CRMs — Improving businesses and customer relationships.

In this highly competitive market, a growing business needs to handle multiple processes simultaneously and efficiently. It has become extremely crucial to maintain healthy customer relations.

This becomes increasingly difficult when businesses scale and the number of employees and customers increases. CRM or Customer Relationship Management is a set of practices and tools which helps the company to maintain healthy customer relations and achieve faster growth.

A Customer Relationship Management(CRM) software is a suite of softwares used by companies to manage and analyze customer interaction and data, with the goal of improving business relationships with customers, assisting in customer retention and driving sales goals.

CRMs are used to compile information on customers across a wide range of channels wherever customer- company communications happen such as the company’s website, telephone, live chats, direct mails, marketing materials and social media platforms.

CRM can be used in a broad set of business processes like customer data, customer interaction, automate sales, track leads, contracts, marketing, customer Support, employees knowledge and training, asset and resource management.

CRM softwares collect, analyze and store all these information in a centralized database, so that businesses can easily access and manage it. This information is extremely valuable to business and can be used for a lot of purposes.

It allows businesses to gain actionable customer insights with a sophisticated analytics engine, make more accurate predictions to uncover new business opportunities. It can automate various workflow processes such as tasks, calendars, alerts etc, giving managers the ability to track employee performance and productivity, keeping the stakeholders more satisfied.

There are various types of CRM softwares available –

• Marketing automation: CRM is used to track buyer journey, from the time they first interact with the website to when they complete their transactions. It collects information about leads and uses them to manage campaigns. They can automatically send them marketing materials, manage and optimise marketing campaigns across both online(social media and web) and offline channels(billboards, television ads).
• Sales force automation: This is used to track all communication between salesperson and the customer which prevents duplicate efforts between both sides. It includes various modules like lead management, contact management and sales forecasting. All these help businesses increase their sales for effectively and efficiently.
• Contact Centre Automation: After sales support is the primary way businesses retain customers and manage their brand. Many customers are increasingly dissatisfied with the contact center experience. Using CRM for customer issue tracking, incoming and outgoing call management, and chatbots for automated reply are some ways to improve customer service.
• Analytics CRM: The main function of this CRM is data analytics. It collects massive amounts of customer information from various channels and communications to give better insights about their online habits. It stores various organizational data that helps marketing executives to make better campaigns, top management to make better decisions, human resources to enhance employees retention and so on..

Conclusion

There are many popular CRMs available in the market like Zoho, Freshsales, Oracle and Hubspot. Each of them cater to a different segment of small, mid-cap or large businesses. Before implementing any CRM system, it is crucial for the company to define future goals and strategies. The goal is to identify which business processes need more automation or intelligence. Most CRM softwares generally provide a free trial to help you find the best fit for your business.