Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
What is CRM?
In today’s competitive world, customer service and engagement is often the key to success. Customer Relationship Management or CRM systems are the cornerstone to a successful strategy that helps you manage marketing, sales as well as post-sales delivery activities efficiently.
An effective CRM can provide a complete view of your customers. Not only can you identify prospects and create a sales funnel, but you can also create appropriate marketing segments and run targeted campaigns. Further by recording different stages of conversation with customers along with their preferences, you can improve customer service and delivery.
CRM software can be purchased standalone or it can be deployed as an extension of elaborate ERP solutions.
What does CRM do?
The aim of all CRM systems is to help you build a customer-centric business and create a long-term relationship with your customers. Evolving technology lies at the heart of all CRMs. Most businesses who use CRM have reported an improvement in customer service and satisfaction as well as increased customer retention and loyalty.
Through features that help monitor, schedule and manage tasks, record sales and delivery as well as automation of workflows, there is a decrease in error as well an improvement in productivity, efficiency as well as levels of customer service.
Further, the CRM also helps you in centralizing your customer data and standardizing sales processes, that result in improved sales. Smooth integration into marketing automation ensures that the ball is never dropped and customers are not lost. Intelligent CRMS can also help you identify the right set of customers and define your marketing and sales strategy.
Function areas
Key functions of a CRM system are sales, marketing and services.
Sales
- Contact Management: The most basic of features, this allows you to gather all your customer data, segment, organize and profile them.
- Customer opportunity management: Handling leads and scoring them is the cornerstone of all CRMs. Automated scoring patterns improve the efficiency and productivity of your sales teams and help to increase conversion rates.
- Sales performance management and dashboards: These Business intelligence features help you make data-driven and customer-centric decisions.
Marketing
- Campaign and promotion management: Automated and personalized campaign building features in the Marketing modules of the CRM help you effectively engage with both prospects as well as customers.
- Customer segmentation and profiling: Identifying and grouping customers who have the right interests and profiles is a key Marketing feature that helps to organize customer data and subsequently target them.
- Marketing analytics: Meaningful analytics when derived from CRM can drive not only marketing but also business strategy. Smart visualization of data, as well as detailed and customizable analytics, are key features of a Marketing CRM.
Customer service management
- Order Management: From fulfilling orders to invoicing and handling different processes related to the customer, the order management function records customer conversations at each process for efficient handling and delivery.
- Complaint management: Closely integrated into CRM is the ability to raise a ticket and track and respond to customer complaints effectively and in a timely manner.
- Field service management: Decoding the complexities of managing a field force, this module helps to organize and build efficiency in organizations which have a mobile workforce and field service operations. By providing cloud-based platforms which can be accessed from mobile devices, operatives on the go can handle customers better and more effectively.
Trends and Industry Needs
- Intelligence and data-powered CRM: Today’s CRM store extensive data and this data fulfills a critical business need – that of targeting and engaging customers in a more meaningful manner.
- Improved usability: Customizable user-friendly interfaces, as well as a component of personalization according to user needs, industry trends and customer profiles, is one of the biggest trends today.
- Mobile accessibility: As more and more users access data on the go, providing intelligent access and compatible user interfaces on smartphones are the necessity of the hour.
- Increasing social integration: As social media marketing becomes essential for brands; elements of social media optimization and gamification are essential tools of every futuristic CRM.
Top CRM software vendors
Hubspot CRM: One of the most powerful CRM systems, Hubspot can automate and turbocharge both your sales and marketing. The CRM is built with an increased focus on handling inbound lead generation and creating highly engaged communication with prospective customers.
Salesforce CRM: Salesforce is one of the world’s leading CRM systems and renowned for its modular and flexible architecture. It not only packs in detailed sales and marketing features but also revenue planning and analytics.
Freshsales CRM: A unique CRM that leverages Artificial Intelligence, Freshsales provides intelligent scoring, automation and personalization. Rich analytics provide business managers with improved decision making and increased visibility.
Whether you use a standalone CRM or an ERP with built-in CRM, a seamless integration of CRM databases with ERP is absolutely pertinent. Evolved ERPs such as SAP Business One and Netsuite have competent CRMs that can cater to all your customer relationship needs.