How important Customer Relationship Management is?

[Deepak Bohra]

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a term that refers to a blend of various strategies; practices and technologies, which help a company to improve, manage and evaluate customer interactions.

CRM plays a crucial role because customers are the most important entities of a business, which ensures the existence of any company.  In addition, the objective of CRM is to retain customers and generate more sales.

There is a wide range of benefits offered by CRM software or solutions to the companies. CRM helps in compiling the customer data from various channels among the customers and companies. Further, companies get an insight into customer behavior and buying patterns through this compilation.

Benefits of customer relationship management

• Increased sales: By streamlining the sales process, automating tasks, and evaluating sales data, companies can increase their overall sales.
• Better customer service: By accumulating and managing customer information, companies can actually understand their customers very well and improve their services & products for building customer loyalty.
• Accurate analytical data and report: The analytical CRM tools help companies to intelligently manage all the data across the company. It also helps in generating generate actionable leads from those data and reports.
• Retaining the existing customers: customer retention is very important for a company and various CRM tools like customer service automation, enhance the retention of customers.
• Improved efficiency: Better project management, task automation, and various analytical tools improve a company’s operation. It further increases the efficiency of the organization.
• Better planning: By implementing various CRM solutions, companies can evaluate and analyze customer data. It also helps companies to better plan for their future strategies for product launch and promotion activities.

Note: These are some of the benefits of customer relationship management; however, different solutions of CRM offer different benefits.

Types of CRM solutions

There are many solutions include under CRM, which helps in improving various aspects of the business like sales, customer service, and many more. So, we are mentioning a few of the CRM software and solutions:

Marketing automation

The objective of this type of solution is to help businesses to adopt various effective channels such as phone calls, emails, face-to-face meetings, and ads on social media to outreach their potentials customers. In addition, marketing automation also enables companies to inform their audience regarding their new product launches and improvements.

Salesforce automation

This tool helps the companies to monitor customer interactions and automate some business functions of the sales cycle, which is very important to follow leads, make new customers and create customer loyalty. By implementing sales force automation, companies can boost their sales and revenues.

Customer support and service

The after-sales interaction with the customers is very crucial for the company as companies can get feedback about their products. Additionally, through customer support and service, companies can build customer trust in their brand, which would further benefit companies.

CRM analytics

Analytic CRM enables companies to evaluate customer data across various channels to develop strategies for boosting their business. In addition, it also enables companies to take better and informed decisions and generate actionable insights from the gathered data. It also helps companies to identify customer purchasing patterns through evaluated data.

Social media monitoring

Through social media monitoring, companies can identify and determine consumer trends and brand image via different social media platforms. Moreover, companies can also keep an eye on what people are saying about their brand and then, react to it accordingly. Social media enables companies to address their customers and interact with them directly.

To sum up

Customer relationship management is one of the important aspects of a company. There are various types of CRM solutions available in the market, which helps a company to improve its communication with their customer and develop brand loyalty.

It is a combination of various technologies, strategies, and solutions that helps in maintaining a healthy relationship with the company with its customers. CRM offers various benefits to the company like increased sales, automation of daily tasks, and many more.

The demand for customer relationship management would increase in the coming years due to the aspects like increasing importance of improved customer relationships, building brand image and customer loyalty, etc.