Guest Post

Customer Relationship Management or CRM is a strategy used to manage a company’s interactions with its customers, consumers, clients or potential sales targets.

It is an approach which has evolved over time to incorporate technology as a key tool to organise and automate many business processes. These are generally focused on sales activities, but also encompass other critical business functions such as customer service, marketing and technical support.

Though CRM can sometimes refer to an IT system which helps to manage these functions, in successful companies it is usually regarded as a company wide business strategy to maintain existing customers and successfully obtain new ones.

In its essence, Customer Relationship Management helps businesses gain an insight into the behaviour of their customers and modify their business operations to ensure that customers are served in the best possible way. The way CRM has evolved (and in turn how CRM has allowed business to evolve) is to shift the focus from the business to the consumer.

The traditional viewpoint in industry used to be “here’s what we can make – how can we sell it?” Now the fresher approach is: “what exactly do our customers need and how can we fulfill that need?” The ultimate goal of an effective CRM system is, however, always to maximize profit.

A number of types of CRM have evolved to deal with the complex workflows which exist in all larger companies. Although these have distinct functions, they are often linked together in by one CRM package which allows all functions to be linked together. More and more, this tends to be a web-based CRM solution.

The advantages of web-based CRM is that they are real-time systems and can be accessed and amended simultaneously by different departments in different geographical locations. Some of the key functions typical to an effective CRM system are as follows:

Marketing

Customer data can be used to help target marketing drives, create different material to capture different leads and assign the correct member of the sales team to follow up on that lead. Customer data usually begins with a record of all of the organisations or individuals the business deals with, arranged by category, or role. Customer activity such as emails, orders and invoices can all be linked to this.

Sales

CRM can provide a range of tools to a sales team, including Activity management, Opportunity tracking, Pricing and Forecasting. Sales success can be fully analysed, allowing accurate sales forecasts and individual sales performances can also be tracked.

Order Fulfillment

A CRM system can create, record and effectively manage order fulfillment data such as transaction documents, sales orders, invoices, purchase orders and credit notes.

Customer Support

CRM can improve the quality of service delivered to customers, by managing all their queries, complaints, feedback and testimonials in one place. In this respect, CRM can be extremely helpful in identifying issues with products or services. Often, CRM includes a system to generate ‘cases’ – issues reported by the customer which require an investigation to prevent reoccurrence.

The use of web-based CRM avoids using separate applications for every business function, each with their own bank of electronic records, folders and files.

Instead, there are brought together, joining up data from previously disparate areas like sales, marketing, technical support and customer relations, allowing an accurate, consistent view of customers. As such, companies using an effective CRM system could be seen as having a significant competitive edge over rival companies who don’t.

This article was written by Workbooks, leading supplier of web-based CRM software.