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Customer
Relationship Management (CRM) is partially about software but mostly
about strategy. A CRM
strategy defines the process of interacting with your customers or
clients in efforts to maximize the relationship for profitability. The
strategy typically involves three important functions in organizations:
marketing, sales and customer service. Marketing:
Today’s businesses scrutinize every dollar spent to generate
business. Gone are the days
of mass mailing or faxing to large lists of contacts.
Targeted, specific marketing is essential to maximizing your
Return On Investment (ROI). Sales:
With centralizing prospect and customer databases and automating
the routine sales tasks, most businesses are able to keep their
salespeople in front of their customers or clients. Additional benefits
include visibility to management and the organization of a centralized
system. From simple tasks
of writing letters to sending emails and delivering proposals, a good
system maintains each customer contact and communication to tell the
whole story allowing fewer salespeople to service more prospects or
customers. Customer
Service:
You’ve invested in marketing and earned customers or clients
through your sales process – now you need to keep them happy.
All customer inquiries should be logged and handled efficiently.
Key clients or customers should have preferential treatment and
issues should be escalated as appropriate. In
short, good customer relationships are at the heart of business success.
There are many technological components to CRM, but thinking about CRM
in primarily technological terms is a mistake. The more useful way to
think about CRM is as a process that will help bring together lots of
pieces of information about customers, sales, marketing effectiveness,
responsiveness and market trends. |
