What is CRM?
Customer Relationship Management, known as CRM, is a software that manages your business contacts, leads, clients and opportunities. Additionally, some CRM systems come with features that help you in tracking customer problems, purchasing patterns and other information that helps you to have a 360° review of your customers and eventually increase sales.
CRM has been growing steadily for the last few years and is now seen as the way for any business to excel in this ‘e’ era. The aim of deploying a CRM in any business is to concentrate on the retention of clients by collecting all data from every interaction each client makes with a business, whether this interaction was of a sales type both inbound and outbound or of any other sort such as support type calls. CRM data is collected using various means such as call logs, emails, web or face to face in the field. The data is then used by the business for specific business purposes such as marketing, service, support or sales while concentrating on a customer centric approach rather than a product one.
Why CRM?
There are many studies that prove that the use of CRM increase customer satisfaction and hence increases business revenue and profits. Harvard Business Review, for instance, concluded in a study that some businesses can boost profits by almost 100% by retaining only 5% more of their clients. Similar studies by PIMS proved that a dissatisfied client will tell around 10 others while a satisfied one will only recommend a business to an average of 3 friends. Further, a study commissioned by Ventura showed that if customer service problems were eliminated completely, then this could potentially double profit growth of the business over a five-year period.
Moreover, today’s product life cycle has become really short. This has deprived businesses from enjoying the sustained financial benefits of being product innovators. Not only competitors are coming out with copycat products to the market quicker but new generations of products are introduced more quickly making service and support the key to retention of existing and future customers.
Finally, implementing CRM in business will help the business cut costs and keep customers. Additionally, several analysis show that the cost of acquiring a new customer could be up to seven times more expensive than retaining an existing one.
Customer Relationship Management, known as CRM, is a software that manages your business contacts, leads, clients and opportunities. Additionally, some CRM systems come with features that help you in tracking customer problems, purchasing patterns and other information that helps you to have a 360° review of your customers and eventually increase sales.
CRM has been growing steadily for the last few years and is now seen as the way for any business to excel in this ‘e’ era. The aim of deploying a CRM in any business is to concentrate on the retention of clients by collecting all data from every interaction each client makes with a business, whether this interaction was of a sales type both inbound and outbound or of any other sort such as support type calls. CRM data is collected using various means such as call logs, emails, web or face to face in the field. The data is then used by the business for specific business purposes such as marketing, service, support or sales while concentrating on a customer centric approach rather than a product one.
Why CRM?
There are many studies that prove that the use of CRM increase customer satisfaction and hence increases business revenue and profits. Harvard Business Review, for instance, concluded in a study that some businesses can boost profits by almost 100% by retaining only 5% more of their clients. Similar studies by PIMS proved that a dissatisfied client will tell around 10 others while a satisfied one will only recommend a business to an average of 3 friends. Further, a study commissioned by Ventura showed that if customer service problems were eliminated completely, then this could potentially double profit growth of the business over a five-year period.
Moreover, today’s product life cycle has become really short. This has deprived businesses from enjoying the sustained financial benefits of being product innovators. Not only competitors are coming out with copycat products to the market quicker but new generations of products are introduced more quickly making service and support the key to retention of existing and future customers.
Finally, implementing CRM in business will help the business cut costs and keep customers. Additionally, several analysis show that the cost of acquiring a new customer could be up to seven times more expensive than retaining an existing one.