Why CRM is Important for Organizations?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is more important than ever. Today the competition is fierce is an understatement. Customers are also getting more demanding with each passing year. Keeping your customers happy is priority number one and every business strives in this direction albeit with varied results. If you are a business leader who accepts that ‘Customer is King’, then it is high time you should also know why CRM is important for organizations?

CRM is not just a fancy term that is thrown around in sales meetings and monthly reviews of sales departments, regardless of industry sector. CRM broadly can be defined as a set of strategies, practices and software that assists in enhancing customer rapport in order to better customer retention with the upshot of higher sales revenue and profitability.

The customer touchpoints for a business could be variegated. These could be direct contact, email, website, blog, telephone, social media and so on. But still effort has to be made to bring about a structured framework for monitoring all of them. The customer-facing personnel cannot waste time in sifting vast amounts of information about a particular customer. Wasted opportunity is a loss for the enterprise and taking such chances can prove to be very costly in the long run.

CRM can help by giving all the right information about any customer like his/her past buying habit, personal preferences, demographic details, pet peeves and so on and so forth to build buyer personas for better targeting and serving the customer.

Businesses generate large quantities of data. This data could be structured or unstructured. CRM brings about a systematic approach to dealing with all kinds of data. Using data analytics it is possible to greatly improve sales and generate customer delight on a consistent basis. Data can flow from all directions like user generated data, external databases, past records, research data, authoritative information related to the industry and likewise. All this can be sifted and meaningful insights derived out of it thus making the job of sales personnel and IT managers so much easier.

Automation is key to performing low priority and repetitive processes that do not need much human intervention. Thus it helps if technology takes over the tasks of sending alerts, notifications, keeping track of purchases and such other things so that performance and productivity of the business enterprise can vastly improve.

Here is what you can expect from your CRM initiatives:

Firstly, it is important to know about customer buying journeys and provide them the most appropriate marketing resources to get a better chance of closing the sales. Using CRM it is possible to remove redundancies and precisely pinpoint where a customer is presently in the sales funnel. It helps to better coordinate the marketing and sales departments’ efforts for improved results.

It is also possible to modernize the contact center processes so that the personnel talking to the customers know what exactly to do when a certain customer is facing a certain problem or has some specific queries. It helps to reduce the time and provide better solutions with the upshot of one more satisfied customer.

There are various CRM solutions available in the market. Zeroing in on one can be a demanding task. But businesses should thoroughly evaluate their need for a CRM solution and choose one that fits their needs perfectly. Today cloud-based CRM solutions are the most popular and one with the maximum benefits. There is no need for the client to be responsible for the administration, maintenance, integration, security, update and all other issues. These are conveniently taken care of by the provider or vendor. This makes it ideal for businesses both big and small since the solutions can be deployed on demand with relatively lower costs and minimum technical resources and expertise at hand.

How CRM helps businesses to stay ahead of the curve?

• Customer expectations are extensively met leading to higher customer retention and loyalty
• Higher value is derived from each customer since acquiring new customers is a costly affair
• Better profitability for the enterprise thanks to concentrating on most valuable customers
• Business direction can be successfully steered based on customer response and feedback
• Deploying extreme customer-centricity in the best way possible is a distinct possibility.