What Is CRM – Customer Relationship Management?

Keeping the Key Process of Customer Relationship Management Under Control

Customer Relationship Management is a customer-oriented management approach built around actively creating and maintaining long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with customers. These relationships need to benefit both the customer and the company (a so-called win-win situation), which rules out unethical treatment of customers.

CRM systems are the modern term for long-established business processes tied to marketing, sales, and customer service. Put simply, their purpose is to successfully capture interest, win new customers, and retain existing ones.

Put very simply, CRM is sometimes described as a database-driven process for gathering, processing, and using information about a company’s customers. It lets a company get to know, understand, and anticipate customers’ needs, preferences, and buying habits, and it supports two-way communication between the company and its customers. In a broader sense, “CRM” is also used to describe the software, hardware, and staff a company assigns to carry out these functions.

Overview

CRM is becoming a critical concern for organizations of every size. Marketing professionals today talk more and more about the need to shift focus from products to customers. After all, it’s the customer who brings in the money.
Once the first market surveys started appearing, manufacturers and sellers began orienting themselves more toward what the market actually wants, designing products that customers use because they solve a real problem or deliver an obvious benefit.
Every company grapples with these challenges:

1. Retaining existing customers
2. Understanding customers
3. Being able to listen to them
4. Identifying key processes
5. Increasing customer satisfaction while improving key processes
6. Building a marketing strategy to retain existing customers and win new ones
7. Being able to reach new customers

The key to a successful CRM initiative is accurate, consistent customer data, accessible online across the entire IT infrastructure. It’s important to recognize that a CRM solution touches sales, service, and marketing alike, all in the interest of keeping the customer satisfied.
Customer relationship management is, at its core, a strategy focused on building and sustaining long-term customer relationships. So it isn’t just technology — it’s a shift in company philosophy toward putting the customer at the center. Most CRM implementations that fail do so because this strategy isn’t actually followed.

• Campaigns and their evaluation
• Finding potential sales channels, cross-selling, up-selling, customer retention, and so on
• Customer behavior analysis – pricing, new product development
• Decision support – forecasting and analyzing customer profitability, and so on

Collaborative CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

This covers special functionality that enables communication between a company and its customers across a range of channels, aimed at delivering higher-quality customer interactions. Operational CRM feeds the useful information generated during customer interactions back to individual business departments — sales, technical support, and marketing. That might mean passing on specific customer requirements, or questions about new services, from technical support to sales and marketing. The goal of collaborative CRM is to share this information gathered across all departments to improve the quality of service delivered to customers.

CRM Philosophy and Benefits

CRM is an approach for identifying, acquiring, and retaining customers. It lets organizations manage and align their customer interactions. Good customer relationship management helps companies increase the value of every such interaction and, in turn, achieve better financial results.

Today’s organizations have to manage customer interactions across a whole range of communication channels — the web, call centers, field sales reps, dealers, and partner sales networks. Many companies also run several lines of business that share the same customers. The challenge is giving customers an easy way to do business with the organization, however they like, whenever they like, through whichever channel, language, and currency they choose. Customers need to feel like they’re dealing with one unified organization that recognizes them at every touchpoint. The benefit of CRM is clear: more efficient processes, and better, more detailed customer information for sales, marketing, and company leadership. Customer relationship management helps companies build more profitable customer relationships and lower operating costs.

Built-in workflows can take some of the administrative burden off your sales reps’ shoulders — tasks that are tedious but still matter to how the company runs. Time-consuming steps can be automated: a workflow can notify sales reps about newly arrived orders, flag contracts that need renewing, or even send a customer a birthday message.

CRM systems bring a new approach to unifying with other applications, built on a complete, detailed understanding of customer behavior, ongoing communication with customers, and a focus on each individual customer.

Sales organizations can shorten the sales cycle and boost key performance metrics like revenue per sales rep, average order size, and revenue per customer. Marketing organizations can increase campaign response rates and marketing-driven revenue while lowering customer acquisition costs. Service companies can boost service-staff productivity and customer loyalty while cutting service costs, response times, and time-to-resolution. Across every industry, effective customer relationship management is a strategic necessity for growth and survival. Research has shown that companies that create satisfied, loyal customers see more repeat business, lower customer-acquisition costs, and stronger brands — and all of that translates into better financial performance.

CRM Solutions We Specialize In

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM – the best-known CRM from the world-renowned vendor Microsoft