CRM stands for customer relationship management. A CRM system is a piece of technology that can allow your company to better handle your company’s relationship with current and future customers. On top of that, a CRM can allow you to automate previously time-consuming sales and marketing processes.
What is Customer Relationship Management, Anyway?
Customer relationship management, as the name implies, can also vastly improve your customer service processes. How? CRM software can quickly pull up a customer’s previous purchases, tendencies, and other chats that he’s had with your company. Then, a CRM can allow your company to apply customer relationship management resources to where they’re most needed.
The best part about customer relationship management might be that it’s cloud-based software. This means that it can allow everyone in your organization to visualize relationships with customers, suppliers, and service users through an intuitive dashboard that lays out everything very clearly. A CRM can be used for sales, marketing, and customer service as well as business development, data visualization, and recruiting.
Experts now agree that over the next five years CRM software will become the largest piece of enterprise software available. Considering the importance of attracting local customers in the retail industry, retail CRM is also expected to become much more important in the years to come.
How do CRM Systems Actually Work?
Customer relationship management software by gathering information on your customers and bringing it all together. This is really convenient because it allows you to instantly pull up information on a particular customer, or group of customers, when you want to kick off a marketing campaign or have a customer service representative help them work through a problem.
Your CRM will collect customers’ contact information and social media data to form a comprehensive picture. Google Contacts, a contact management tool, can actually be synced up so that your company can get the best of both worlds. Once you’ve listed your contacts, added contact information, and created lists with Google Contacts, you can get even more mileage out of your sales team work by integrating everything into a CRM like Zoho.
It really pays to do so since a CRM can automate administrative tasks, marketing, sales, and customer service processes once your contacts are uploaded. Since a CRM also creates customer insights automatically you might find yourself ahead of the curve when it comes to saying just the right thing at just the right time to prospects that you’re trying to turn into repeat customers.
Does Data Support CRM’s Effectiveness?
Absolutely, customer relationship management software has been proven to increase your leads, sales, and sales productivity by 30 percent or more. Customer satisfaction should also improve by over a third once you upload all of your contacts into a CRM and start reaping the benefits of automated sales, marketing, and customer service.
The statistics that come as a surprise to some are the fact that CRM software can lead to decision making that’s over 35% more efficient and overall revenues that are 25% or more higher. All of these amazing benefits are documented in the Salesforce Relationship Survey that analyzed over 10,000 customer interactions over a three year period from 2014 to 2016.
Can CRM Help Retail Stores Too?
A CRM system is an especially potent tool in the retail industry because CRM has been shown to increase cross-selling and up-selling opportunities. When you understand your customers better through customer relationship management, you can make more enticing offers and tailor your email marketing campaign’s messages to suit their current (or even future) preferences.
A CRM could discover that a customer has a need or question even before the customer or your company know. The fact that CRMs also happen to be cloud-based means that your entire staff can engage with customers remotely at literally any time.
