What Is CRM: Purpose and Benefits

Finding customers for your business isn’t always easy. This is why it’s so important that when you do get customers, you provide a great experience that’ll have them coming back for more. However, managing every aspect of the customer’s relationship while also focusing on getting new leads can become a complex task. 

CRM software is used to gather all the important customer interactions in one centralized location. Having all this information easily accessible in one place can help improve the customer’s experience and satisfaction. Keep reading to discover more about how CRM works and the benefits of using these tools.

What Is CRM Software?

CRM or customer relationship software is basically used to store all of a business’s customer information. The CRM industry is growing fast as more businesses realize the importance of keeping all their customer information in a single place. CRM software can be used for a range of processes related to the customer’s experience. This can include organizing contacts, automating marketing and sales processes, gaining insights into future sales, and much more.

CRM software can also be used to track the behaviors of both new and existing clients as they interact with your website, social media accounts, or email campaigns. The software can then initiate an automated response, such as sending an email that guides the customer through the buying/sales funnel. Alternatively, if you prefer a more personal approach, the software can let the sales team know about the interaction so that they can follow up directly.

CRM use also isn’t limited to only contact management but can affect multiple aspects of your customer relationship strategy. Recent studies have shown that businesses experienced improvements in some aspects after starting to use CRM software.

• 47% improvement in customer retention
• 47% improvement in customer satisfaction
• 45% improvement in sales revenue
• 39% improvement in upselling or cross-selling

What Is the Purpose of Customer Relationship Management?

As your company grows and expands, so does your customer base. Eventually, it becomes difficult to manage all the details of your customers, both current and potential, in a centralized location. This can lead to miscommunication between sales staff or even customers being forgotten or neglected. This is bad for business, as neglected customers very rarely return, and they might leave negative reviews or comments that can impact your reputation.

Often, important conversations with clients are buried in emails, scattered across spreadsheets or even written on post-it notes that get lost. This can lead to inconsistent communication with clients. It looks unprofessional when you follow up with a client only to learn that a colleague has already reached out. Not to mention, this is a time that could be spent reaching out to other customers.

When looking at CRM software, the top requested features include the following:

• Contact management
• Interaction tracking
• Scheduling and reminders
• Pipeline or funnel monitoring
• Sales automation
• A centralized database
• Email marketing
• Customization
• Reports and analytics
• Integration
• Lead generation

Contact Management

CRM software is used to manage your client details in one place. Here you’ll store all the relevant information on the client, from contact details to purchases, carts, wish lists, and more. This information is helpful when you want to reach out to your clients with personalized offers.

Interaction Tracking

Another CRM purpose is interaction tracking. This feature monitors how individuals interact with your website, emails, or social media. For example, the software might notice a customer abandoning their cart. It’ll notify a sales representative who can then reach out to the consumer about the abandonment and offer personal assistance. Alternatively, it can also track the consumers’ likes so that you can target them with relevant ads.

Scheduling and Reminders

Good CRM tools include features to schedule tasks and set reminders. This becomes increasingly important as your business grows and you have multiple clients to deal with. It’s easy to become overwhelmed and forget to reach out to a client or follow up on an order. 

Pipeline or Funnel Monitoring

CRM tools can also monitor your pipeline or sales funnel. It keeps track of where a customer is in the process so that you can reach out where necessary to provide assistance or more information as needed.

Sales Automation

Some CRM tools can be set to automate sales. If your business has a simple sales process, you might not need an extensive sales force to accept new sales. You can automate the process, making it easier for your sales team to manage.

A Centralized Database

The benefit of a centralized database is that everyone has access to the most recent data. This means anyone can immediately connect with an existing or potential client without missing a beat. 

Email Marketing

Email marketing is still one of the most affordable and effective marketing strategies. However, in order for these campaigns to be successful, you need to be able to personalize your emails. Having email marketing tools available right in your CRM gives you a single platform to manage these campaigns with easy access to individual data.

Customization

Businesses often have varying needs. What’s crucial to your business may be irrelevant to another. As such, being able to customize your CRM tools is great for when you need very specific features. 

Reports and Analytics

In order to provide a great customer experience, you need data. Reports and analytics are a great way to get instant insight into your customers and their experiences.

Integration

Connecting your CRM system with others, such as billing platforms or payment processors, is a convenient feature that can improve how you deal with customers. The more systems that are integrated together, the better data and insights you can collect. This can improve your productivity and the overall customer experience.

