A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is a tool that refers to the strategies that companies and businesses use to manage, monitor and analyze customer information. This is a system that can help the marketing team and salespersons work efficiently and find potential customers faster. The CRM system is beneficial to a business in many ways like,
- Improves business relationships with customers
- Increases customer retention
- Improves employee morale
- Improve data collection rate
- Boost’s sales team’s ability to close deals
Though the CRM system has numerous pros, there are a few cons to it too. It requires a significant investment, plenty of time to configure the system and time to learn how to use its features. Hence, it is important for you to decide when your business desperately needs to implement a CRM system.
We provide you the cases where implementing the CRM system would be beneficial to the growth and progress of your business.
1. For efficient data analysis of the customers
If your company has very few customers, then there is room to fill out the records manually, and a CRM system can be avoided. But as your company begins to expand, it becomes difficult to monitor all the records, and it inevitably leads to inadequate data analysis of the customers. It becomes difficult to record and monitor the data of each of the employees without the use of automated analysis tools. A CRM system makes it easier to store and analyze the data of the customers and monitor their behavior.
2. Improves customer satisfaction
The unavailability of a CRM system puts a massive load on the employees to efficiently store, track and process the data of each of the customers. This means the customer will not be given the necessary individual attention, which might lead to them being disgruntled.
Devote time to understand the customer’s concerns, get their feedback and see what can be improved. Customer satisfaction is extremely vital to customer retention and implementing a CRM system will provide you time to effectively serve your clients.
3. To avoid missing sales opportunities
Having to track sales manually could lead to too much to track and could result in missing out on sales opportunities. Missed sales opportunities also affect the morale of the salesperson. By implementing an automated tool like a CRM system you can use it to notify salespersons when they can follow-up on a potential customer.
This allows you to work efficiently where you can filter the customers that a particular salesperson can approach, which also avoids missed sales opportunities.
4. Improves visibility into sales activities
Every company wishes to improve its sales activates. However, even the best salespersons of your company may miss out on potential sales opportunities due to a lack of proper systems in place. A CRM system will ensure that this doesn’t happen. It is also difficult to keep track of all this information without a centralized place.
A CRM system will let you effectively track the activities of the salespersons, and it is then they can be held accountable for the mishaps from their end. A CRM system also lets you keep track and re-assess your sales targets based on the performance of your employees.
5. Makes the employees more accountable
Sometimes employees might miss a sales opportunity due to lack of sufficient data as the employees might have forgotten or they might not have realized that it’s their job. The employees might not accept this as a mistake on their side and might just blame the system being implemented as too inefficient.
A CRM system acts as a centralized database that provides adequate data on all the interactions you have had with potential customers. This is a transparent system that will tell you which employee neglected a client and what the reasons behind it were. The CRM system can thus be used as an employee assessment tool in this way.
6. Avoiding internal communication problems
There’s little that can get worse for a customer if he’s continuously bouncing around by different departments just because the teams don’t coordinate well enough. This happens in a manual system because it is extremely difficult to keep track of all customer behavior changes.
A CRM system improves communication between the departments, and the employees as it lets them monitor all the changes and hence they are better prepared when handling the customers.
7. Avoiding employee turnover
Employee turnover is a nightmare for business owners and can wreak havoc on the business. The unavailability of a CRM system places a heavy burden on the employees as they are made to deal with massive chunks of data of each customer. They have too much to remember, keep track of and might underperform, which affects them and forces them to leave.
A CRM system thus reduces the weight on their shoulders as it is an effective tool to seamless store and transfer the information of the customers between employees.
8. Provides a centralized source of information
Spreadsheet, Google sheets, post-it notes would have worked fine when the number of customers in the business was minimal. But as the business begins to expand, it becomes next to impossible to store, track and retrieve information using those tools.
An alternative is the CRM system- which offers the organization a single, centralized source of easily accessible information. This acts as a central database which is will update in real-time.
9. Avoiding more than one employee interacting with a customer
The best way to make a fool out of yourself is to have two employees handling a particular customer with each not knowing what his colleague told the customer. This happens due to a lack of coordination due to a lack of a CRM system, as the employees are unable to keep a track of the information changes.
Making a customer explain something multiple times just because you haven’t interacted with your colleague who was handling the customer previously is a sin. A CRM can avoid such an embarrassing situation as both the employees will have access to the customer’s history and will be able to keep track of all his interactions.
A CRM system will, therefore, keep the employees well informed about all the customers.
10. Facilitates growth of the business
As each business is keen is interested in growing, as we have seen before there are many problems that arise due to the lack of a CRM system. It is therefore highly imperative to implement a CRM system into the business as it begins to expand, as it just not possible to handle so much data manually.
Why you need a change of mind about CRM System?
Growing your company and increasing your income requires developing excellent relationships. This is just not possible without a CRM system as it gives visibility into the sales and marketing activities of the company. As we have seen before, it is beneficial for both the employees and customers. It improves the morale of the employee which helps them deliver the customer a better experience as well.
Over the past few years, the computer world has grown manifolds. The computer data volumes are exploding, as more and more data are generating on a daily basis. This data that is used for data mining for information is referred to as ‘Big Data’. We will now be looking at what Big data is and how it integrates into the CRM and is constantly changing the dynamics of the computer world.
If you find this article useful, Don’t forget to share it.
For more new updates on Technology check out our blog.