CRM or customer relationship management is a term connoting business strategy and software aimed at organizing and improving customer relations. It in...
CRM or customer relationship management is a term connoting business strategy and software aimed at organizing and improving customer relations. It includes all sales and after sales interactions by the organization with existing customers,
deployed to satisfy and retain them. It also involves efforts to detect, follow and finalize deals with potential customers and gather market trends and customer behavior related information.
A well-planned and executed CRM prevents customer defection making certain that all existing clients have a good customer experience. Effective customer relation management systems also help identify the best customers, market demand, and other general consumer data like their likes and dislikes. This assists the expansion of the business into new product lines and new markets; being attuned to the changing market trends, the enterprise can grab business opportunities as and when they arise, without crumbling under the pressures of a competitive market. After the initial investment in customer relations management tools, the customer management expenses of a business have been generally found to plummet; the rising sales revenue breaks even soon, gradually leading to increasing profits.
CRM’s tools were heavily human resource based in the earlier days when salesmen had to travel heavy with paper documents, meet customers and rely on local payphones for reporting to the office. Today the technological developments have made this enterprise methodology heavily automated. This in fact has lightened the task of the sales and marketing personnel.
Today’s customer relations managing systems make use of streamlining knowledge management software such as contact and leads software. The software builds specialized databases to store records of customer profiles, leads and historical and in progress contracts in an organized manner for easy tracking and retrieval whenever required. It enables order taking with mobile devices and sales information sharing across the enterprise. This aids quicker transaction processing; account, cash and telephone sales improve.
Customer support software, which is call centre and help-desk software, help sales employees provide efficient after sales troubleshooting and repair services to customers and efficaciously address customer grievances.
The growth of Internet technology has changed the manner of communication between people and has led to popularity of online transactions. Customer relationship management has also kept pace with this technological advancement and leverages Web based social media such as popular social networking sites as its new tool for interacting with customers, improving their business experience and finding out customer preferences for selling more effectively.
E CRM uses self-service software for sending automated emails, email organizing and marketing campaign managing. The help desk software is integrated with self-service websites for personalizing the online experience; this is termed “mass customization”. The web based survey software helps enterprises conduct automated electronic surveys, questionnaires and polls on customer predilections online.
Forming new strategic partnerships is integral to maintaining competitiveness and business expansion. Partnership management software creates tracks and retrieves partnership agreements and contracts.
An enterprise can purchase customer relations management software available in options like on-premise, on custom order or SaaS, software as a service, from software vendors.
Recently customer relations management software has been developed for mobile phones, so that sales personnel can carry customer information and work on it on the go without having to open even their laptops.
The customer relations management scenario of tomorrow will be dictated by the high-tech cloud computing concept. Rather than make a sunken investment in customer relations management on site hardware, software and servers it involves using the services of Internet based super computing network of servers. This concept permits processing millions of computations in very little time, paying only for resources used. This makes it ideal not just for large businesses but also for seasonal business, small and medium enterprises’ CRM needs.
