• Analytical CRM
is based on data mining and data interpretation. It's used to analyze customer sales data, payment and credit history, and evaluate customers’ response to marketing campaigns.
• Collaborative CRM
is an approach to customer relationship management (CRM) in which the various departments of a company, such as sales, technical support, and marketing, share any information they collect from interactions with customers.

What is a customer management relationship software?

Customer Relationship Management software has become one of the leading SaaS software branches in the last years. Software as a service (SaaS) is a software distribution model in which a third party provider hosts applications and makes them available to customers over the internet. Customer Relationship Management software uses the data analysis of your customers’ history with your company to improve business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on customer retention and ultimately driving sales growth.

CRM systems collect and organize your current customer data, but even more importantly – they help you gather such data, and reach out to audiences you had no idea would be interested in your product or service. CRM systems help your organization to streamline business processes. It standardizes and automates sales, marketing and service processes to reduce human error. It increases productivity, speeds up business processes and improves customer satisfaction.

Sales Cycle is the time that a company takes to close a deal. It starts when a salesperson first contacts with a lead and ends when the lead becomes customer. CRM with sales process automation helps salespersons to track and communicate with all leads. It helps to complete the sales process quickly and efficiently.

Customer segmentation (also referred as market segmentation) is an essential business activity in product marketing. It breaks down customer and/or potential customers into smaller groups that share similar kind of characteristics. Segmentation could be based on many factors – buying pattern, geography, age, gender or any other custom rules. This helps business to reach more targeted customers and increase sales.

CRM can help you a lot here. It captures and analyzes customer data, coming from various sources. Thereafter it divides customers into groups as per business requirements. CRM helps organization to develop new product, set product price, run campaign and decide service methods.

Campaign Management is the very first step to reach potential customers with ones products and hence it must be flawless. Customer segmentation and campaign management are almost correlated. Customer segmentation finds out the best group to target and campaign management helps to run campaign and analyze data. CRM leverages the efficiency of marketing campaign by automating the process. A well defined marketing strategy with CRM helps business to get more qualified leads than traditional campaign. CRM reduces the campaign cost, analyzes campaign data and forecasts future marketing strategy.

Few years back also, Social Media Marketing was just a buzz word. But, now it is difficult for any business to grow without social media presence. For example, only Facebook has 2 billion active users and according to report, in 2015, Facebook influenced 52% of consumers’ online and off-line purchases, up from 36% in 2014. (Source: The Drum)

Not only marking, social media helps in customer servicing also. 71% of customers who experience quick and effective response via social media are likely to recommend the brand to others. (Source: NM Incite)
Good exposure in social media helps business to reach out more potential customers. It helps to reduce service cost and improve customer engagement.
CRM with social media integration helps business to run and track social media campaign, measure its effectiveness, increase sales, resolve customer queries and many more.

82% of customers leave a company because of bad customer service experience. (Source: RightNow)

The above statistic is enough to show you the importance of good customer service. CRM helps a business to keep existing customers, bring more business from them and capture new leads by automating customer service processes using CRM.

CRM helps to deal with customers' complaints or suggestions more effectively and quickly, minimizing human error by streamlining the business process. Not only that, CRM gives better traceability of employees' actions on customers' queries thus, improving the overall customer service of your company.

Acquiring a new customer is 6-7 times costlier than retaining an existing customer. Satisfied and loyal customers are more likely to buy products than a new customer.

Moreover, they spread positive words about the brand.
74% of consumers think that word of mouth is key influence in their purchase decision. (Source: PRNewser)

Satisfied customers help to generate more leads and increase sales. CRM helps an organization to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.

It is very important to resolve customers' queries ASAP. Very first step for this is to set proper escalation matrix which helps to response customers' queries on time, increase sales, run campaign within budget.
CRM is the best place where one can customize their own escalation matrix and integrate with customer details.

CRM is not only for customer management but also employee management.
It is very important to assign and complete tasks to employees within time and budget.
By using CRM, one can automate task management process. It can create and assign tasks among employees based on their skill set, availability, geography etc.
Business can set their own rules in CRM to manage tasks efficiently. Not only that, CRM maintains employee hierarchy and control data visibility also.
For example, Team leader can assign and track progress of all his team members' tasks. Manager can see all tasks assigned to team leaders and their subordinates.
Many CRM applications offer task synchronization with other platforms as well, like Outlook, Google Calendar.

One can specify own rules in CRM to automate customer communications, like sending a welcome kit to customers once they join with its business or an email when their queries are resolved or gift on birthdays or a letter when a new product is lunched etc.
This reduces human errors as well as increases customer satisfaction.

Communication channel matters a lot in every department – sales, marketing or service, also to create or maintain positive impression of brand.
One must capture preferred communication channels of customers.
This process can be automated in CRM to reach the customers with their preferred channels only. Thus, optimum utilization of communication channels will definitely increase lead to customer conversion ratio, sales and profit as well as customer loyalty.

