CRM is an acronym for Customer Relationship Management. In other words, a technology that is used to manage interactions with present and potential customers is called CRM. It is an online system that enables the organizations to create reliable customer relationships and streamline processes that can not only increase sales but also improve customer service and eventually, profitability.

What is CRM?

The customer relationship system has been in the market back since the 1990s. However, the online CRM system has taken over and popularized itself over the last decade. CRM platforms are extremely powerful online systems that can connect all data from sales leads and customers in one place only. A CRM can be utilized for analyzing and recording all calls, meetings, improving sales, increasing revenue, and emails.

Other than this, CRM services enable one to get personal with customers and prospects with personalized messages. You can differentiate, slice, and track the data to make sales and marketing smarter, more effective, and efficient.

You can think of an online CRM system to be a literal depiction of serving and gaining the loyalty of customers. An online CRM system will not only enable you to stay focused on the relationships of your organization with people (customers, service users, suppliers or colleagues) but also allow you to embed sales, marketing, and HR processes in the business.

It is a single framework that is designed to enhance the entire business strategy while with an aim to bring your marketing, sales, and customer support activities together, streamline the processes, people, and policy in one platform.

Why does a CRM matter?

In case you want to make sure that your business lasts, you need to rely on a tangible business strategy for the upcoming future. You know that you already have targets for sales, profitability, and business objectives. However staying up to date along with implementing reliable information for the progress of your goals is something that can be tricky.

How can you translate the different data streams that come in from the sales team, marketers, social media teams, and customer service team into constructive business information? The answer to this question is the implementation of an online CRM system with the help of a CRM consulting partner. Using a CRM system has the capability to give you a clear overview of your customers.

You will be able to see and view all the important information at one place in a simple and customizable dashboard that will tell you about a customer’s previous history with you, the order status, outstanding customer service issues, and a lot more.

You can also decide to include important information from any public or social media activity, likes or dislikes, what people are saying and sharing, etc. Additionally, marketers can also use CRM for understanding the pipelines of sales or prospective work that might come in for making precise and effective forecasts. CRM services will give you clear visibility of every lead while showing you a clear path right from inquiry to sales.

Although CRM was traditionally used as a sales and marketing tool only, customer service teams are seeing exceptional benefits from the CRM systems. The customers of today might pick up an issue on one public platform while taking to a telephonic conversation for resolving the matter privately. A CRM platform is something that helps you in managing inquiry over all channels without losing any track.

What does an online CRM system do?

Enabling contact management on a large scale is the most important function of absolutely any customer information system, regardless of the fact if it is cloud-based CRM or just a CRM software on a server. The fundamental role of an online CRM system is to do the job of being a hub for organizing and making an absolute sense of important data and insights along with providing all tools needed to collect and manage information about people who are important for a business.

These functions can seem very different when they are worked out across multiple departments. For example; a CRM can assist in enabling the sales representatives to see past the interactions and purchases before anyone makes a phone call. It can also offer support teams of an organization with any credentials or contact details that might be required for offering better customer service. It can give marketers access to complete details that can help in targeting campaigns.

Understanding and organizing important data insights is an important responsibility for any company. However, just as the importance of audience information grows the number of details that a business needs grows as well. With so many online channels and ways of engagement, the data often gets looped in different tools while making it difficult to get a true picture of what the customers do or talk about.

Therefore, regardless of the size or the industry of business, turning to CRM tools can create a central hub for audience reports, gaining a better understanding of who the customers are, what they want, and build stronger relationships as they grow.

In fact, CRM is not just for the big businesses that make it to the list of Fortune companies. With the help of using statistics, one can improve customer relationships considerably and this has become an important feature of all kinds of organizations. In fact there the businesses that are just starting out have an even better chance because there is no better time for contact management as compared to the one in the beginning.

From the time one creates an online presence, the CRM services can help in gaining access to valuable information about the customers and potential customers. It can not only help in laying a strong foundation for building and updating the relationships with customers, collecting data, but it can also help in setting consistent automation and personalized touchpoints with time.

