In an enterprise setting, customer relationship management (CRM) points to the central location from where you save and access the data of your customers and prospective clients. Think of it as a database of your customers with their names, numbers, email addresses, status, remarks, interactions, etc. An efficient CRM system comes in handy when your support team is on call with a distressed customer, or your sales team is talking to a promising prospect. The objective of a CRM system is to strengthen business relationships, improve conversion rates, optimize customer-centric processes, and drive profitability.

A submodule to larger ERP systems, CRM systems span to various departments in your organization including sales, marketing, support, and operations.

 

What does CRM stand for?

When your ecommerce team needs the email addresses of people who visited the website in the past week for a remarketing campaign or when your marketing head needs a file on customers who purchased goods worth $1,000 for an email marketing campaign, your CRM system will go a long way in deciding the success or failure of these campaigns.

CRM stands for customer relationship management and is the management of an organization’s relationships and interactions with customers.

Modern organizations employ CRM systems that are much more than just a database of your customers. They’re capable of integrating with third party tools, can export needed data in various formats, are accessible remotely, and can run automation workflows.

 

What is the role of CRM?

CRM systems of today replace spreadsheets and siloed databases for storing customer information. In addition, they can integrate right with your spreadsheet solution, SQL databases, messaging service, or any other source of customer data and bring them to a central location. The primary role of a CRM system is to make each customer interaction accessible to anybody in the organization when they might need it.

The biggest beneficiaries of a modern CRM system are the sales and marketing team. When your marketing team is optimizing the email marketing campaign to target high net worth individuals, they should not have to go and hunt for the target customers’ information. They expect the CRM solution to deliver the exact subset of information in a format that’s compatible with their email marketing automation tool.

It’s normal to think of customer relationship management only in relation to your customers. However, CRM systems can include anybody you may do a business transaction with who isn’t an employee or a consultant. This could include your suppliers, service users, and logistic partners.

 

Reasons why CRMs are vital to businesses

A few years ago, business consultants were a little hesitant to recommend CRM systems to smaller teams due to how complicated they used to be. With the arrival of cloud CRM solutions, these concerns have become a thing of the past. CRM systems have become so approachable and affordable these days that it’s hard to imagine an efficient marketing or sales team without one. Smaller teams generally start with a barebones CRM system with a single database and add new features and secondary databases as their customer-base expands. Cloud and hybrid CRM solutions provide unparalleled modularity in terms of adding and removing features and, of course, scalability.

“CRM is the largest and fastest-growing enterprise application software category, and worldwide spending on CRM is expected to reach USD $114.4 billion by the year 2027.”

A business’s biggest asset is their customer information, which is why it’s critical that they protect this information from intruders at any cost. CRM systems are much more secure than traditional methods of information keeping such as paper-records and digital spreadsheets. Moreover, most CRM vendors are compliant with data protection laws. Furthermore, many CRM solutions can pull additional information about your customers and prospective clients from public domains.

 

How CRM can help your business

Track sales and customer data

CRM allows you to identify potential customers, respond quickly to customer service inquiries, and track the progress of customers through their entire life cycle. This helps provide a better overall customer experience and increase sales. CRM also makes it easier to communicate with existing customers as well as target new ones with marketing campaigns.

Automate marketing

Automating certain tasks in your processes can make marketing campaigns more effective and efficient, while allowing you to focus on the customers and marketing strategies. Monitor customer satisfaction, evaluate current strategies, and adjust your approach while the marketing automation pipeline takes care of running the campaigns.

Personalize customer experiences

CRM helps build relationships with customers by providing valuable insights into their behaviors and preferences that help you offer personalized experiences.

 

How much does a CRM system cost?

The cost of a CRM system will depend on several factors including the size of your organization, how sophisticated the CRM system is, and whether or not you opt for customization options. Generally speaking, basic CRMs can cost anywhere from $15 to $50 per user per month (or more). For larger organizations that need more robust features, CRM systems can cost several hundreds of dollars per user per month. Many vendors also offer customization options, which will increase the overall cost of the system. Additionally, some vendors charge setup fees and other additional costs.

