Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is about building and maintaining profitable long-term customer relationships beyond the one-off buy and sell transaction. It works on the philosophy of putting the customer first. It involves acquiring, retaining, and partnering with selective customers to create superior value for both the company and the customer.
A CRM system provides a clear overview of your customers by which you will be always connected to them. It will help you to retain existing customers, provide services and support to them, and also helps to find new customers and win their businesses.
CRM provides means and a method to enhance the experience of individual customers so that they will remain customers for life. It does so by:
1. Communicating with customers.
2. Understanding their behavior and their requirements.
3. Building a system to satisfy those requirements.
A CRM system allows everyone in the business to have wonderful relationships with each other and their customers. A CRM tool lets you store every piece of information about your business in one central location and make this information available to anyone at your company who might need it.
A successful CRM program is
1. simple involves training users to make customers feel valued
2. complex in finding affordable ways to identify the customer and their needs, design customer contact strategies creating customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Customer relationship management (CRM) solutions enable businesses to store and manage all their customers’ data in one place, where all stakeholders can see it. That data can be mined for insights, used to automate marketing and sales processes, forecast future sales, and much more. Many companies are offering CRM software, each tuned to help businesses achieve different goals and objectives.
You try to rope people in with ads on social media. You start a blog. Sometimes, you even do it the old-fashioned way and set up a booth at a trade show. But once you have their attention, then what? Do you even know if you have their attention? If you had a CRM you would gain these insights and more. Another one of the many benefits of CRM: it is the framework on which you can optimize your lead generation funnel.
With a CRM, you can capture all of your interactions with prospects and customers, no matter where you’re trying to attract them. You can embed forms on your blog to capture contact information, and identify which keywords are bringing more attention to your page. The CRM can also search social media and qualify leads based on user activity, and integrate that data into automated, personalized marketing campaigns.
Many CRM platforms offer data analytics tools that enable businesses to unlock insights that are invisible to the naked eye. You can measure just about anything from customer sentiment and whether you’re meeting their expectations, to your sales team’s performance or how well that last marketing campaign did.
You can create dashboards to organize customers based on different characteristics or demographics or automate lead qualification. This can help you target specific parts of your audience with different marketing campaigns that will make the biggest impact.
CRMs can have quite an impact on some important metrics. The folks at Zoho claim that CRM can help customers improve lead conversion rates by 300%, improve customer retention by 27 percent, and shorten sales cycles by 24%. They also found that revenue per sale increased by 41% while saving 23% on sales and marketing costs. In other words, CRM can help you make more sales at a higher value, faster, and for less cost.
