What is CRM?

Introduction:
Customer relationship management (CRM) is an approach to managing a company’s interaction with
current and future customers. The CRM approach tries to analyze data about customers' history with a
company, in order to better improve business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on
retaining customers, in order to drive sales growth.CRM directly contributes towards customer benefits
and the growth of businesses. Information Technology plays a very critical role in identifying,
acquiring, and retaining the customers, and thereby managing a healthy relationship with them.
Definition:
 Customer relationship management (CRM) is important in running a successful business.
The better the relationship with your customers and suppliers, the easier it is to conduct
business and generate revenue.
 CRM or Customer Relationship Management is a stratey for managing an organisation’s
relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. A CRM system
helps companies stay connected to customers, streamline processes and improve
profitability.

Examples:
A few examples of outsourced CRM are:

 Sales force
 Sugar CRM
 Really Simple Systems
 Net Suite CRM
 Zoho

Types of CRM systems:

There are three types of CRM.
 Operational CRM
 Analytical CRM
 Collaborative CRM
 1. Operational CRM:
Operational CRM generally refers to services that allow an organization to take care of
their customers. It provides support for various business processes, which can include
sales, marketing and service. Contact and call centers, data aggregation systems and web
sites are a few examples of operational CRM.
2. Analytical CRM:
Analytical CRM is based on data mining and data interpretation. It's used to analyze
customer sales data, payment and credit history, and evaluate customer response to
marketing campaigns.

Applications of Analytical CRM:

Analytical CRM is an essential part of customer relationship management. Analytical CRM
accumulates and analyses different kinds of customer data, including:

 Sales data: example purchase and return history, brand preferences etc.
 Financial data: payment and credit history, including payment type, credit scores, etc.
 Marketing data: customer response rates to marketing campaigns, customer satisfaction
data and retention data, etc.

3. Collaborative CRM:
Collaborative CRM is an approach to customer relationship management (CRM) in
which the various departments of a company, such as sales, technical support, and
marketing, share any information they collect from interactions with customers.
Technology Enabled CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is an ideal
approach:
CRM is important because. it enables a businesses to deepen and profit from relationships with
customers, service users, colleagues, partners and suppliers. Cloud-
based CRM is ideal because it offers instant deployment, cost-effective scalability, and access
from anywhere on any device like laptops, mobiles and tablets etc.

Comparison between technology enabled CRM and traditional CRM:

Dimensions Technology Enabled Organization Traditional relationships
Management with customers
Advertising Provide information in response to Push and sell a uniform
Specific customer inquiries message to all customers
Targeting Identify and respond to specific Market Segmentations
customer behaviors and preferences.
Promotions and Individually tailored to customers Same for all customers
Discounts offered
Distribution Direct or through intermediaries; Through intermediaries
Channels Customer choices chosen by the seller
New Product Created in response to customer Determined by the seller based
Features demands on research and development
Measurement used to Customer relation; total value of the Market share; profit
manage the customer individual customer relationship
relationships
What can a CRM do?
CRM or customer relationship management—is business software that helps individuals and
teams maximize their customer communications and sales efforts. It empowers your team to
build relationships more effectively and provide the best customer experience from evaluation to
purchase and beyond.

Elements of CRM:
There are four elements of CRM

 Know: understand your markets and customers

 Target: develop the offer
 Sell: acquire the customers
 Service: retain the customers.
 Characteristics of CRM:

1. Email Client Integration:

You can now gain all of the automation and the organization of a dedicated email client inside
of your CRM user interface. Don’t depend on Outlook or IBM notes — find a CRM that will do
double duty for you. Then when a customer calls needing support, your reps can easily pull up
their previous interactions and information to give them the best care possible.

2. Workflow and Approvals:

One of the ways in which your company will instantly increase its efficiency is by optimizing
workflows. CRMs can facilitate optimization by automating processes like data collection, data
analysis, marketing campaigns and other tasks that were previously done manually. They also
offer reporting and analytics to help users identify problem areas in order to improve them.

3. Sales Data:
One of the best features of CRM software is its ability to organize your sales and customer data
into manageable chunks. Once raw data is stratified, it can be developed into visualizations you
need to make decisions. Users are able to quantify KPIs, identify pain points and make data-
driven decisions.

4. CRM Data/File Storage:

In order to maximize the usefulness of data, it must be properly stored. One of CRM’s key
features is a proprietary method of data storage so users can pull up the data in an efficient
manner. CRMs also offer safeguards to protect and backup this important data to prevent losses
and security breaches.

5. Files Sync and Share:

CRM software functions as the synchronization platform for many of your outside programs.
Upload emails from Outlook, sync with Google Drive, import spreadsheets and more. Because of
the sharing features of CRM, you can view all of your feature set from one platform.

6. Inside Sales Console:

The platform for increasing sales performance through a more efficient UI is known as the
inside sales console. CRM systems offer optimized UI and data analytics to further streamline
and improve the customer experience.
 7. Sales Performance Management:

Among other CRM system features, sales performance management offers a range of benefits to
sales teams. Managers can easily see what aspects of the sales team are performing well and
which need improvement. Data can be organized by sales rep or by other quantifiers. You can
manage the performance of sales partners from the platform to ensure your team is performing at
its best. By identifying problem areas with concrete data, they can be more efficiently addressed.

