Why You Need To Deploy A CRM In Your Existing Business Model

CRM basically is an acronym for “Customer Relationship Management” in Management Information System’s (MIS) terminology.

It encompasses all rules, principles, implementations, instructions, and regulations an organization observes while interacting with its consumer base.

An Overview of Customer Relationship Management

The sole purpose of a CRM is to engage the audience at all stages of buying, beginning from discovery, awareness, decision, purchase, and post-purchase. CRM makes the company’s life a lot easier by managing several teams at once in delivering the best consumer encounters.

The technology-based companies, systems, and frameworks that aid in the efficient management of all forms of external communications with clients are also termed CRM. The existing trends in CRM tech include Software, Machine learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Cloud Computing. It is deemed as one of the fast-rising enterprise software solutions that include the SaaS industry.

The top-grade CRM tools are provided by tech giants like Salesforce, SAP, Hubspot, Zoho, Microsoft, Nimble, Dynamics, Oracle, Sugar, Pipedrive, and Adobe.

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The key components of CRM range from an organization’s web assets like website, emails, apps, mass mailings, and phone calls. The utilization of social media acts as a boosting factor to nurture positive relationships with existing customers and attract new ones. The main idea is to keep the clients on the brand’s web and not to let go by offering them good experiences with the company’s products/services.

Overall, CRM involves all ways in which a company communicates with its customer strata, but in general points to the technology employed to consistently manage all of its relationships.

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The Customer Relationship Management cycle

The 5 primary stages in the CRM lifecycle are:

Establishing Contacts with Prospects

Consumer Acquisition

Lead Conversion

Building Consumer Loyalty

Consumer Retention

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What does customer relationship management software do?

The sales and marketing teams in a company work tirelessly to maintain leads flowing into the marketing funnel while the customer support and service division tries to retain them. The prospective customers will be interacting with personalities from several departments in your business.

There is high activity once a prospect is caught in the marketing net, their call logs and inquiries are recorded, their personal details are collected and stored in a database, stage of buyer’s journey they are in is marked, email responses reside in multiple inboxes need to be collated, sticky notes with vital information are in the possession of the customer support executive, etc.

So, as you can see too much information about a single customer is spread over various resources that are handled by various teams, all these fragments need to be combined to form one cohesive unit. This becomes mandatory for the smooth functioning of the system.

The CRM is a central pool that ensures all the data mined be accessible to all the teams on a real-time basis, intimating fast on deals being negotiated, deals that are closed, and prospective deals. It saves plenty of time that is spent on intercommunications and holds the key to synchronization of business activities.

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Who owns the Customer Relationship Management system?

Based on the magnitude of the companies:

Start-ups:

They are young and looking forward to scaling in the near future, and need scalable technology so that there are no hassles of data migration.

Small/Medium Size businesses:

They are small doesn’t mean they don’t expand. They are medium doesn’t mean they are not large enough to procure one. Multiple vendors are out there to reach these businesses with small business CRM options at affordable pricing policies.

Enterprises:

CRM takes the sole control of the business, essential in closing deals, brings order and discipline, needed to perform analytics and forecast to set higher goals and reach them eventually. So, choose one according to the simplicity in usage and its relevance to your business.

Based on teams using it:

Sales team:

• To monitor leads and classify them as Hot/Warm/Cold.
• Review customer conversations.
• To send out emails that are automated.
• Evaluate daily/weekly/monthly sales.
• To maintain call logs.
• Tracking prospects and customers.

Marketing team:

• To establish contact forms/chatbots to convert website users into leads.
• Track the consumer’s interests based on their activity behaviour on the company website.
• Personalized emails based on their buying patterns are created and sent out at scheduled times as gentle reminders.
• To monitor paid acquisition or campaign performances.

Managers:

• To pull sales and marketing reports.
• Template reports are made available by the CRM.
• Custom reports can be made for specific use cases.
• To monitor sales and marketing trends.