There is no need for CRM to be engaged in a full-time job. Regardless of whether it is about a small team, there is a solo entrepreneur, who relies on occasional marketing campaigns for selling the brand, CRM implementation done with the assistance of a CRM consultant can help in putting the data to work and save time. With its implementation, a person or a team can make valued decisions about where one should focus on reaching customers, which channel is preferable, and how to engage them for a long time.

Working of CRM:

More often than not, an online CRM system is just thought of as a technology. Whereas, the truth is that it is much more than that. Almost no technology, regardless of how sophisticated it might be can become successful without a good strategy for guiding implementation and use. It is important for the business strategy and technology to work together for bringing a customer-centric plan to life.

By understanding the work and the role played by CRM in customer-centric data management and automation, we will see how CRM is a world in itself.

– Making and Implementing Customer-Centric Strategy: The role of an online CRM system is to support a strategy that allows the customers to be the focus of everything. This customer-centric strategy should be such that it focuses clearly on the goals and visions of meaningful customer experience. Since valuable customer experience is significant, CRM implementation goes far in improving the customer experience.

Each time a customer gets in contact with a new organization or through a different channel, an opinion is likely to be formed. This opinion can either be good, indifferent, or bad. As time passes by, this set of customer experiences create a picture in the customer’s mind, which in turn plays a role in forming the brand image.

Any organization that is serious about CRM design and strives to form a quality experience because of understanding that poor customer experience can drive customers away is on the right path.

– Centralization of Customer Data: CRM software applications are responsible for combining all sales, customer service information, and marketing into one database. With so many businesses collecting data on customers and prospects, good access to data lying in the database means fewer problems in the organization, and better customer-centricity.

Customer information is a sum total of phone numbers, contacts, addresses, etc. Having a CRM partner to implement an online CRM system will lead to all that was discussed, the next follow update, the status of an open item, etc.

This is important information that can be used to measure, manage, and keep a track of sales, marketing, and the various customer service activities as they are all directly linked to the customers. Overall, this helps in building great customer loyalty and experience.

Since an online CRM system has the ability to centralize the entire customer-facing information, any unnecessary finger-pointing within an organization gets reduced substantially. The marketing team can no longer blame the sales team for not communicating and vice versa. No matter what department of the company is being talked about, they all have access to the same information.

– Automation of Business Processes: The companies that have streamlined business and customer-facing processes are the ones that make the business a lot more efficient. Different aspects such as budgeting and planning are an important part of customer-facing processes on which sales, marketing, and customer service rely. A good CRM strategy focused mostly on the customer-oriented processes helps in solving the needs of customers in a much better way.

In essence, the complete CRM process generally begins with a lead. In simple words, just the name of a person you can sell to. Mostly, a person is supposed to fill a web form that is provided with the contact information. Just after the lead is put in the system, the software takes one through the sales process.

An online CRM system reminds the salesperson to call at a mutually decided time. Each time one interacts with the prospects, it gets recorded in the CRM system and the same applies in case someone talks to the prospect. CRM keeps tracks of all the lead generation while bringing in more customers.

In addition to this, CRM works as a library of documents, emails, and phone calls that facilitate an effective interaction when a prospect is initiated.  The team gets a prompt and an automated trail of communication because all the information is kept in one place. Regardless of whether you are in marketing, customer support, or sales, a CRM system can help in automating business processes while automating each process as it works with the other. However, it must be understood that each business should be well defined for getting good results.

Benefits of an online CRM system:

An online CRM system is available to marketing teams, salespeople, customer support specialists, and absolutely anyone who comes in contact with customers of large and small companies. However, we are going to list down the benefits in complete detail below:

1. Efficiently Organized Data: One of the biggest benefits of CRM is that it facilitates the effective organization of data. When you move to an online CRM system, you will be required to inculcate the practice of entering email addresses, phone numbers, and contact information. Just when the CRM system is up and running, users can follow and track information about every customer.

A CRM system is a central place for storing and managing all important information that makes working easy for everyone. Here, everyone is inclusive of customers who get better service and detailed attention just as you start to understand them a lot better.

2. Identify and Categorize the Leads: One of the most important benefits of an online CRM system is the fact it can enable you to identify and add new leads easily while categorizing them precisely. You can not only create customized pitch documents in less time, but you can also cut down the response time and enable the sales team to capitalize on the next opportunity.

