HOW CRM CAN HELP YOUR BUSINESS
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and it is a sought after software that businesses use for ease of sales and marketing operations. As the name suggests, CRM software mainly provides automation in storing and processing customer’s information to ascertain the next approachable strategy to land a new customer. Your sales get accelerated as you can easily accumulate critical information about customers from using CRM software and head them under one database.
Types of CRM software:
Operational CRM: These CRMs assist with the most basic functions that CRM software can provide you like Marketing Automation, Sales Automation & Service Automation. This way, different departments can work together on capturing, nurturing, and closing deals for your company. For example, leads coming from different marketing channels can be automatically uploaded to the CRM through integration.
Analytical CRM: Information gathered about customers from operational CRMs are analysed in-depth to know customer preferences, points of contact, interests, shopping habits, etc. This way, companies can make use of the data they already collect to make better business decisions.
Collaborative CRM: This CRM software, as the name suggests, help different branches under any organization to have access to customer data. While operational and analytical CRM focuses on gathering customer data, collaborative CRM helps combine the data under different tags in one database so sales, marketing & customer support can work in harmony to facilitate teamwork.
Strategic CRM: Sometimes included in the collaborative CRMs definition, strategic CRM focuses on customers. In this example, collecting information about customers and the interactions between them and your business may lead to improve their relationship with them. It not only gives you insights right away but instead adjusts or customises the way you interact with customers in the long run. This solution is useful if you’re in a business where the focus is on long-term relationships, rather than quick sales and short campaigns.
Now that we have elaborated on the different types of CRM, we shall look into how CRM software can prove beneficial for your company. Be it an MNC or SME, whatever the size of your business may be, you can never go wrong with adapting technology into your day-to-day business activities.
Enhanced knowledge of customers: CRMs tend to offer a competitive advantage to the sales, marketing & support team. Not only do they know a contact’s full name, email address, telephone number, postal address, website and social media accounts, but also such critical business facts as a contact’s position in the company, his/her relations to other contacts in your database, the language they speak, and even their birthdays.
Customer Retention: While CRM software is a great asset in finding and nurturing your potential and new customers, it’s also a great tool for keeping your existing customers happy. A CRM software will help you keep your promises by reminding you about appointments or when to send follow up emails. But what makes the real trick here is that CRM can also prompt you to reach out to those customers who have not been contacted in a while.
Faster Communication: Not making your customers wait by quickly replying to their requests is a sign of professionalism. Saving your and your customers’ time is the CRM system, which offers you a set of customizable, ready-to-use email templates, letters, documents, proposals, quotes, invitations, newsletters, etc.
Provides better customer data privacy: A CRM system can help you obtain and document your contacts’ permission to store and use their personal details (consents), send automatic notifications to all new contacts informing that you would like to store their data, manage your customers’ subscription to email communication preferences, and even set up rules to update personal details for groups of contacts – all at one time. Doing this all manually will take most of your time and you also run the risk of making mistakes. But, setting up a CRM system to do that for you is a quick, safe and reliable way to make your communications with customers GDPR compliant, which in turn builds trust as you handle your customers’ data with respect.
Acquiring new customers is a long and arduous process & maintaining good relations with them is important as well. CRM software assists your business not only in better processing customer data but also in generating new leads. CRM software also saves time which is a crucial resource in business. There are multiple choices out there but choosing the right CRM software that is within a stipulated budget may prove difficult. Do proper homework on what your business needs are and chat with multiple CRM software development company to finalize an option.
