The customer has been and will always be the core of a business. The biggest businesses have succeeded only because of the customer-oriented approach they use to grow their business. Maintaining the relationship with the customer and understanding their requirements to serve them better, is the key for expanding a business and drive the most growth out of it. Since the old customers contribute to maximum sales and growth of an organisation, it is essential for the latter to provide their customers with that exceptional experience that the customers come back again and again. For the past many years, CRMs have been helping businesses in terms of improving customer relations, managing their communication with them, achieving their business targets.

What is CRM?

CRM or Customer Relationship Management, as the name suggests, is the technique and the technologies that organisations of every scale use to manage their customers and maintain the relations with them in order to enhance their profits. CRM helps the organisations to build strategies based on customers’ interaction, their behaviour and data, such that it can reach maximum customer satisfaction, retain its older customers, make new ones, as well as to attain maximum organisational growth. A CRM keeps and maintains the data related to the complete lifecycle of the customers.

Components of CRM

Maintaining a relationship with the customers and utilizing the relationship for providing better services such that to yield maximum benefits is not a single task, but is incorporated with a number of components. The components of a CRM that contributes to the growth of the business with the help of customer relationship management are as follow:

• SalesForce Automation: SalesForce Automation helps businesses to track the major operations like order processing, contact management, inventory management, order tracking, customer management, sales forecast analysis and employee performance evaluation, etc.

• Marketing: Marketing is the one strategy without which no business can ever survive. The CRM provides marketers with flexible segmentation tools, intuitive response tracking, and insightful analytics. This way, the marketing process is automated and becomes effortless for the companies.

• Lead Management: CRMs are responsible for tracking the client history, their behaviour as well as interests, making the marketers and sellers capable of increasing productivity and efficiency.

• Customer Service: Better customer service leads to better productivity and added growth. It is not that your relationship with the customer ends as soon as the project is over. You need to be in touch and provide the best possible services to the customers, even after the deal is concluded. The customer service helps in building trust among them and win their loyalty.

• Analytics & Reporting: The analytics and reporting are helpful in tracking customer history, managing sales and marketing. This way, you can access the information whenever required, in order to serve those customers better as well as to carry out other sales and marketing related works.

Types of CRM

There are the three main types of CRM as below:

1. Operational CRM Operational CRM is liable for automating all the processes that are carried out inside and outside an organisation. It creates a single file containing all the information of every existing customer also based on their behaviour and interaction with the organisation. It further includes the process of SalesForce automation, Marketing automation and Service automation. This type of CRM targets on generating leads, marketing/sales strategies, acquiring new customers, dealing with the older ones, tracking and updating the customer’s status, providing customers with helpful information through text messages, email, as well as phone calls.
2. Analytical CRM: This type of CRM keeps the record of the client data, providing a better insight into customer’s requirements and demands. It also helps in the acquisition of new customers and retention of the older ones. The analytical CRMs are the most useful in building the marketing and sales strategies by analysing consumer behaviours, patterns, and pain points.
3. Collaborative CRM: The collaborative CRM completely focus on improving the customer experience and sets the right flow for the communication between the various departments of the organisation, including sales, marketing, support, technical and others. The CRM collects the information from the customer interactions and makes strategies to improve the quality of customer service and gain customer satisfaction as well as loyalty.

Who Should Use CRM?

Every business that cares for each of its customers and wants to maintain a long term relation with them, in order to generate more revenue and growth, must use a CRM. As already mentioned, a customer is the backbone of a business, so it is compulsory to nurture the relationship with them so that one can gain maximum customer satisfaction and retention. So CRM is the most necessary method that helps the businesses to hold on to their old customers, make new, and achieve maximum benefits as well as growth.

Benefits of Using a CRM

CRM is the most useful technique through which you can not only handle your customers but also manage all the operations going on inside the organisation and enhance your business growth. Following are the benefits of using CRM in an organisation:

• Better Client Relationship: The only target of developing CRMs is to grow the business by providing the customers with the best possible services. So CRMs are responsible for maintaining better relationships with the customers.

• Increased Productivity: Since, using a CRM, the relationship with the existing customer is managed properly, it helps the organised with increased productivity.

• Customer Satisfaction: When a customer is given the maximum attention and provided with better services, it becomes easier to gain customer satisfaction.

• Customer Retention: One of the best customer retention method that a CRM apply is, whenever a customer tends to move to other companies to access similar services, it offers even better options to the customer. There are many other methods that CRMs provide to retain the existing customer.

• Improved Efficiency: Since the companies get to know about the demands and needs of the customers through the CRMs, these companies start focusing on fulfilling those demands and needs, resulting in increased efficiency.

• Better Reporting and Analytics: CRMs provide the best analytical and reporting services to the companies, that helps them keep the records of almost every information and behaviour of the customers, related to the products and the services it is providing to them. So it becomes easier for the companies to track the needs of the customers, the most revenue generating services and many other things contributing to the growth of the business.

CRM Integration

Though you can build a purely CRM based system to maintain the customer’s data, integrating it with your website or marketing automation system helps you in seamlessly processing the data directly into your CRM. The CRM integration can save a lot of time and effort for the marketing, sales, and the other involved teams. For example, whenever users submit their information to the website or take any action, either a new lead is created, or in the case of an existing customer, the lead is updated automatically in the CRM without the need for doing such stuff manually. This way, you can easily track the customer’s interaction with your business from day one at a single place.

Popular CRMS that Businesses are using: CRMs are beneficial and always in demand, here is the list of most used and most popular CRMs, that have been helping the businesses with its services:

• Salesforce CRM

• Zoho CRM

• HubSpot CRM

• Oracle Sales Cloud

• Freshsales

• Pipedrive

• Workbooks CRM

If you are also planning to use CRM integration to streamline your business operations, and looking for a good development team, you can contact the Xornor Technologies to know more about the technology.