What is a CRM System And Why Are They Invaluable?
A CRM System is a customer relationship management software that is used to track and monitor all of your company’s interactions and relationships with customers, and prospective clients. It’s a simple goal: improve your relationships and ultimately bolster sales.
A decent CRM system enables businesses to remain connected with their clients, to streamline their processes and ultimately boost profitability. By implementing CRM solutions into your business, you can focus on individual customers & service users, whilst collecting data for the broader customer base as well.
Who uses and can benefit from a CRM?
A CRM system is for everyone in your business, from the customer service department, your sales team, the business development and recruitment agents, marketing, and of course, you. It gives you all a better way to manage your interactions, driving your overall success as a business.
Using a CRM tool can enable you to store customer and prospective client contact information, whilst identifying possible sales opportunities, record service issues & complaints, manage your marketing, and doing so in one central system—allowing anyone in your business who might need to draw from it to do so in real-time.
Having such invaluable data so readily accessible makes life easier for your employees, boosting productivity and allowing collaboration between departments to work smoothly and more efficiently.
Why is a CRM so important to your business?
When it comes to enterprise software, the CRM system is the single largest area of revenue spending and procurement. In order to thrive in the future, you will need a strategy that is going to allow such growth and longevity.
Your CRM can help you track sales targets, business objectives, and to gauge how profitable your business is. But it’s also about accessing up-to-date, relevant, and highly accurate information.
If you wish to understand your customers, their wants and needs better, then a CRM system can allow that. With a simple dashboard that can easily be customised to fit your company culture, you can track absolutely everything in a simple-to-use software that everyone can navigate freely.
A CRM can also be used to track public social media activity, which will allow you to see what your customers have to say about you. What are their likes and dislikes? Which products or services are getting the best responses? Which areas do you need to work on?
Your marketing team can also use the CRM solution for understanding the sales pipeline better. Where are your prospects coming from? What can be done to increase the chances of them converting into business? All of that and more can be gained with a quality CRM system.
Whilst CRM software has been traditionally used for sales and marketing, customer service departments are now greatly benefiting from them. You are able to track customer interactions across multiple channels without losing sight of the issue.
A business without a CRM is an expensive one to run
Many people think that a CRM system is too expensive to implement and thus try to avoid using one at all costs—not knowing that in doing so, they are costing their business more money in the long-run. CRM’s can be used to streamline administration tasks and ultimately create more free time for your employees to focus on more important “revenue generating” areas. Don’t let valuable information go to waste on hand-written notes when instead absolutely every interaction can be stored in one central location.
Without a CRM it’s not uncommon for valuable details to get lost or meetings to not be followed up on. If you wish to prioritise customers and their needs, then you must be able to easily track them.
By recording every interaction with your customer, you’ll end up with an awful lot of valuable data which can be used to bolster the client/customer relationship. It’s also invaluable for enabling managers to track their employee’s work to ensure that everyone is performing to the best of their abilities.
What does a CRM system do?
In a nutshell, a CRM system allows a business to find new customers, keep them satisfied, build stronger relationships, and grow your business.
CRM systems enable you to understand a customer better over time by collecting as much data and information as you can on them. This can in turn be used to increase the customer’s profitability to your business, but also their satisfaction. It’s not just about getting another sale on the board but selling the right product or service to those who need it & can benefit from the most.
CRM software can also connect and integrate with other handy business tools and applications such as billing & accounting software—ultimately giving you a 360-degree view of your customers.
You can also automate the time-consuming administrative tasks such as data entry and lead or service case routing. These automated insights help you better understand the customer, whilst even predicting how they will react to an interaction so that your agents can adjust their approach accordingly.
Not to be confused with customer-manipulation, a CRM system is designed to enable your business to better serve the customer.
1 – Make improvements to the bottom line of your business
These are the genuine results that you can experience by implementing a quality CRM system into your business today:
- Increase lead conversion by 30%
- Improve customer satisfaction by 35%
- Encourage faster decision making by 38%
- Bolster sales productivity by 35%
- Increase overall sales by 30%
- Experience a revenue growth in excess of 25%
2 – Identify and categories your leads
Adding and identifying new leads to your CRM system is a great benefit. This will allow your sales reps to focus on the right leads and prioritise interactions that will be most likely to close. Additionally, marketing can identify the leads that will require more TLC, priming them into becoming quality leads with higher conversions. Simply put, you’ll no longer need to waste your time on cold leads!
3 – Satisfied clients lead to more customer referrals
With a CRM system you can better understand—and thus offer greater care for—your customers. This creates more cross & upselling opportunities. Happier customers are much more likely to not only become repeat customers, but they’re also more likely to recommend your business to others.
4 – Better support across the board
Customer satisfaction should always be at the forefront of your priorities and by using a CRM system, you’ll be able to provide the highest standard of care across the board, at all times.
5 – Make your products & services better
Of course, in order to maintain your customer satisfaction, it is also important to improve your products and services as often and as effectively as possible. A CRM system will give you key insight into where your products & services are going right, and where they are going wrong. Spot problems in real-time and react according to the data for the best results.
Cloud-based CRM for the win
Another thing that tends to put business owners off the prospect of having a CRM system implemented into their business is the installation itself. Especially if you have a relatively large business, installing a CRM software across hundreds—maybe thousands—of computers is a daunting tasks. Instead, take to the clouds and embrace the technological revolution that has changed everything. Take your business to the next level in a central, secure, and easily accessible location.
This advancement will also enable your sales teams to access every customer on the road. You can update the CRM instantly after a meeting and literally work from anywhere. This freedom of information can truly enhance the way that your business operates.
And of course, using cloud-based CRM solutions means that you can cut back on the overall costs of implementation. No hardware needed, no version control or update scheduling; it will simply be priced based on the number of users who access the system and the types of features that you will require. That, and this flexibility means that you can scale up and add additional features as your business grows and your needs change. Simple!
Conclusion
If you would like the following benefits…
- Faster deployment
- Cost-effective scalability
- The freedom to work from any device, anywhere in the world
- Automatic software updates absent the stress of scheduling
- Increased collaboration
- Higher sales & conversions
- Increased customer satisfaction & retention
- And so much more!
…then you need to get your hands on a CRM system for your business today!