subject: Crm Is The Core Of Your Customer Strategies [print this page] Customer relationship management is an organized business approach that sets requirements and procedures for how a company deals with current and potential clients. It is at the core of any company that wishes to embrace a customer driven philosophy. Underlying the business direction is the technology which drives the strategy using CRM software. An effective CRM implementation works with customer data. Throughout your business you will have the right information, being used by the right people at the right time. In effect CRM can be the driver of change, the basis for facilitating business growth and making you stand out from your competition.
Whilst each company objectives may differ, fundamentally, CRM is a strategy to enhance customer satisfaction, raise revenue and profit and increase the overall performance of staff when dealing with customers. Exceptional customer service is not just left to a sales team or a help desk, but demands to be integrated across all customer activity within your organisation.
Most companies implement CRM to assist sales, marketing and customer service. Each of these departments is closely aligned around a customer and it is logical that information about a customer is shared between them. When developing the business requirements for managing your customers, having input from all three of these departments is critical. Spending the time to clearly define the goals, expected results and the processes will help you determine the solution that best meets your needs.
Some of the essential characteristics of a customer relationship management solution would be to:
- Keep all client account information in a single repository and to track any communication with each client.
- Maintain sales opportunities, match them to sales forecasts and track them against your sales process.
- Maintain product and pricing lists together with automated discounts specific to distinct clients.
- Integrate into Microsoft Office products and quickly generate any communication including general correspondence, quotes, orders and invoices.
- Generate and maintain lists to manage marketing campaigns.
- Retain all your marketing material in a central location and make it easily accessible.
- Hold a history of what marketing material has been sent to each customer account and to individuals within that account.
- Be able to send focused correspondence to individuals specific to their work roles and interests.
- Retain a history of customer service calls and be able to use this to track progress and help in resolving other customer concerns.
- Share all this information across each of sales, marketing and customer service and have an integrated approach to manage all interactions with each customer.
- Provide you with an extensive level of business intelligence through regular reports as well as real time dashboards.
CRM is no longer just available to the larger enterprises, those that have the money to invest. CRM software products such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM give you the choice of implementing CRM on-premises or on-demand. On-premises allows you to integrate applications including Microsoft Office products as well as accounting, warehousing and inventory applications among many others. On-demand CRM provides an enterprise level system to smaller companies through a hosted CRM solution. In itself, this can be a quick start into a CRM initiative that still allows you to migrate to an on-premises solution as you grow.
An effective customer relationship management solution is not just software. The information technology component is the last decision after having defined your business strategies and created the processes by which your people will interact with your customers
