Customer Relationship Management is a necessary process for businesses to manage and maintain their past, current, and prospective clients. In today’s marketplace, where immediacy trumps all else, it’s crucial to reach your customers and create an engaging relationship from your initial contact. In today’s demanding economy, building a relationship with every client is essential.  There are no industries exempt from this need in our current economy. Spearheaded by online retailers, the process to keep a new prospect interested, or hot, has led traditional businesses to step up how they compete and communicate with clients.

 

What is CRM?

 

Any efforts a business makes to get closer to a customer can be considered Customer Relationship Management (CRM). This concept combines management thought with business practices. Therefore, CRM programs aim to develop and implement business strategies utilizing supporting technology to close the gap between a business’s current and future performance concerning customer acquisition, growth, retention, and satisfaction. Think of CRM as a technological support structure that allows a company to provide direct support to its clients. Suppose a potential new client wants a quote for your business services. With a sound CRM system in place, that quote can be immediately sent to the client, as well as an outline for the next steps. 

 

CRM focuses on managing and optimizing the customer life cycle within a business entity. This system is designed to provide an excellent customer experience from the initial introduction to a potential new client throughout their entire time doing business with the company. A solid CRM plan will include steps to develop and retain the relationships with any client it acquires. Plainly speaking, CRM manages all business interactions with a client.

 

Why CRM?

 

For a business to be competitive in the market, they need to ensure the client can access their business in one way or another at any time and anyplace. Nowadays, customers can access information, companies, products, and services on demand. This creates a demanding customer base and high engagement expectations for any business. Therefore, companies must increase their accessibility to meet increased customer demands. This includes creating a new optimization plan within a business unit to address all customers’ communication and interaction levels, whether by phone, fax, email, or in-person.

 

CRM systems help target ways to improve productivity, profitability, and enhancing operational management information while reducing the cost of handling clients. Think of CRM as automating the client interaction processes with more immediacy, greater engagement, repeat benefits, while reducing the overhead on staff designated for these interactions. CRM processes allow companies to collect the information they need from current, past, and potential clients to design and develop everything from marketing strategies, products, and services to customer support avenues. The information gathered allows a company to understand a customer’s needs and value better. When considering a customer’s value, a company can design new strategies for an exceptional customer experience that will help create repeat customers and brand advocates. 

 

Understanding CRM as a dominant business driver makes it simple to see how business objectives based on customer service and relationship building can reduce distribution (channel) costs. The database of information built by CRM tools to manage a client base allows more functionality of information and access to clients’ needs, engagements with the organization, sales data, customer service concerns, and upsell avenues. These data points are all stored within the system and utilizable by anyone in the organization as designed.

 

Benefits of CRM

 

• Customizable development and design strategies to improve client relations and retention

• Increased business intelligence

• Innovative solutions designed for your clients

• Improved / competitive customer service relationships that stand out in the market

• Integration of customers’ views, needs, and concerns in the ever-changing marketplace

• Achieve business objectives

• Increase commitment to excellent service

• Increase investment protection with increased profitability, productivity, and cost reduction

• Business transformation and re-engineered business strategies

• Ability to identify potential determinants of customer loyalty or defection

 

Implementation Hurdles

 

• Affordability

• Lack of understanding of CRM and its tools, uses, and benefits

• Slow implementation

• Improper databases

• Reliance on old processes, resistance to change

• Long-term phased implementation

• Narrow view on CRM

• Viewing CRM as only technology for specific processes within an organization

• Awareness

 

There are many reasons CRM technologies are still in their infancy with many businesses. Companies either don’t collect relevant data or don’t understand how to best use the data they gather to create improvements in their systems to truly benefit from CRM solutions. 

 

Once a business learns to use CRM effectively, it can quickly compile critical client information to improve its revenue and profit. This valuable information asset allows for more targeted marketing plans, cost analysis, service costs, and staff productivity. Customer Relationship Management tools are available to structure every aspect of a business, from development to marketing and sales to customer service, to engage customers and provide them with a positive experience.