The Top 5 Features of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Software
The importance of the customer has been emphasized time and again
, making it important for any business to know the top 5 features of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. In today's mature economy, it is the relationship with the customer that matters most to the success of a business. And
CRM software combines the power for information technology with marketing to improve and maintain business-customer relationship; so as to have maximum customer retention. In general, CRM software provides the following:
1) Sales Force Automation. This involves automating the processes and work that typically is the job of the sales people. The feature enables automating account management, contact management, opportunity management, and sales analysis. This includes both collecting customer data including date, time, value, and item at every point of interaction. This data is used to predict customer behaviour also acts as input for effective campaigns and is vital for
business software.
2) Marketing. These features involve designing and implementing marketing campaign which involves promotion of their products through various channels such as email, internet, telemarketing, social media sites etc. The features include campaign management, lead management, email with trackable links, integration with pay per click sites or search engine etc. The analysis of campaign results and effectiveness is also included.
3) Groupware Integration. The feature offers integration with other systems such as Microsoft exchange, blackberry, and outlook. Considering the popularity of smartphones and importance of social media networking sites, and their use in the mobile phones, this is a great advantage. You also have to be sure when you buy CRM software that it provides integration with all your software and hardware as well as any third party software you may have.
4) Customer Service. You have a much better chance of customer retention if you service your customer better. If they do not have to wait for your service and have problems afterwards. The features in the CRM software enable you to do that. They help with raising the ticket, routing, escalation, customer surveys, and self service portal. The processes being automated, there are lesser chances of glitches and needless waiting on the customer's part.
5) Information Analysis. The features provide report writing and advanced report writing functions. Regular reports are of course necessary for effective campaigning, since you need to know if the campaign is really working and if the customer is responding as needs be. You should also know about customer complaints, and how effectively they are solved etc. All this contributes to better customer relationships.
Customer Relationship Management became necessary when businesses understood that they could no longer ply the market with products of their own choosing with no care for the customer. The role and reduction in cost of customer retention over customer acquisition was understood and thus CRM became important.
CRM software, along with your strategic work force gives you detailed data about your customers making it easy for your team to understand the customer's individual needs and preferences thus making it possible for you to know when a customer is likely to purchase your product and how much they might buy. This also provides you information to revise and improve your products so as to make it better suited to your customers.
Also, this data allows you to do cross selling or up-selling. Like when someone purchases a car, you can also sell them a better car stereo; or encouraging the customer to buy a more expensive and higher category product.
These advantages make these among the top features of CRM software.
The Top 5 Features of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Software
By: Ted Brumby
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