage users to lump the information of the transaction, follow trends and figure out the value and KPI by uniting the CRM system with already existing storage systems.
Lastly, Opportunity management encourages companies to manage the sudden growth and demand by using a forecasting model, which mingles sales history along with sales projections.
A powerful CRM system works accurately to capture the significant data from the customers and accumulates the same in an accessible location. It also generates the alerts and notifications to be sent to customers without wasting much time.
It won’t be wrong to say that CRM usage opens doors to advanced opportunities in marketing, the collection of customer data and most prominently leverages the complete knowledge in such a way that gets reflected through measurable sales figures.
Basically, a CRM system should be competent enough to foster the customer satisfaction while cutting down the number of actions needed for managing the customer relations. However, a deficient CRM system would only result in doubling the efforts, which often makes the process of achieving results a lengthy and time-consuming one.
Therefore, give your business a resourceful companion by choosing the appropriate CRM system suiting your business preferences!
If you would like a robust collection of core CRM functions that you should be looking for, as well as information about where you can get a very powerful 100% free to use CRM, then check out our Free Ebook “A Beginners Guide to Customer Relationship Management Software”
Topics: CRM, custom research, Customer relationship manager