CRM stands for customer relationship management. The term refers to practices, strategies, and technologies that companies use to manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle. Its sole aim is to improve business relationships with customers, assist in customer retention and boost the sales.

As a matter of fact, CRM systems/ software help compile information on customers across different channels. The information may include company’s website, telephone, live chat, direct mail, marketing materials and social media. CRM systems can also give customer-facing staff detailed information on customers’ personal information, purchase history, buying preferences and concerns.

The primary aim of customer relationship management systems is to integrate and automate sales, marketing, and customer support. Therefore, these systems typically have a dashboard that gives an overall view of the three functions on a single page for each customer that a company may have. The dashboard may provide information like client information, past sales, previous marketing efforts, and more. It may further summarize all of the relationships between the customer and the firm.

Operational CRM consists of 3 main components:

Salesforce automation:

It works with all stages in the sales cycle, from initially entering contact information to converting potential client into an actual client.

Marketing automation:

It mainly focuses on easing the overall marketing process to make it more effective and efficient.

Service automation: 

It is the part of the CRM system that focuses on direct customer service technology. Service automation utilizes multiple channels such as phone, email, knowledge bases, ticketing portals, FAQs, and more are used to support customers.

The main components of an efficient CRM are:

i) building and managing customer relationships through marketing

ii) observing relationships as they get better through distinct phases

iii) managing these relationships at each stage and recognizing that the distribution of the value of a relationship to the firm is heterogeneous.

The businesses that leverage customer relationship management systems can effectively find success in the following ways:

Better internal communication:

Having a great CRM strategy in place helps in building up better communication within the company. Different departments can easily work as a single team and hence provide an enhanced customer service owing to the easy customer data sharing.

Improved analytical and data reporting:

As a matter of fact, CRM systems store information in one place. This makes it easy to locate information needed such as customer information, sales goals, and performance reports. This further leads to improved analyzing of the data as a whole and increased efficiency.

Boost customer revenues:

Apart from increased efficiency of the various departments of a business, the collected data can also be used to popularize marketing campaigns in a more effective way. The data can effectively be used to reach out to a wider audience and gain a greater exposure. This can eventually help in increasing the customer revenue.

Increased customer loyalty:

A loyal customer base is what every business wishes to have. With an efficacious CRM software in place, customer loyalty can be measured in a less costly manner. Once a business has loyal customers, it has the greatest marketing tool to empower its marketing endeavors. Yes, with a loyal customer base comes a rich source of WOM marketing which has an immense potential for benefiting a business in the form of increased customer acquisition, boosted sales and so on.

Hope, the post helped you learn a lot about CRM and you are probably looking forward to using one if you’ve not leveraged its power to date!