What is CRM? All about CRM.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. The goal is simple: Improve business relationships. A CRM system helps companies stay connected to customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability.

When people talk about CRM, they are usually referring to a CRM system, a tool that helps with contact management, sales management, productivity, and more.

A CRM solution helps you focus on your organisation’s relationships with individual people — including customers, service users, colleagues, or suppliers — throughout your lifecycle with them, including finding new customers, winning their business, and providing support and additional services throughout the relationship.

Who is CRM for?

A CRM system gives everyone — from sales, customer service, business development, recruiting, marketing, or any other line of business — a better way to manage the external interactions and relationships that drive success. A CRM tool lets you store customer and prospect contact information, identify sales opportunities, record service issues, and manage marketing campaigns, all in one central location — and make information about every customer interaction available to anyone at your company who might need it.

With visibility and easy access to data, it's easier to collaborate and increase productivity. Everyone in your company can see how customers have been communicated with, what they’ve bought, when they last purchased, what they paid, and so much more. CRM can help companies of all sizes drive business growth, and it can be especially beneficial to a small business, where teams often need to find ways to do more with less.

Here’s why CRM matters to your business.

Gartner predicts that by 2021, CRM will be the single largest revenue area of spending in

enterprise software. If your business is going to last, you know that you need a strategy for the future. You have targets for sales, business objectives, and profitability. But getting up-to-date, reliable information on your progress can be tricky. How do you translate the many streams of data coming in from sales, customer service, marketing, and social media monitoring into useful business information? 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, 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 about you or your competitors. Marketers can use a CRM solution to better understand the pipeline of sales or prospects coming in, making forecasting simpler and more accurate. You’ll have clear visibility of every opportunity or lead, showing you a clear path from inquiries to sales. Some of the biggest gains in productivity can come from moving beyond CRM as a sales and marketing tool, and embedding it in your business – from HR to customer services and supply-chain management.

What does a CRM system do?

A customer relationship management (CRM) solution helps you find new customers, win their business, and keep them happy by organising customer and prospect information in a way that helps you build stronger relationships with them and grow your business faster. CRM systems start by collecting a customer's website, email, telephone, social media data, and more, across multiple sources and channels. It may also automatically pull in other information, such as recent news about the company's activity, and it can store personal details, such as a client's personal preferences on communications. The CRM tool organises this information to give you a complete record of individuals and companies overall, so you can better understand your relationship over time.

A CRM platform can also connect to other business apps that help you to develop customer relationships. CRM solutions today are more open and can integrate with your favourite business tools, such as document signing, accounting and billing, and surveys, so that information flows both ways to give you a true 360-degree view of your customer.

Here’s how a CRM system can help your business today.

1. MAKE IMPROVEMENTS TO YOUR BOTTOM LINE.

Introducing a CRM platform has been shown to produce real results – including direct improvements to the bottom line. CRM applications have a proven track record of increasing.

2. IDENTIFY AND CATEGORISE LEADS.

A CRM system can help you identify and add new leads easily and quickly, and categorise them accurately. By focusing on the right leads, sales can prioritise the opportunities that will close deals, and marketing can identify leads that need more nurturing and prime them to become quality leads.

With complete, accurate, centrally held information about clients and prospects, sales and marketing can focus their attention and energy on the right clients.

3. INCREASE REFERRALS FROM EXISTING CUSTOMERS

By understanding your customers better, cross-selling and upselling opportunities become clear — giving you the chance to win new business from existing customers.

With better visibility, you’ll also be able to keep your customers happy with better service. Happy customers are likely to become repeat customers, and repeat customers spend more — up to 33% more according to some studies.

4. OFFER BETTER CUSTOMER SUPPORT.

Today's customers expect fast, personalised support, at any time of day or night. A CRM system can help you provide the high-quality service that customers are looking for. Your agents can quickly see what products customers have ordered, and they can get a record of every interaction so they can give customers the answers they need, fast.

5. IMPROVE PRODUCTS AND SERVICES.

A good CRM system will gather information from a huge variety of sources across your business and beyond. This gives you unprecedented insights into how your customers feel and what they are saying about your organisation — so you can improve what you offer, spot problems early, and identify gaps.

Here’s what cloud-based CRM offers your business.

CRM and the cloud computing revolution have changed everything. Perhaps the most significant recent development in CRM systems has been the move into the cloud from on-premises CRM software. Freed from the need to install software on hundreds or thousands of desktop computers and mobile devices, organisations worldwide are discovering the benefits of moving data, software, and services into a secure online environment.

WORK FROM ANYWHERE.

Cloud-based CRM systems such as Salesforce (Learn more: What is Salesforce?) mean every user has the same information, all the time. Your sales teams out on the road can check data, update it instantly after a meeting, or work from anywhere. The same information is available to anyone who needs it, from the sales team to the customer service representatives.

REDUCE COSTS.

CRM can be quick and easy to implement. A cloud-based system doesn’t need special installation, and there’s no hardware to set up, keeping IT costs low and removing the headache of version control and update schedules. Generally, cloud-based CRM systems are priced on the number of users who access the system and the kinds of features you need. This can be very cost-effective in terms of capital outlay, and is also extremely flexible — enabling you to scale up and add more people as your business grows. Salesforce is flexible in terms of functionality, too — you’re not paying for any features that are not useful to you.

A CLOUD-BASED CRM PLATFORM OFFERS YOU:

• Faster deployment

• Automatic software updates

• Cost-effectiveness and scalability

• The ability to work from anywhere, on any device

• Increased collaboration

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