Based on the type of business:

B2B/ SaaS B2B:

If you are looking out to get in touch with resellers, other businesses, partners, etc. You may need to track the number of sign-ins, subscribed user base, put up product demos in which case CRM would be of great use.

B2C/ SaaS B2C:

If you are a business wanting to pull an audience. Then you will need CRM to perform data mining and data analytics.

Advantages of Customer Relationship Management Tool

• Due to the targeted insights that CRM provides, users find the experience more personalized.
• Reduces information gaps to zero. Making CRM the single trusted source.
• It portrays your business/brand story and ideals in a single voice and tone.
• Stimulates and steps up conversions.
• Elimination of manual data entries which was the case of spreadsheets.
• All operations are automated once scheduled.
• Provides in-depth reports on sales and marketing
• It acts as an effective tracker of sales attributions to the correct source.
• The Collaborative Nature of the CRM enables to maintain a single identity and alignment.
• The consumers’ vulnerabilities revealed will enable the business to cross-sell/up-sell products/services.
• Enables a quick integration of all business applications.
• Eliminates duplicate and incomplete fields.
• Prevention of losses through the feature of fraud detection.
• Enhances the process of decision making and thereby productivity.
• Exploits the internet-of-things to intensify consumer engagement
• It could shoot up referrals from existing consumers.
• Helps in identifying problems with your company’s products/services earlier.
• Assists in fixing strategies that aren’t working.
• Gives insight into consumer opinion on your product, which could be used to update your offers.

How to execute a new Customer Relationship Management system?

Step 1. Get your team together. Assemble them.

Step 2. Plan your short- and long-term goals. Plus, the strategies.

Step 3. Streamline the processes involved.

Step 4. Make a roadmap to utilize the CRM platform.

Step 5. Choose the customer fields that are of your interest.

Step 6. Define the kind of reports you would like to obtain.

Step 7. Educate the CRM administrator.

Step 8. Interact with the user base.

Evolution in Customer Relationship Management Technology

On-premises CRM

Those were the days when CRM and its associated data were hosted on local business servers and computers. It could be accessed through the local networks. It involved a lot of initial expenditure for the installation of CRM software, renewal costs, and miscellaneous cost overheads.

When you wanted to expand, scalability would become high on your pocket and the process too complex. While such an option wasn’t available for a few of them.

Cloud CRM

CRM and its associated data are hosted on the cloud and managed by the vendor.

Swift deployment.

It is made accessible through web browsers and you can continue to pay as long as you choose to use it, charged in terms of the number of users.

No hardware or software installation costs are involved.

Auto software updates.

Gives you enough flexibility to scale up/down.

You have an option to modify feature plans and also to add/remove licenses.

Enhanced collaboration.

Mobile CRM

A mobile app seamlessly linking to your desktop CRM enables you to use it on the go, you don’t need to be stuck to your desktop in a single location.

The mobile version is optimized for the best user experience.

Allows you to remain connected with your team anywhere, anytime.

You may choose to check in when at meetings to indicate your presence.

An option to add voice notes/tasks/appointments.

Top features of Customer Relationship Management Software

Merged Contacts View

For every contact registered:

All the details, latest conversations through mail/chat/SMS and call logs are recorded.

The User’s engagement chronology with the business is listed.

Tasks and upcoming appointments with him/her.

Tracking user’s activity on product pages and history of resources downloaded.

E-mails/newsletters sent out to him/her.

It also ranks contacts on the basis of the degree of engagement.

Pipeline Management 

Helps in managing deals and pipelines and also provides status updates.

Gives a visual summary of all deals and stages of engagement.

Few of them even facilitate the creation of multiple pipelines for huge businesses.

Suggests the best course of action for every deal in place.

To perform sales forecasts and identify choking spots.

Data Entry Automation

Automatically captures consumer data from the emails/chats/web forms fields.

Low response times due to mapping of prospects to executives in nearer geographical locations.

Managing e-mails

Reduced time spent on navigation by integrating your email with the CRM.

You can create/save standard email templates to respond to customers.

