Customer Relationship Management What is CRM Software? Customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. The goal is simple: Improve business relationships. A CRM system helps companies stay connected to customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability. When people talk about CRM, they usually refer to a CRM system or platform, a tool that helps with contact management, sales management, productivity, and more. CRM software helps you focus on your organization's relationships with individual people — including customers, service users, colleagues, or suppliers — throughout your lifecycle with them, including finding new customers, winning their business, and providing support and additional services throughout the relationship. With a CRM solution, the sales and marketing team can track and follow a customer’s interaction journey with your business. This can enhance the customer journey and experience by refining each customer touchpoint. The importance of CRM for your business CRM software is increasing in importance as it is the largest and fastest-growing enterprise application software category. Worldwide spending on CRM is expected to reach USD $114.4 billion by 2027. If your business is going to last, you need a strategy for the future that’s centred around your customers and enabled by the right technology. You have targets for sales, business objectives, and profitability. But getting up-to-date, reliable information on your progress can be tricky. How do you translate the many streams of data coming in from sales, customer service, marketing, and social media monitoring into useful business information? A CRM system can give you a clear overview of your customers. You can see everything in one place — a simple, customisable dashboard that can tell you a customer’s previous history with you, the status of their orders, any outstanding customer service issues, and more. You can even choose to include information from their public social media activity — their likes and dislikes, what they are saying and sharing about you or your competitors. Marketers can use a CRM solution to manage and optimise campaigns and lead journeys with a data-driven approach, and better understand the pipeline of sales or prospects coming in, making forecasting simpler and more accurate. You’ll have clear visibility of every opportunity or lead, showing you a clear path from inquiries to sales. Some of the biggest gains in productivity and in making a whole-company shift to customer-centricity can come from moving beyond CRM as just a sales and marketing tool and embedding it in your business — from finance to customer services and supply chain management. This helps to ensure that customer needs are at the forefront of business processes and innovation cycles. What does a CRM system do? A customer relationship management (CRM) solution helps you find new customers, win their business, and keep them happy by organising customer and prospect information in a way that helps you build stronger relationships with them and grow your business faster. CRM systems start by collecting a customer's website, email, telephone, social media data, and more, across multiple sources and channels. It may also automatically pull in other information, such as recent news about the company's activity, and it can store personal details, such as a client's personal preferences on communications. The CRM tool organises this information to give you a complete record of individuals and companies overall, so you can better understand your relationship over time. A CRM platform can also connect to other business apps that help you to develop customer relationships. CRM solutions today are more open and can integrate with your favourite business tools, such as document signing, accounting and billing, and surveys, so that information flows both ways to give you a true 360-degree view of your customer. Salesforce: The top value drivers for implementing CRM Here is a closer look at the top value drivers for implementing CRM. 1. Managing marketing/sales campaign through CRM (89%) 2. Consolidate all customer knowledge in the organization into the CRM solution (80%) 3. Demonstrate Return on Investment through increased sales revenue (74%) 4. Leverage data collected from company initiatives for improves decision making (55%) 5. Data quality and cleansing (50%) 6. Augment CRM with sales intelligence data (41%) 7. Mobile access to CRM (25%) 8. Establish a company wide data collection standard (21%) 9. Implement employee training (16%) What Is CRM Integration? Your CRM platform is part of your company’s collection of hardware and software — and this collection is extensive. According to MuleSoft’s 2020 Connectivity Benchmark Report, the average organization uses 900 applications. These applications exist in: ● Cloud applications ● Legacy infrastructure ● On-premises hardware and software CRM integration connects each application with your CRM platform so data can flow to, from, or between them. The goal with CRM integration is to host complete, accurate data from your business software to give you a complete picture of your business and customers. What Is Customer Data Integration? According to MuleSoft, customer data integration, or CDI, “gathers all data about a customer from disparate systems in various departments within a business and assembles it in a single location, making it easily accessible to multiple departments.” This location is your company’s single source of truth (SSOT). While CRM integration specifically focuses on creating conversations between your CRM platform and other business software, CDI involves the entire ecosystem of data. With proper data management and integration, employees get one unified view of their customers. A unified view empowers your company to make data-based decisions and serve customers in a personalized, efficient manner. CRM integration is part of an overall customer data integration strategy. Both tasks can be burdensome. Big data, which includes any dataset that’s too massive or complicated for traditional data processing application software, is a good thing for businesses. Nigel Filer writes that big data “opens up new opportunities for businesses to congregate and pull together disparate data to substantially improve decision-making, minimize risk, and unearth valuable insights that would otherwise remain hidden.” But all this data can be difficult to manage. When companies integrate data into one central location, such as a CRM platform, it’s easier to analyze and process, especially using machine learning, a subset of AI. Companies can analyze data faster with machine learning and make decisions based on reality and statistical trends, not estimates.
