CRM – Customer Relationship Management
CRM is the abbreviation for customer relationship management.
Customer relationship management (CRM) entails all aspects of interaction that a company has with its customers, whether it is sales or service-related. While the phrase customer relationship management is most commonly used to describe a business-customer relationship (B2C), CRM systems are also used to manage business to business to business (B2B) relationships. Information tracked in a CRM system includes contacts, clients, contract wins and sales leads and more.
How CRM is Used Today
CRM solutions provides the business data to help you provide services or products that your customers want, provide better customer service, cross-sell and up-sell more effectively, close deals, retain current customers and to better understand who your customers are. Organizations frequently look for ways to personalize online experiences (a process also referred to as mass customization) through tools such as help-desk software, email organizers and different types of enterprise applications.
CRM Usability
CRM software has typically been considered difficult to use. As an enterprise application, stability, scalability and security has been the primary focal points of CRM solutions. Usability, according to this Enterprise Apps Today article, was not a key part of CRM which often resulted in failed software projects, largely attributed to undue complexity. With increased adoption of CRM applications, however, today’s CRM software vendors make usability a central part of their products. To improve usability many vendors today focus on usability issues to make CRM workflow as simple and intuitive as possible, to offer navigation that can be performed in three clicks or less and to ensure CRM software is designed to suit the needs of sales teams.
The CRM Strategy
Customer relationship management is often thought of as a business strategy that enables businesses to improve in a number of areas. The CRM strategy allows you to to following:
- Understand the customer
- Retain customers through better customer experience
- Attract new customers
- Win new clients and contracts
- Increase profitably
- Decrease customer management costs
The Impact of Technology on CRM
Technology and the Internet have changed the way companies approach customer relationship strategies. Advances in technology have changed consumer buying behavior, and today there are many ways for companies to communicate with customers and to collect data about them. With each new advance in technology — especially the proliferation of self-service channels like the Web and smartphones — customer relationships are being managed electronically.
Many aspects of customer relationship management rely heavily on technology; however, the strategies and processes of a good CRM system will collect, manage and link information about the customer with the goal of letting you market and sell services effectively.
The Benefits of CRM
The biggest benefit most businesses realize when moving to a CRM system comes directly from having all your business data stored and accessed from a single location. Before CRM systems, customer data was spread out over office productivity suite documents, email systems, mobile phone data and even paper note cards and Rolodex entries. Storing all the data from all departments (e.g., sales, marketing, customer service and HR) in a central location gives management and employees immediate access to the most recent data when they need it. Departments can collaborate with ease, and CRM systems help organization to develop efficient automated processes to improve business processes.
Other benefits include a 360-degree view of all customer information, knowledge of what customers and the general market want, and integration with your existing applications to consolidate all business information.
social CRM
Social CRM (customer relationship management) is a phrase used to describe the addition of a social element in traditional CRM processes. Social CRM builds upon CRM by leveraging a social element that enables a business to connect customer conversations and relationships from social networking sites in to the CRM process. Social CRM may also be called CRM 2.0 or abbreviated as SCRM (social customer relationship management).
inbound CRM
Inbound CRM (customer relationship management) is the term used to describe customer experience when the customer initiates the contact with the business. The contact can be initiated through any means of communication, including an inbound call center or via the business’ online website. Often, inbound CRM is a part of the sales or customer support relationship.
small business CRM – customer relationship management
In CRM (customer relationship management) terminology, the phrase small business CRM is used to describe a lightweight CRM application that is designed to meet the needs of a small business.
Customer relationship management solutions provide you with the customer business data to help you provide services or products that your customers want, provide better customer service, cross-sell and up sell more effectively, close deals, retain current customers and understand who the customer is.
While the phrase customer relationship management is most commonly used to describe a business-customer relationship, CRM systems are used in the same way to manage business contacts, clients, contract wins and sales leads.
The Difference Between Enterprise and Small Business CRM
Typically, CRM applications and software are considered enterprise applications — that is an application designed for larger enterprises that would require a dedicated team to develop custom CRM modules, another team to analyze the resulting data and reports, plus an IT staff to handle costly upgrades and deployment.
Small business CRM applications differ from enterprise CRM in a number of ways including the amount of data handled by the system, IT requirements, pricing, and the tools and features of the CRM application itself.
CRM dashboard
Dashboard is a term that is widely used to describe an application interface that provides users with quick access to information or common tasks. In CRM (customer relationship management) the dashboard is used to monitor business performance and CRM data and reports are often shown in the dashboard to provide a quick and easy overview of current business performance using charts, graphs, and maps.
A CRM dashboard is designed to let users perform some specific actions and tasks with a single mouse-click from this interface. For example, a click from the CRM dashboard could provide you with a detailed report on any lead follow-ups that are scheduled for today.
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CRM – Customer Relationship Management
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