 

What to look for in a CRM system

Automation

A good CRM system should be able to automate customer service activities in order to free up your team’s bandwidth and increase efficiency. It should also provide an automated way to track customer inquiries, follow-ups, tasks, and other activities.

Customization

A CRM system should be customizable to fit your business' needs. It should allow you to customize or create workflows, set up rules for customer interactions and notifications, and access data from external sources.

Flexibility
The ability to quickly adjust the data in a CRM system is key for a business’ growth. A CRM system should have the flexibility to easily add, remove, or edit data as needed.

Reporting

Being able to generate reports from your customer data is essential for understanding customer trends and needs, as well as for seeing how successful your sales strategies are.

How do you implement a CRM system?

Implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) system requires careful planning and preparation. Then, you have to pick a CRM system. Choosing the right system for your business’ needs, including one with the features and functions that you need, is not an easy task. There are many on the market and their pricing model can become quite high. Also, once you’re on a particular system, it’s hard to migrate as CRM vendors don’t make migration from their solutions easy.

Vendor lock-in, hidden costs, an inconsistent pricing model, and an unpredictable interface are some of the reasons our customers prefer custom CRM solutions.

 

Which departments can benefit from CRM?

The benefits of a modern CRM system span to various departments in your organization. Your support department needs access to the CRM system most of the time since these are the people in direct contact with your customers and prospective clients. In addition, the sales and marketing department need access to your customers’ data in order to perfect sales pitches and marketing campaigns. The operations department also needs access to the customers’ data at all times.

Sales

The success of your sales pitch is dependent on the information you have on the prospect. If your CRM gathers intelligence on the subject from public domains such as their social media pages and accounts, business website, public directories, etc., the sales representative can combine the information and build a convincing case. They will save time researching the subject, which will give them more time to perfect the sales pitch.

For example, if the representative learns that the subject is interested in golf and Victorian artifacts, they can use this information to break the ice which will improve the chances of conversion.

Marketing

Different marketing campaigns have different target audiences. If you are a cosmetics company, you would have brands targeting people of different ages and income groups. Your lip gloss would be more prominent among teenagers while your foundation line would be relevant to women in their late 20s or 30s.

When you run an SMS campaign to promote your anti-ageing cream, a CRM system makes it a simpler process to filter the phone numbers of your female customers that are in their late 40s and 50s. You also want to export the information in a format compatible with your SMS portal.

Without a CRM system it would take forever to gather the information and activate a.

Customer service

Your support representatives are in contact with your customers more than any other representative from any other department. However, not every customer is the same. An old-time customer with a monthly bill worth over $10, 000 is more important than a month-old customer with a monthly bill worth $1,000.

Your sales representatives need the information at the time your customers call them regarding a query or complaint. The CRM should enable your customer service representatives to resolve customer issues based on their credentials. Due to automation, the page containing the customer information will automatically pop up on the CRM screen as soon they connect which saves the representatives time as they do not have to manually look for the customer’s information.

Operations

The job of an operations manager is to acquire, develop, and deliver goods to your customers based on their needs and the ability of your organization. The CRM system at your organization should ensure that they’re doing the job with utmost efficiency.

 

Best CRM tools on the market

Zoho CRM

In addition to lead management and contact management, Zoho CRM includes marketing automation, multichannel forecasting, territory management, and a host of other capabilities.

A conversational AI assists users to predict lead and deal success, offers a voice assistant, and suggests activities to automate based on behavior analysis.

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a versatile solution for your support and sales team and includes analytics, automation, and tools for marketing and mobile apps.

HubSpot Sales Hub

HubSpot is a fully featured CRM that can track, organize, and close leads and is free to use up to a certain number of users. HubSpot is the best free CRM solution on the market.

Microsoft Dynamics 365

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is probably the most famous CRM solution for large enterprises. It’s highly customizable and easily integrates with your existing Microsoft Azure and Office 365 workflows.

 

Rare Crew is a custom software development company that you can trust to build a CRM system based on your organization’s needs. Custom developed software gives you more control over the features you want in a CRM system and is perfect for small and medium teams.