Customer Relationship Management

customer relationship management

Operating a business has its challenges. Everyone wants to make their business more efficient and more profitable. Managing your customer relationships is one of your major priorities. So today in this episode let’s know about the software that helps to dramatically improve your business and boost your profits.The CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It means managing long term relationships with the customer by making them happy and satisfied. Think of CRM as a tool you need to manage business relationships, business practices and business process. It helps to maintain your vendor relationships, internal sales activities and marketing teams. An effective CRM helps you gain insights into your business sales performance so you can adjust your strategies based on trends. A good crm tool will manage your customer interaction by organizing, automating and synchronizing the part of your business.

Who needs CRM?

If you have customers then you need a CRM. Whether you are a small business looking for a place to store information and have it accessible across multiple devices or you are a larger business wanting to manage customer interactions and focus on improving customers satisfaction, you will want a CRM Software. Previously all the details regarding customers like contact details, files, documents etc are stored in excel sheet, emails and other methods. This method is time consuming. So we are now using CRM software for this which helps to automate our every business tasks.

For example, initially a company sells its services to 60 customers. Slowly the customers increases up to 10000 then 10,000 and increases gradually. Now they have to maintain relationships with all the customers and make them happy. Likewise, the company should track every detail regarding customers like whether their query or any questions are addressed or not, whether they are satisfied with their products or not, they are getting services on time or not. So for tracking all the history regarding customers CRM software is very useful.

Why CRM?

CRM in its simplest form is a way to manage Leads. A lead is a person who expressed some interest in your products or services and opportunity is a sale that you are working on. Lets know some of its useful features so that we can know how useful CRM software is.

1) Contact Management
It helps to store the contact information of customers such as names, address, email, phone number, and others.

2) Document Management
It helps to collect, store, upload and share documents in a centralized location making it easier for everyone involved to access the information. So everyone in the business team can access the information easily. Similarly, you can search and retrieve data easily through one place.

3) Email Integration
It helps to integrate with email such as Gmail, Outlook and yahoo etc

4) Quotation/Proposal Management
You can easily create quotations and send to your customers with the help of CRM software. Likewise you can create invoices, proposals and send.

5) Reporting/Analysis
CRM tracks the data of every customer from initial stage to final stage. So you can generate reports and perform analysis on the daily, weekly or monthly basis. You can analyze the progress of business. Similarly based on the past and present trends you can analyze the future trends of our business.

6) Workflow automation
It helps to schedule meeting, appointments discuss proposals and track every record. You can prioritize every task and perform accordingly. You can set up reminders so that we can follow up every meeting and tasks on time. Daily activities can be done efficiently.

So, CRM software gives a clear picture about our customers. We can visualize everything about our customers in one place. You can know the customer’s previous history with you, the status of their orders and any issues they encounter and many more. So if you want to improve relationships with existing customers and acquire new customers faster then you must use CRM software for your business. Thus, CRM Software is a key to your business solution. It gives you the marketing tools that you need to help organize your sales process, and make sure that your customer’s needs are always met.