What is a CRM and Why is it Important?
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a strategy for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with your customers and potential customers. It helps you improve your profitability.
More commonly, when people talk about CRM they are usually referring to a CRM system. A tool which helps with contact management, sales management, workflow processes, productivity and more.
Customer Relationship Management enables you to focus on your organisation’s relationships with individual people – whether those are customers, service users, colleagues or suppliers. It is not just for sales. Some of the biggest gains in productivity can come from moving beyond CRM as a sales and marketing tool. Then embed it in your business – from HR to customer services and supply-chain management.
Why CRM Matter?
If your business is going to last, you know that you need a strategy for the future. You’ll already have targets relating to sales, business objectives and profitability. But getting up-to-date, reliable information on your progress towards your goals can be tricky. How do you translate the many streams of data coming in from sales teams, customer service staff, marketers and social media monitoring into useful business information?
Using 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. Also 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 with you. Marketers can use CRM to better understand the pipeline of sales or prospective work coming in, making forecasting simpler and more accurate. You’ll have clear visibility of every opportunity or lead, showing you the clear path from enquiries to sales.
And though it’s traditionally been used as a sales and marketing tool, customer service teams are seeing great benefits from CRM systems. Today’s customer raises their voices on the social channel like Twitter. Then they more this conversation to private email or calls. A CRM platform enables you to manage the enquiry across channels without losing track.