CRM

While old-fashioned methods like note cards, Rolodex, mobile phone, excel spreadsheets, or Google documents, may help in the short term, but in the long run for faster growth, businesses usually turn to a CRM system.

90% of businesses that have more than 11 employees use a CRM tool. It is the second-largest enterprise software market after ERP. The year 2016 saw an overall CRM usage increase that grew from 56% to 74%. The worldwide sales of this segment are further anticipated to cross $36 billion by 2017 (according to Gartner Research report).

CRM or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a tool that lets large and small enterprises to automate, organize, simplify, centralize, scale, secure, and synchronize every component of customer interaction, including marketing, sales, customer service, support, and customer engagement.

Here’s a comprehensive list that will help you understand the benefits that you avail by having a CRM tool: –

1. AUTOMATION OF EVERYDAY TASKS

There are so many small tasks in a day that consume an awful amount of your time. Aside from the basics, there are hundreds of tasks like form filling, reports filing and sending, legal work, and a lot more, that must be completed in order for everything to function properly. That is exactly where CRM systems come into place. They are designed to take the burden off the shoulders of your employees.

2. BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF YOUR CUSTOMER

The more you know your customer, the better it will be for you to offer them the right kind of experience. To do this, you need to move beyond all the disorganized methods, and trace, identify, document, and record every interaction they have with your organization using a CRM tool. Not only does it allow you to store a vast list of customers and any important information regarding them, but accessing their files is even more convenient as it is stored on the cloud.

3. IMPROVED CUSTOMER RELATION

One of the major benefits that one gets by using a CRM tool is attaining better customer satisfaction results. This strategy not only helps in servicing, marketing, sales but also helps you out in performing these tasks in an organized and systematic way, which in turn helps in increasing customer loyalty.

4. INCREASED UPSELLING AND CROSS SELLING

A CRM system can also be used to up-selling and cross-sell products and services. This is done by understanding the wants, needs, and patterns of purchase of the customers (with the help of the CRM tool), and accordingly, provide them with relevant offerings. Furthermore, the details are also stored in a central database and are accessible to all company executives. They are used by executives when an opportunity is spotted to promote other products.

5. BETTER INTERNAL COMMUNICATION

There cannot be a better tool than CRM to help in building up effective and better communication within the company. Since the customer data and communication is automatically stored, this makes it easier for all the employees to access all the information including emails, calendar, phone call details, etc., in one place.

It makes it possible for all the employees to maintain the level of efficiency and helps different departments like sales, marketing, customer service to work in tandem. This means, since all employees will have access to similar data and complete clarity about the customer, they will be able to provide the same high level of service in their respective departments.

6. OPTIMIZED MARKETING

CRM tools help you to get better insights about your customer needs, behavior, an idea about the most profitable customer groups, and so on. This not only helps you to narrow down more accurately, but this strategy further allows you to identify the correct time to market your product to the customers; thus increasing your success rate. In this way, you get to optimize your marketing resources more efficiently.

7. SUPERIOR ANALYTICAL DATA AND REPORTING

CRM systems store data from all departments in one place. This means that not only can it easily be incorporated with other tools or plugins, but this also gives you the opportunity to automate your reporting to free out more time. Furthermore, you can also personalize your dashboard to get instant access to the data that is relevant to you (after filtering the rest), leading to improved analysis. And better reporting data eventually leads to making resourceful and effective decisions.

Every business has a different way of storing and managing customer connections and information. While some prefer to go with old-fashioned ways and excel spreadsheets; mature and wise businesses prefer to go with advanced tools. That said – if you have any intentions of scaling your business, and growing your customer and employee base, then it may be time that you considered a CRM system.

CRM – A VALENTINE FOR YOUR BUSINESS