What are the benefits of CRM solutions?

A customer relationship management program is a type of software that helps businesses manage, track and organise their relationships with customers

CREDIT: This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on Business News Daily

A customer relationship management (CRM) can help you store customer data such as user behaviour, how long a customer has been with your business, purchase records and notes on sales interactions, all of which you can use to optimise your sales and marketing processes and improve customer service across your organisation.

A CRM solution can be used in various ways and provide numerous benefits to your business – here are 11 key benefits a CRM could provide.

Better customer service

Modern CRM software has many functions, but the software was created to improve business-customer relationships, and that’s still its main benefit. A CRM manages all of your contacts and gathers important customer information – like demographics, purchase records and previous messages across all channels – and makes it easily accessible to anyone in your company who needs it. This ensures that your employees have all they need to know about the customer at their fingertips and can provide a better customer experience, which tends to boost customer satisfaction.

Increased sales

A CRM tool can help you streamline your sales processes, build a sales pipeline, automate key tasks and analyse all of your sales data in one centralised place, potentially increasing sales and productivity. A CRM helps you establish a step-by-step sales process that your employees can rely on every time and that you can easily tweak as issues arise.

Improved customer retention

Once you’ve procured and converted leads, it’s vital that you put in the work to retain them as customers and promote customer loyalty. High customer turnover can have many negative effects for your business, like diminished revenue or disrupted cash flow, so use your CRM, and the information it provides about your customers, to encourage repeat business. The CRM will provide sentiment analysis, automated ticketing, customer support automation and user-behaviour tracking to help you determine problems and quickly address them with your customers.

Detailed analytics

It’s one thing to have plenty of data about your customers, but you need to know what it means and how to use it. CRM software, typically, has built-in analytic capabilities to contextualise data, breaking it down into actionable items and easily understood metrics such as click-through rates, bounce rates and demographic information which will enable you to judge the success of a marketing campaign and optimise accordingly.  

Higher productivity and efficiency

CRM software uses marketing automation technology, which expedites menial tasks like drip campaigns and frees up your employees’ time to focus on work only humans can handle, such as creating content. It can also ensure that no tasks slip through the cracks (for example, that all important emails are always sent to the right people). Additionally, a CRM can show you a dashboard of how your business processes are working and where your workflows could improve.

A centralised database of information

Another thing CRM software does really well is providing a centralised database with all information on your customers, making it easily accessible to anyone in your company who needs it – your sales representatives can easily see what products a certain customer is interested in, for example. If the customer has previously interacted with the company, the CRM will include records of that interaction which can inform future marketing efforts and sales pitches, saving your employees the time of digging through old files and records – and it makes for a better and more productive experience for the customer.

Managed communications with prospective leads

Lead nurturing can be an arduous and complicated process, with many steps and opportunities to communicate. A CRM automatically manages the process, sending your employees alerts when they should reach out to the prospect and tracking every interaction, from emails to ‘phone calls.

Improved customer segmentation

A list of hundreds of contacts can be unwieldy and overwhelming. A CRM will automatically segment your contact lists based on your criteria, making it easy to find the ones you want to contact at any given time. You can sort contacts by location, gender, age, buyer stage and more.

Automated sales reports

Your team can easily collect and organise data about prospective and current customers using the CRM software’s dashboard and reporting features, which allow employees to automate and manage their pipelines and processes. The CRM can also help your team members evaluate their performance, track their quotas and goals, and check progress on each of their projects at a glance.

More accurate sales forecasting

With any business operation you need to be able to review your past performance and strategically plan for the future. Using the automated sales reports in CRM software, you can identify key trends and get an idea of what to expect from your future sales cycle performance, while adjusting your goals and metrics to suit those projections.

Streamlined internal communications

Aside from facilitating communication between your business and your customers, a CRM can make it easier for your employees to communicate with each other. A CRM makes it easy to see how other employees are speaking with a potential customer, which helps your team maintain a unified brand voice. It also allows team members to send each other notes or alerts, tag each other on projects, and send messages and emails, all within one system.