What is the best solution for maintaining a healthy relationship with customers? Enterprises across all industries face this question often during different phases of their business. The solution is simple- CRM. Customer Relationship Management acronym as CRM is an important business tool that manages customers, prospective target and partner information. Maintaining a strong relationship with customers is the key to a long-term success. And, CRM is a valuable solution for maintaining a healthy relationship with customers.
What is CRM ?
Integrating a CRM solution in the existing system streamlines the marketing and sales process. It collects, manages and organizes customer information. It is beneficial for both small, medium and large-scale businesses owing to the varied functionalities like managing contacts, monitoring marketing campaign, setting appointment and customer service. Organizations of different sizes and across industries like retail, education, logistics, eCommerce and transportation, can implement bespoke crm customer relationship management software into their system.
Data is available on a central platform, which makes it easy for decision makers to take a note of customer preference, market trends and changing dynamics in purchasing power. Understanding customer buying habit helps in staying competitive and completing sales at the Point of Sale . A custom CRM solution integrates different marketing efforts with business processes like administration, finance, reporting and accounting for managing customer relationship effectively. For custom development you can opt crm software development company in India.
Features of an effective CRM solution
CRM software helps in organizing business information. The main aim of this software is to help businesses track their customers. An effective solution encompasses with a host of features that help in organizing, tracking, communicating with clients and automate processes. For choosing the best CRM, you need to focus on the important features and how the functionality of this software meets your business requirement. Important features you need to look for are
- Lead Management – Each sales lead when nurtured and tracked yields high revenue. Tracking the steps of lead conversion- setting reminders, meeting, call and follow-ups is beneficial for both marketing and sales team.
- Contact Management – Managing contact of vendors, customers, partners and referrals who are integral to your business is important. This feature helps in maintaining the complete history of your stakeholders from first contact till date.
- Billing & Invoicing – A CRM system generates invoices and bills for each customer. The software can generate PDF quotations and email those directly to the customers. It helps in keeping financial information of customers organized. Assessing the frequency of a customer’s payment is easy with this feature.
- Hardware Monitoring – For a seamless operation, it is important for any business to have easy availability of hardware systems. Checking availability of network, status of routers, host spots and similar equipment is essential. This feature helps in better troubleshooting of software and makes more time available for managing customers.
- Campaign Management – Managing, tracking and analyzing marketing campaigns from the onset to the end help in improving the ROI. This feature helps in tracking marketing campaigns on the basis of purchase trends, demographics, support histories and response patterns. Users can select the campaign and assess the success across different channels.
- Remote Access – In the present scenario, access of data restricted to only one location is not desirable, remote access is an emerging need. This CRM feature equips remote workers with the power to feed and access information from different locations.
- Reminders and Alerts – In no way can you let your customer miss any important appointment or event. It makes sending custom reminders through emails or SMS of appointment or events relevant to customers easy.
- Data Reporting and Analytics – This is the key feature of any effective CRM solution. The ability to analyze data for identifying customer behavior and trends helps in organizing and evaluating data in a customer database so that decision makers can cater customer service based on it and improve customer relationship. Exporting data and compiling it are few important functionalities of this feature.
- Issues and Complaint Tracking – Keeping a track of customer issues and complaints is essential to prevent it from further escalation. Generating tickets for each customer complaint and tracking the progress is important in customer relationship management.
- Task and Workflow Management – It helps in assigning tasks for your staff or linking the task with different projects, sales leads and customers. There is also scope of connecting the task with the calendar that can be viewed by multiple users.
- Business Process Automation – Automating business processes is easy with a CRM system. It saves both time, money and makes reporting seamless, which in a way helps in improving operations and relationship with each customer.
A CRM software with these features is a necessary investment for the businesses. These features are customer-centric. For organization, irrespective of their domain it is essential to have a fully-integrated system, but customized to meet their needs otherwise it will be difficult to capture relevant and vital data. A crm software development company in India will understand your need and create a bespoke niche product for you.
Few of the best CRM solution that have the above mentioned features integrated in it are:
Source Capterra
Benefits of CRM software
Last year, Gartner reported that the worldwide sale of CRM software will reach almost $36.5 billion by 2017. According to Forbes, in comparison to the other enterprise software, there will be a steep climb in CRM sale. These numbers are convincing enough to prove the benefit of a CRM solution for both large and small enterprises. But, for the perusal of business owners and decision-makers the key benefits of using CRM software are
- Improve customer experience – Customers always expect a customized experience. They will not probably like a company that will keep them waiting. A CRM system helps in faster identification of customers, address their needs, cater relevant service and recommend products based on it. Fast access of crucial customer information like past sales history, emails and conversations help in forging a better relationship with customers. Understanding the need of customers decreases the incidents of customer complaints and increases of customer loyalty.
- Focused Marketing Effort – For any business it is important to identify new opportunities. Sales and management team can analyze performance using various business metrics. A CRM will give you a bird’s eye view of your business, which helps in fine-tuning the marketing approach and proper allocation of resources. It also helps businesses in taking take proactive decisions by understanding the scope of new ventures and highlighting the areas that need more attention.
- Maximize upselling and cross-selling – Reports generated by a CRM solution empowers employees with the knowledge and opportunities of upselling to customers that is providing advanced products and services to customers. With an effective and comprehensive solution employees can reduce the time required for assessing customer experience and up-sale or cross-sell services and products. Employees do not have to hunt information about each customer.
- Automated Reporting and Analytics – Analyzing the buying habit of customers is important for any business irrespective of its volume. Analytics tools integrated in CRM solutions help in accumulating sales and customer information in one or centralized dashboard. Decision-makers have easy access to different reports about services, products and customers. So, the management will know which staff is productive, how things are working and what are the pain points.
- Better coordination among employees– A CRM software helps in streamlining management processes. Customer service, marketing and sales team can coordinate with each other. Access to information by different departments of the organization and coordination between them helps in easy management of administrative and daily activities. Improved coordination between employees help in increasing productivity and work capacity.
CRM system helps in identifying pain points and eliminating those. Data generated by these systems helps in meeting the need of customers, which increases customer retention and satisfaction. Goal, needs and challenges of each business are different. For integrating processes that are integral to businesses, you can ask for services of best crm software development company in India.
