Businesses have to be customer-centric and there is absolutely no other option. And being customer centric requires a myriad of aspects to come together and most importantly, these aspects should interconnect in order to form a holistic business model. It is humanly extremely difficult to have a customer-centric model of the nature as described. That’s where a CRM software comes in handy.
A CRM is like a front office dealing with sales, marketing and customer service. It allows data centralisation like none other. CRM offers a data centralisation and inter connection such that the same data can be connected and accessed on different platforms by all the assigned users. Data is usually spread out through different employees on various system and applications as suitable to each of them. This might also result in data loss when a particular employee moves out. CRM happens to be a solution to all this chaos.
Spread out data can be very hard to collect, analyse and report. Data collection itself may end up with a good number of holes and it is a time consuming act. With a slow process, business notice changes in their metrics only at extreme points. For example, if a certain department is running under loss, it will only be clearly visible after a longer time and generally it becomes a hurdle to handle at such points. Data integration is flawlessly accessed in CRM which allows all departments to integrate so that they may work together and inter-act to come up with best business solutions.
Giving a 360 degree view from the customer’s perspective, CRM is modular in nature and the most important module is the contacts module. This is a repository of all contact detail of leads/prospects/customers. Other inclusions in this module can be history of communication, notes for reference and any pending activities. All other modules are co-joined to the contacts module and integration between all the modules is allowed thus.
A summation of all benefits that result from CRM can be termed as automation. The reduction of human interference ensures a process to run without any errors. For example if a lead fills a form on the website, the CRM software is automatically updated with the information and an auto-response mail is sent to the lead. This email can be copied to a sales team member giving him an assigned prompt of follow up. Once the team member responds to this email, it is also stored in the contacts history of communication. All these activities happen without any human interference requirement and therefore ease out things for the better.
Additional business activities such as lead scoring can also be implemented in CRM. Lead scoring can be accomplished by answering simple questions and giving the lead an automatically calculated score. Alerts and prompts can be sent out to different departments/personnel regarding different reminders. Customised dashboards can be implemented in CRM such that all important information is directly visible with comparison facilities.
If you are looking for a customer oriented management base, CRM is your ultimate source!