Effective team collaboration brings more leads and increases sales.
For example, data from service unit can help marketing department to run more effective campaign or sales department to up-sell or cross sell products.
CRM unites various departments (like Sales, Marketing, Service, Management) of an organization. The purpose of collaboration is to enhance the quality of service and customer satisfaction.

 

Data protection must be the highest priority in any business.
In CRM, users can see customer data according to their roles and responsibilities. It helps business to safe guard customer information from being stolen or misused.

• A CRM application has a Better Traceability Matrix. It can answer all these questions like
• Was the last marketing campaign effective enough?
• Which channels gave the maximum sale in last campaign?
• How the company performed during last 5 years?
• How many customers did the company loss in last quarter?
• And a million dollar question: Are the customers satisfied to do business with the company?
CRM can analyze data, generate reports and measure campaign effectiveness. Even it can tell when a customer tends to leave your business. It also helps upper management to take better decision based on historical data analysis.

Why use a CRM software?

Customer relationship has been playing one of the most crucial roles in business throughout the history of business. So, maintaining a healthy and productive customer relationship is the best way to ensure a bright future for your business regardless of what of the industry or niche you are operating on. Since, customer relationship is an inseparable aspect of business, so obviously, people want to figure out the best way to do it. Customer Relationship Management software digitalises the whole thing and manages it much more accurately and efficiently. Thus, the importance of Customer Relationship Management cannot be overstated.

This may not be a challenge or priority of a local store that knows exactly who their customers are, but as operations grow in complexity and business expands, the need for a digitized solution simply imposes itself.

This briefly explains why Customer Relationship Management software solutions have become one of the leading SaaS software branches in the last years. CRM systems collect and organize your current customers’ data, but even more importantly – they help you gather such data, and reach out to the potential customers you had no idea would be interested in your products or service.

Benefits of Customer relationship management software

There are numerous compelling benefits of employing the customer relationship management software. Here are just a few for starters:

• CRM helps in availing a comprehensive customer history. It will keep track of the whole history of your company’s customers’ trends and habits, even of those who have been acquired by your company before installing the systems.


• It will help you gear up with all the key products needed to attract and retain audience as it keeps track of each customers’ purchase history.


• It will keep your company service ready as well as optimize your company’s conversion probability. That is, it will track down the time of the day when each customer is more likely to visit a site to make a purchase. It will intimate your company during the festive seasons of the year or in any time of the year when demands of a particular product are most likely to get raised in your area.


• CRM will target and record the important information on potential customers, thus, helping your company in acquiring new customers.


• Obviously, using CRM will help you save time as well as increase your company’s productivity.


• CRM will, thus, expand your business and boost your brand image.


• CRM implementation may be a costly process for SME but over the time it becomes the most cost effective way to run business. It will reduce costs as you shrink your whole marketing team as well as your analytical team so there will be way fewer people in the memo.


• Last but not the least, mobile CRM enables business not to lose a single selling opportunity, even when someone is not in office. It helps employees to access customer data using smart phones or tablets any where at any time. Stay connected, do business!

Expectations from customer relationship management software

Technology has made it easier for consumers to get what they want. Customers demand instant gratification, and we must meet them or suffer the consequences.

This explains in brief why CRM software solutions came to be one of the leading SaaS software branches in the last years. Some of the common expectations from CRM softwares are:

• CRM will make the marketing team document its work and follow processes
Even though a CRM can provide an enterprise-wide view of customer interactions, the data must still be added to the system first. Driven by self-preservation, some marketing teams may write off CRM as cumbersome and time-consuming, decreasing its overall efficiency.


• CRM will ensure the implementation of effective marketing initiatives
CRM softwares help in following up with customers, having conversations and determining what they need is what will help enhance the effectiveness of your marketing programs.


• CRM will make a seamless integration between marketing and sales department of the business
Inter-departmental relations are created, maintained or sabotaged by the people who work in your company. This is a cultural issue which cannot be solved by any CRM software alone. Developing and sustaining a cross-functional relation between marketing and sales will therefore require effective leadership, and not some magical CRM solution.


• People can learn to use the CRM softwares on their own
Your firm needs to develop a culture of rigorous and regular training, measurement and evaluation to ensure that everybody is on the same page with your CRM systems because everyone working in your firm might not have the mental capacity to grasp the entire host of functionalities with a robust customer relationship management software.


• CRM should be managed by the IT team
Even though the IT teams need to be involved in evaluation of alternate CRM platforms, they should not have the monopoly on the uses and functionalities of the system. CRM should be handled by your marketing and sales professionals, and it is they who should be accountable for it.
 

Steps to adopt an effective CRM software

• Active mapping and reengineering of your sales processes.
• Proactive convincing of your internal constituents that CRM will help them do their job better.
• Phase-wise deployment of your CRM system.
• Complete accountability for the users of the CRM system.
• Direct involvement of other departments besides sales and marketing when deciding on your CRM goals.
• Inspect. Repeat.