Customer Relationship Management

Customer Relationship Management

What is CRM Software?

A tool known as customer relationship management (CRM) is used to handle all interactions and relationships between your business and its clients. The objective is straightforward: to strengthen business ties. CRM systems assist businesses in maintaining contact with clients, streamlining procedures, and boosting profitability.

When people talk about CRM, they usually refer to a CRM system or platform, a tool that helps with contact management, sales management, productivity, and more.

The use of CRM software enables you to concentrate on the relationships that your business has with specific individuals, such as clients, service users, coworkers, or suppliers, over the course of the entire lifecycle of the relationship. This includes acquiring new clients, earning their business, and maintaining and enhancing existing relationships.

Who is CRM software for?

A CRM system gives everyone a better way to manage the external contacts and relationships that are essential to success, whether they work in sales, customer service, business development, recruiting, marketing, or any other area of the company. With CRM software, you can manage marketing campaigns, track service issues, identify sales opportunities, and store customer and prospect contact information all in one convenient location. You can also make data about every customer interaction accessible to anyone at your company who might need it.

Collaboration and productivity can be increased with visibility and simple access to data. Everyone in your firm has access to information about consumers, including how they were approached, what they purchased, when they most recently did so, how much they paid, and much more. CRM solutions can be especially helpful to a small firm, as teams frequently need to find methods to do more with less. CRM systems can help businesses of all sizes promote business success. Our CRM Handbook offers guidance and the initial steps for getting started, as well as an explanation of how and why small to medium-sized firms should think about utilising CRM software.

The importance of CRM for your business

Since CRM software is the most popular and quickly expanding subset of enterprise application software, its significance is growing. By 2027, it is anticipated that global CRM spending will amount to $114.4 billion USD. If you want your firm to last, you need a future strategy that is focused on your consumers and supported by the appropriate technology. You have goals for your business's goals, profitability, and sales. Yet, obtaining current, accurate information about your development can be challenging. How do you turn the numerous data streams generated by sales, customer support, marketing, and social media monitoring into insightful business data?

A CRM system can give you a clear overview of your customers. You can see everything in one place — a simple, customisable dashboard that can tell you a customer’s previous history with you, the status of their orders, any outstanding customer service issues, and more. You can even choose to include information from their public social media activity — their likes and dislikes, what they are saying and sharing about you or your competitors. Marketers can use a CRM solution to manage and optimise campaigns and lead journeys with a data-driven approach, and better understand the pipeline of sales or prospects coming in, making forecasting simpler and more accurate. You’ll have clear visibility of every opportunity or lead, showing you a clear path from inquiries to sales. Some of the biggest gains in productivity and in making a whole-company shift to customer-centricity can come from moving beyond CRM as just a sales and marketing tool and embedding it in your business — from finance to customer services and supply chain management. This helps to ensure that customer needs are at the forefront of business processes and innovation cycles.

Running a business without CRM software can cost you.

More administration means less time for everything else. An active sales team can generate a flood of data. Reps are out on the road talking to customers, meeting prospects, and finding out valuable information – but all too often this information gets stored in handwritten notes, laptops, or inside the heads of your salespeople.

Details can get lost, meetings are not followed up on promptly, and prioritising customers can be a matter of guesswork rather than a rigorous exercise based on fact. And it can all be compounded if a key salesperson moves on. But it's not just sales that suffers without CRM.

Your customers may be contacting you on a range of different platforms including phone, email, or social media — asking questions, following up on orders, or contacting you about an issue. Without a common platform for customer interactions, communications can be missed or lost in the flood of information — leading to a slow or unsatisfactory response.

Even if you do successfully collect all this data, you’re faced with the challenge of making sense of it. It can be difficult to extract intelligence. Reports can be hard to create and they can waste valuable selling time. Managers can lose sight of what their teams are up to, which means that they can’t offer the right support at the right time – while a lack of oversight can also result in a lack of accountability from the team.

What does a CRM system do?

A customer relationship management (CRM) solution organises customer and prospect information in a way that enables you to forge deeper ties with them and expand your business more quickly. It helps you locate new clients, earn their business, and keep them satisfied. CRM systems begin by gathering information about a client from their website, email, phone, social media, and other sources. Along with storing personal information like a client's communication preferences, it may also automatically draw in additional data, including current company activity headlines. The CRM application organises this data to provide you with a comprehensive record of people and organisations overall, enabling you to comprehend your relationship across time.

A CRM platform can also connect to other business apps that help you to develop customer relationships. CRM solutions today are more open and can integrate with your favourite business tools, such as document signing, accounting and billing, and surveys, so that information flows both ways to give you a true 360-degree view of your customer.

And a new generation of CRM goes one step further: Built-in intelligence automates administrative tasks, like data entry and lead or service case routing, so you can free up time for more valuable activities. Automatically generated insights help you understand your customers better, even predicting how they will feel and act so that you can prepare the right outreach.