Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a set of practices , procedures and innovations used to manage customer interactions and data during customer life-cycle. The objective is to create and enhance business associations with customers. It aims to enhance your relationship with existing customers, help find new eminent customers and win back previous customers. It helps in gathering, sorting and analyzing customer data.

CRM is an approach to actively track and manage customer information and simplify repetitive tasks. CRM can help diminish expenses  and increase profitability by automating business processes that nurture customer loyalty. It enables responsive customer service and imparts business intelligence.

Some of the most common features of Customer Relationship Management  are:

•  Sales Pipeline
• Deal Management
• Activity Tracking
• Email Tracking
• Built-in Calling
• Sales Automation
• Goal Tracking

The conventional use case of CRM systems is to support sales force with as much information as possible about customers and leads so that they can maximize their effectiveness during a sales call or follow up. By looking up a customer in the CRM system, a salesperson can quickly refer the entire history of the account or lead, including closed business, call reports, contacts, customer challenges and much more. It can also provide notifications to sales teams, providing optimal timing for follow-up contact.

Benefits of Customer Relationship Management:

 1.Keep all customer data at one place

A business shouldn’t suffer from scattered spread sheets , documents and notes made on paper, or depend on employees who changed jobs or forget customer addresses and phone numbers. CRM can help you to store the entire history of interactions with every customer, including calls, emails, signed contracts, previous orders and so on. You will always have the latest updates on your contacts, build relationships with customers based on history of their communication patterns and check what pipeline stage the lead is at- all that in one place.

2. Track profitability and predict revenues

CRM is a perfect tool to simplify an accountant’s work , as they no longer need to worry about tracking every cent of revenue, taxes to be paid, product discounts, and client returns – the system provides accurate sales and financial reporting which are important processes in the corporate value chain. Innovative CRM solutions can extrapolate the history of customer interactions and previous orders to give an idea of what is to come. You can see pipeline of prospective deals and get the idea of how many deals you can expect to see in upcoming months.

3. Automate business processes that were previously manual

Innovative CRM solutions allow automating some of frequently used business processes by suggesting the best and the most efficient next steps user should make to maximize effectiveness. These can relate to lead management, opportunity management, quote management, order management and so on.

4. Aligning marketing, sales and service

Recent studies demonstrate that aligned organizations achieve and average of 32% annual revenue growth while less aligned companies report an average of 7% decline in revenue. One f the opportunities to connect the dots between the marketing, sales and service is to use CRM technology that is designed to unify all customer-facing  processes.

5. Collaboration within the teams

Innovative CRMs offer robust tools for collaboration within the teams and with customers directly from the system: make calls, manage emails, approve contracts and receive notifications not to miss any important event.

In today’s scenario, organizations need to continuously interact with their customers and fulfill their requirement in order to withstand the market competition. Organizations need to track and process a large amount of customer information in order to increase interaction with future and prospective clients. Therefore, organizations need to have a cutting edge technology in order to manage, synchronize and automate this process.