Having the right product and price is not enough to satisfy the modern-day customer. Deep understanding of your customers’ relationship with your business and products is required to gain loyalty and provide them with the best service. This is where CRM plays a vital role.
Customer relationship management (CRM) refers to whatever systems and processes your business uses to keep track of customer information, from contact details and preferences to sales history and service requests. Whether you’re a local retail store or a global enterprise, providing a good customer experience is the key to success – which is where CRM software comes in.
Nurturing leads, making sales and retaining customers are imperatives whether you’re a local retail store or a global enterprise.
CRM software has evolved over the years, and now, in our data-driven economy, we use data-driven solutions to deliver the best results. Modern CRM software platforms can help manage customer data, nurture and track leads, build a sales pipeline, expedite service calls and requests, and deliver actionable business intelligence.
Good CRM solutions are versatile and can help small businesses looking to grow and build a competitive advantage. They’re just as useful for global businesses looking to deploy a scalable backend toolset to that will accommodate diverse functions and in all their territories.
What can CRM do?
An effective CRM system will offer the functions you need to manage and maintain customer relationships. Typically these include:
- Marketing: to generate leads and target campaigns using data analytics and automation tools
- Sales: to automate sales events, track leads and build your pipeline
- Customer service: to simplify customer interactions, generate sales opportunities and onboard new clients
- Project management: to improve scheduling, team coordination and resource demands
- Field operations: to coordinate field teams, improve service and implement predictive maintenance
- Analytics: to discover patterns in data, generate business intelligence and create powerful new sales and engagement tools
How does CRM help your business?
Implementing a CRM system will streamline your backend, improve your customer relationships and make your business more profitable.
On the backend, it will unify all your customer data, eliminating duplication and increasing efficiency. Too many businesses have customer data spread across different systems: sales team, customer service team, product team, and so on.
Storing everything in one system saves time and money. It eliminates unnecessary data entry and problems caused by mismatched data, and simplify updates such as changes of address or ticket progress.
Similarly, by having all customer data readily available and viewable on a single CRM dashboard, tracking and managing relationships becomes simple. You can easily track behaviours such as website visits, sales inquiries and purchases, and transactions – whether a sale or a service request – can be executed fast.
These improvements should lead to increased profitability, as you can concentrate your sales efforts on the customers and market segments most responsive to your service or product.
A final benefit available in more sophisticated CRM systems is data analytics. Bringing together information about sales campaigns, customer behaviour and other data allows you to fine-tune your approach, reaching more customers (and potential customers) and maximising their sales potential.
Making a case for CRM
Best of all, CRM is highly cost-effective. Nucleus Research estimates that “CRM pays back $8.71 for every dollar spent”. That’s a powerful return, but it’s important to measure your own experience carefully; if your CRM hasn’t improved business performance, then perhaps it needs optimising.
At Eagle360, we use and recommend Microsoft Dynamics 365 as our preferred CRM solution. We believe it offers the best combination of features, ease of use and cost-effectiveness for virtually all businesses.
With that said, we’ve worked with most of the CRM solutions on the market. We have experience deploying, migrating and integrating diverse systems and are confident that whatever your needs, your current setup and your budget, we can find a solution that will boost your business