With precise and completely held information about the clients and prospects, the sales staff can focus their complete attention and energy on the right clients while gaining a competitive advantage.

3. Better Sales Opportunities: Almost no one wants to stop after gaining a handful of customers or clients. However, sometimes, the problem lies in struggling with the idea generation that helps in increasing the customer base.

An important way is to learn more about creating better sales opportunities is by learning more about the people who are already customers. One way to learn more about the people who are customers already, an online CRM system can track the insights and patterns into the themes and trends.

This type of analytics can actually help in developing micro-targeted plans and different strategies for sales opportunities at particular times.

4. Tracking Sales Progress: In addition to the fact that CRM helps in managing the customer base, it also helps in tracking the progress of the sales for the entire organization. In case you are a one-person business, you can also get the assistance you need for tracking the leads and following up.

Additionally, if you have a large sales team, every new set of leads gets assigned to you as a sales rep and their journey gets tracked from that point onwards. Just as the journey progresses, the CRM platform offers a starting point for acting on the sales trends and close gaps. This is an easy way to track the performance of your sales team.

5. Effective Communication: Besides the fact that CRM can be an efficient use of sales resources, it can also allow your customers to benefit from the personalization features that many CRM tools offer. An important advantage of effective and personalized communication is that it improves the productivity and efficiency of an organization.

All of this can be used in the CRM database for building better customer relationships with the help of personalized communications. An effective way to do this is by addressing the customers with their first name in the emails or creating marketing campaigns based on different industries.

6. Increasing Referrals from Existing Customers: CRM services enable you to understand your customers better, create up-selling and cross-selling opportunities that can ultimately help in winning new business from existing customers.

Just after the CRM consultant helps you with the implementation, you can have access to better information that will eventually become the reason for keeping your customers happy. Since happy customers are more than likely to return more often and when they return they will spend more. Hence, this is an exceptional benefit.

7. Better Retention Rate: A way in which CRM can benefit the sales processes is the fact that it reveals all customers who generate the highest revenue or are the most engaged. You can find the most lucrative customers by gaining a much better understanding of who attends your online seminars, webinars, and open all your emails with the help of a CRM.

When you start reaching out to them to advocate your brand more, you can increase the retention rate of your customers. The ability of a CRM to understand customer behavior can ultimately help you come up with reliable solutions. A better insight into customer behavior will always help you develop a plan or a program that retains the customers who are on the verge of leaving.

8. Tracking Tasks: The CRM services further helps in the integration of a company’s typical workflow while saving more time spent on everyday tasks. Automation helps in boosting customer engagement and offering an added consistency.

The fact of the matter is that consistency is one of the best benefits of a CRM system. When all the important tasks are tracked in the right way, the overall productivity is increased a lot more.

9. Improved Products and Services: A very commonly overlooked benefit of the CRM software is the fact it gathers information from a wide range of sources across the business. This gives organizations an accurate and rather useful insight into how the customers think, feel and what do they say about an organization.

This improves the products and services of an organization because it actually ends up giving valuable insights for the improvement of what is offered, spotting problems, and identifying the gaps.

10. Reporting and Analytics: A business culture that is essentially driven with an analytics-driven working style can actually go a long way in transforming an organization from instinct-based to being data-driven.

Implementation of an online CRM system provides the necessary business intelligence that processes important data from multiple sources and works on significant insights. From the fundamental charts to the advanced analytics insights like looking for problems in the business with an inbuilt analytics engine embedded in the CRM can help the organizations gain an important business advantage.

Related Read: Why CRM Systems Fail?

CONCLUSION:

All the information that has been mentioned above sums up the meaning of CRM in the true sense. CRM services can enable a customer to leave all chaos out of the interactions that happen with the workforce and customers while letting you focus on your goal.

For someone who is just starting out, an online CRM system might come across as intimidating, but when you go further with using it, it is not complicated at all. In fact, it is pretty much like standard automated processes. When you get the hang of this software and learn to rely on it, you will discover that it takes a relatively lesser time to use as compared to your old search habits.

As a market leader in the implementation of CRM services, Encaptechno comes with years of experience that can help you begin your journey of online customer relationship management. Get in touch with us for assistance and allow us to become your partners in unprecedented growth with the help of the best online CRM system.