You can send bulk mailers at scheduled times.

Enables you to track email open rates and CTRs.

Automating sales

Invoice reminder emails are sent out based on triggers like due date approaching, etc.

Enables you to define workflows (an automated set of actions for a particular trigger), that perform tasks on behalf of you.

To modify the deal status, like new to lead, lead to won, etc.

Disseminating welcome emails to new entrants/reminders for renewal to old customers/follow-up emails.

Set tasks, reminders, and appointments.

Automating Marketing

Consolidates data from both sales and marketing teams.

Putting in place chat campaigns.

Monitoring leads’ website activity.

Optimization of web pages based on the above output.

Leads segmentation based on their behavior/interests.

Pitching in promotional text and visual content to engage prospects.

Pass on potential buyers’ info to the sales team.

Analytics and Reporting

Business targets vs business achievements reports.

Sales and marketing activities.

Performance reports.

Web traffic analysis.

To find the attributions of growth.

Handling Omni channels

You can use the CRM tool to engage consumers across different channels.

The various interactive channels include:

Phone: to place calls, log it, map it to contacts, record voicemails.

Chat: integrated at the web portal, to give personalized assistance to users.

Short message services: to not appear very intrusive you can choose this option; it works better and faster than an email.

Whatsapp business: to read and reply to user messages.

Apple business chat: to send replies in response to iMessage.

The CRM software available today gives you options to include the social media activity of your consumer like their preferences, what do they share on public platforms regarding your competitors, to make accurate forecasts.

It is also a major help, as consumers may raise issues or complaints on different digital public platforms/channels (example: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter), whereas, they may choose a private option available like email or chatbots to actually sort them out.

CRM makes this entire roundabout process simplified by aiding in managing queries without losing sight of them. All the business teams thereby get a holistic view of the scenes unrolling concerning a particular customer.

It would be great for your company to integrate your other business activities starting from human resource management to supply chain management to accomplish huge levels of productivity.

Rules to follow for exploiting the Customer Relationship Management tool

Access rules need to be clear and simple. Work out the levels of access, type of records, customer fields, and tabs.

Stay up-to-date with the changes and tweaks to the CRM system and data records.

Encourage productive collaboration and transparency in operations.

Regular feedback from CRM users will help you improve the platform.

How Customer Relationship Management tool helps Customer support/sales teams?

• To determine the age of the cases lying in the database.
• Time is taken for resolving individual cases.
• The count of escalations made in resolving a query.
• The total number of cases closed per executive or representative.
• The self-closed cases number.
• Mean response time to resolve issues.
• Count of cases that are fixed at the portal.
• The Cost incurred per case.

Customer Relationship Management Tool Pricing Policy

The usage is charged usually per user on a monthly basis. However, a few of the companies select annual billing options to incur some savings through an easy payment process.

The general pricing (per user) categories are as mentioned below:

10-15$ – inexpensive category, with a cap on the number of users and storage. Suitable for start-ups.

20-40$ – for added features, to integrate with third-party systems on a wide range, has a limit on the number of users and storage.

50-75$ – for enterprise usage, allows integration with legacy systems and customization.

>=250$ – high-end ones, aren’t cloud-based but are installed locally which provides the much-needed security to your organizational assets.

Before choosing a CRM, you can always opt for free services based on the complexity of your requirements, to test the performance before buying the licenses.

In all, you can expect more and more features of the customer relationship management tools being automated with Artificial intelligence technology put it into greater use, which leads to a reduction in the injection of human entry errors, which are the main cause of deviations in the analysis and reports.

Additionally, there has been a high demand to integrate voice technology to operate devices and conversational apps like voice assistants. Plus, execution of self-service functionality like chatbots and conversational Artificial intelligence.

The CRM tools are trending towards mobile technologies to facilitate access to remote teams likes never seen before. The enhanced UI/UX may be another enticing factor to bring you the attention you are longing for.

All the trends have seen an upward rise and people are wanting to use them to make their business processes simpler and more accountable.