Small Business Resource

CRM stands for customer relationship management. It is a holistic way of looking at customers and is enabled by specific CRM software, which allows data, gathered in different parts of the organisation to be linked up and viewed as a whole. CRM software started to become available during the late 1990s and CRM projects are commonly driven by the marketing department, working closely with IT for implementation and maintenance.

A CRM system allows an organisation to track all customer activity starting from the initial sales process. Sales and Marketing departments are able to track new leads, identify and target dormant customers and use data mining to segment customers for targeted marketing programs and campaigns. A CRM solution additionally enables all marketing activities to be linked to a customer record, providing full insight into a person’s history and actions. Businesses are able to see how often and in which ways they are targeting customers, as well as being able to accurately measure campaign success and which campaigns and methods generate the most leads.

Leads can be assigned to the relevant sales rep for follow up, and further, the progress of the lead can be tracked. Follow up calls and reminders can then be scheduled, helping to provide the tools to enable the timely follow up of leads.

Customer service teams can also benefit from using a CRM solution. CRM provides an entire history of a customer in one easy accessible system, helping customer service teams to deal with customers more effectively and efficiently. All customer transactions are linked to the customer, enabling organisations to identify not only their most satisfied customers, but also the most profitable.

Once the most profitable customers have been identified, organisations can use this information to their advantage by setting up incentive schemes to reward loyalty and to encourage their best customers to spend more. Profiling customers in this way allows organisations to identify common features amongst their ‘best’ customers and use this information as a way of attracting new business.

Analytics is a major part of any CRM system and is one of the reasons why marketing usually takes charge of CRM. The software allows them to examine the data in a number of different ways. For instance, customers can be segmented on total spend, frequency of spend, on product selection and response to marketing campaigns amongst others.

CRM software really is a powerful tool and by segmenting and using their data successfully, CRM allows an organisation to manage their relationship with customers more effectively, attract more business, manage the sales process and increase business from existing customers.

Author Byline:

This article was written by Workbooks, leading supplier of web-based CRM.

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