Key customer relationship management process under control
Customer Relationship Management is a customer-oriented management, a business approach that is characterized by the active creation and maintenance of long-term beneficial relationships with customers. These relationships must be beneficial for both the customer and the company (the so-called two-winner situation), which excludes unethical behaviour towards customers.
CRM systems are a modern term for well-known and used business processes related to marketing, sales and customer service. Their mission, simply put, is to successfully engage, acquire new and retain existing customers.
In very simplistic terms, CRM is sometimes considered a database technology-supported process of collecting, processing and using information about a company's customers. It thus allows to know, understand and predict customer needs, wants and buying habits and supports two-way communication between the company and its customers. CRM in the figurative sense also refers to the software, hardware and personnel of a firm that is responsible for performing these functions.
Overview
CRM is becoming a key issue for organisations of all sizes. Nowadays, marketing experts are increasingly talking about the need to change the orientation from products to customers. After all, it is the customer who brings in the money.
As soon as the first marketing surveys appear, manufacturers and retailers start to focus more on what the market demands and accordingly invent products that customers use because they solve their problems or bring them obvious benefits.
Every company deals with these issues:
- Retaining existing customers
- Understanding customers
- The ability to listen to them
- Identification of key processes
- Increasing customer satisfaction while improving key processes
- Creating a marketing strategy to retain existing customers and attract new customers
- Ability to reach new customers
The key to a successful CRM initiative is correct and consistent customer data that is accessible online across the entire IT infrastructure. It is important to understand that CRM solutions touch sales, service and marketing while maintaining customer satisfaction.
Customer Relationship Management is a strategy that focuses on building and supporting long-lasting customer relationships. So it's not just the technology, it's changing the philosophy of the company to focus on the customer. Most CRM implementations crash on not following this strategy.
- campaigns and their evaluation
- Finding potential sales channels, cross-selling, up-selling, customer retention, etc.
- Customer behaviour analysis - pricing, new product development
- Decision support - forecasting and analysing customer profitability etc.
Collaborative CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
Includes special functionality that allows communicate with the company and its customers through a variety of channels to achieve a higher quality of customer interaction. Operational Customer Relationship Management provides useful information that arises from customer interactions to individual business departments such as sales, technical support and marketing. This includes, for example, providing information about specific customer requirements or inquiries about new services from technical sales support to marketing. The goal of Collaborative CRM is to share this information gathered from all departments to improve the quality of service provided to customers.
Philosophy and benefits of CRM
CRM is an approach to identify, acquire and retain customers. It allows organizations to manage and align customer interactions. Good customer relationship management helps companies to increase the value of each such interaction and thus achieve better economic results.
Today's organisations must manage customer interactions across a multitude of communication channels - including the web, call centres, field sales and dealers or partner sales networks. Many companies also have multiple lines of business sharing the same customers. The challenge is to provide customers with an easy way to do business with the organization, in any way, at any time, through any communication channel of their choice, in any language and in any currency. The customer needs to be made to feel that they are a partner in a single unified organisation that recognises them at all times and places. The benefits of CRM are obvious: streamlining processes and providing sales, marketing and management with better, more detailed customer information. Customer Relationship Management helps companies create a more profitable relationship with customers and reduce operational costs.
A built-in workflow can relieve your salespeople of bureaucratic tasks that are important to the operation of your business. Time-consuming tasks can be automated, workflow can inform salespeople of new orders coming in, the need to re-close expired contracts, or to wish a customer a happy birthday.
CRM systems bring a new approach of integrating with other applications, emphasizing complete and detailed knowledge of customer behavior along with constant communication with the customer and focusing on each individual customer.
Sales organizations can shorten the sales cycle and increase key performance indicators such as revenue per sales rep, average order size and revenue per customer. Marketing organizations can increase campaign response and marketing-driven revenue while reducing the cost of customer acquisition. Service companies can increase service agent productivity and customer loyalty while reducing the cost of service, response time, and time to resolution of customer requests. In all industries, effective customer relationship management is a strategic necessity for growth and survival. Research has shown that companies that create satisfied and loyal customers have more repeat business, lower new customer acquisition costs and stronger brands. All of this translates into better financial performance.
CRM solutions we specialize in
- Microsoft Dynamics CRM - the most famous CRM from the world-famous manufacturer, Microsoft