Lead Generation

Lead generation is an important aspect of any business as it focuses on getting new clients. In order to keep growing, you need to continually generate new leads. CRM software can assist with this by monitoring your website and social media platforms. 

8 Biggest Benefits of CRM

There are numerous benefits of CRM for businesses. The customer experience is a crucial aspect to consider for any business, and having tools to help you monitor this information is essential. If you’re still on the fence regarding the use of customer relationship management tools, here are a few of the benefits you can expect. 

Centralized Data

Having access to centralized consumer data is one of the biggest benefits of CRM software. CRM software takes all of your client information, both existing and potential, and places them in a single database to which all stakeholders have access to it. 

Some businesses have different departments for sales, marketing, and customer service. As such, different people may have to reach out to customers at various stages in the buying process. Having a central database makes it easy for everyone to have the most up-to-date information when reaching out to clients.

Improve Customer Service

CRM tools not only manage all your contacts but also gather important information like demographics, buying history, previous communications, and more. This means that no matter who’s working with the client, they’ll have all the necessary information right at their fingertips. This provides a better experience which boosts customer satisfaction.

Better Knowledge of Your Customers

In order to build a long-lasting relationship with customers, businesses need to collect as much information about their clients as possible. CRM software allows you to capture information on your clients in one location to give you a holistic overview of the client. 

Information that can be captured by CRM software includes:

• Full name and surname
• Email address
• Telephone number
• Website
• Social media accounts
• Job title 
• Relationship to other contacts in your database
• Language
• Preferences
• Birthday

Having access to this information means you can personalize communication with your consumers, which gives a better customer experience.

Increases in Customer Retention Rates

Gaining new customers is more difficult and expensive than retaining old customers. As such, retaining your previous customers is essential for the success of your business. The best way to keep your customers is by building a relationship and providing a great experience. CRM helps with this process in a few ways. 

For one, it keeps information together so that when a problem arises, anyone dealing with the client will know everything they need to in order to deal with it swiftly. Customers appreciate businesses that are eager to help resolve any issues, and CRM makes this process more efficient. 

Increased Sales

CRM tools can help you streamline the sales process in order to make it more efficient. With the tools, you can build your sales funnel, automate certain sales tasks, and monitor all sales data in one program. This increases sales and productivity by establishing a step-by-step sales process. 

Also, CRM tools collect all interactions from your website or social media platforms. These tools will then collect information from these sales leads in order to target them with personalized marketing campaigns. 

The team at Zoho, a leading CRM provider, claims that the use of these tools improves lead conversion rates by 300%, revenue per sale increased by 41%, and marketing and sales expenses dropped by 23%.   

Better Customer Segmentation

CRM programs keep all customer data in one location. They’re also one of the best tools to segment your audience to make communication much easier. With CRM, you can collect a lot of clients’ information, and then segment the data according to your needs. You can group together new and existing clients, or perhaps clients who abandoned their carts, even clients who spent above a certain amount on your products. These segmented lists can be used in sales and marketing to provide a personalized campaign created specifically for that group. Personalized marketing campaigns are much more successful than vague or broad approaches.

Automate Repetitive Tasks

CRM tools are able to take over repetitive, time-consuming tasks to free up your sales, marketing, and service teams. You can set up the tools to automatically send an email when a potential client abandons their cart. Or you can automate the assigning of support tickets to specific employees. You’re also able to automate which sales reps are assigned to new prospects. By automating these repetitive tasks, you not only ensure that the customers are tended to, but your employees will also be able to focus on providing the best experience possible.

Detailed Analytics

Having data about your client is all well and good, but it’s useless if you can’t draw conclusions from it. CRM software includes analytical capabilities to help you understand and draw relevant conclusions from your information. For example, metrics such as bounce rates, click-through rates, and demographic information are useful for monitoring the success of your campaigns. This will help you make improvements where necessary.

Final Thoughts

The benefits of CRM software for businesses cannot be ignored. If you’re looking for a way to streamline your customer management process and improve customer relations, then this software is essential. This becomes even more true as your business grows and you start dealing with more clients.
If you’re interested in CRM software but not quite sure if you’re ready to take the plunge, why not try the InboxCRM extension from Chrome? This free extension integrates directly with Gmail and provides basic CRM functionality straight from inside the email client.