8. Customization Options:
Customization is one of the more basic CRM software features, but it has far-reaching
implications. It’s crucial to know your needs when it comes to customization before making a
purchase. Will the software grow with your organization? Does it have the capability to adapt to
and integrate with existing software used by your organization? Can it incorporate desktop
productivity tools? Can it change when you need it to? If you answered no to any of these
questions, you may need to find more flexible software.

Dimensions of technology enabled CRM:

1. Better client relationships:

The more you know, and remember, about clients (or customers) the more your clients know you
care about them. This enables you to forge a much stronger connection and a deeper relationship
with your clients.
 2. Improved ability to cross-sell:
The more you know about your clients' needs and wants the better able you are to provide the
solution to their next problem.

3. Increased team coloration:

This is where many firms who fail to require their executives to use the CRM fail to reap the
benefits of the CRM. I know this from having managed the implementation of CRM software
where the management team thought it was a good idea but would not learn, or use, the tool
themselves.

4. Less client attrition:

When a client is engaged with only one member of a professional services firm, the risk of
attrition is 40%. When five or more partners are involved in a client relationship, the risk of
attrition falls to less than 5%..

5. Better Internal Communication:

Following a CRM strategy helps in building up better communication within the

company. Sharing customer data between different departments will enable you to
work as a team and help optimize the customer experience —one of several major
benefits of CRM. Each employee will also be able to answer customer questions on
what is going on with their product or service. By func tioning as a well-informed
team, will help increase the company’s efficiency overall and offer a better service
to customers.
6. Enhance Profitability and Efficiency

Profitability is more than just increasing sales. It is creating efficient processes across your
business operations to make sure sales opportunities are not lost and costs are minimized. With
CRM, employees can access important data quickly to serve customer needs or address a
critical business process faster. For instance, a customer is complaining about a defective
product. Customer Service can ask for the product’s serial number and quickly access the
Logistics’ database to record the defective batch, while Logistics can make the necessary
replacement.
 7. Stronger Data Security:

You can set parameters so only authorized employees can access the data, while keeping a
close tab on a single channel for possible breach. In military parlance, positioning your
defensive line in a narrow channel reduces the superiority in numbers of the enemy hackers.
8. It optimize your marketing strategy and makes your service more
credible:
A large portion of our readers looking to compare various CRM solutions are in fact startup
companies and low-tier service providers still building up a market profile. This doesn’t come
as a surprise knowing how useful CRM tools can be to motivate buyers to actually turn to a
specific vendor.

9. It is no longer an enterprise-exclusive service:

Just a decade ago, powerful CRM systems were considered to be enterprise-exclusive products,
which was a reasonable thing to believe with their spinning high prices and complex
installations. Luckily, developers saw small businesses as the ideal audience in need of such
products and started working on their cloud-hosted versions that require neither time nor bank-
breaking amounts.

10. Integration with Other Software:

Many CRM systems can be integrated with other programs such as accounting, project
management and data processing software. This allows you to match your customer information
with all of your other business processes. To know which CRM systems have integration
features, you can compare the different choices available. This will also help you pick which one
is best suited for your business. Having a CRM system in your business will help you achieve
better organization and implementation. However, you need to choose your CRM system wisely.
We have developed a CRM requirements checklist and tool that you can use as a reference when
looking for a CRM software.

11. It identifies and removes inefficient practices:

Speaking of the information delivered by CRM systems, we should also explain how it deals
with the valuable time businesses lose combining methods to evaluate their customers’
behavior. CRM software solutions consolidate different methods, practices, and tools needed to
track customer activity, and finally spare you from double entries and the dull, automated
approach customers find so frustrating.
 12. It turns Customer data into revenue intelligence:
There is a lot to learn from how your customers accept and evaluate your service, but
marketing optimization is by far the most valuable data you will pull out. CRM systems simply
teach you how to ‘energize’ promotional campaigns, and promote products to unfamiliar
audiences that will statistically be interested in them.
13. It supports your cross selling and up selling efforts:

The ultimate goal of using a CRM system is always to trigger it for deal closure, which is why
the best-of-breed systems always support practices such as up selling and cross-selling. In the
up selling case, they draw intelligence from the customer’s current purchase to bring similar
products to his attention and rely on tags and categories you’ve previously inserted. Cross-
selling is also a part of the game, where the system tracks a customer’s previous purchases to
suggest new products and to get an idea of what he’ll be looking for.

14. Targeted Lead Generation:

CRM software can concentrate on your target market. You can apply your marketing campaigns
to specific leads who have a higher interest in your products and services. Email campaigns can
also be personalized, making them more convincing and impactful.

15. Superior Customer Service:

With closer communication and timely responses, customers will be happier to work with you
because they can recognize your effort to provide satisfaction. This will also help with retention
and referrals.