Online CRM Marketing Tips

What a Good CRM System can do for Your Company

At the heart of any good business and its philosophy should be the customer and their needs. Customers however can be expensive and difficult to find, please and retain. Any information therefore that can have a positive impact on these things is important, needs to be collected, recorded, and needs to be an instantly available source of reference company-wide.

What is a CRM System?

A ‘Customer Relationship Management’ System in today’s business environment and in the context of this article can be viewed as software that an organisation can purchase to run on / as their own IT infrastructure. Its scope today is not just for monitoring and recording communications / interactions with customers or prospects, but rather as a complex but hopefully intuitive system which can synchronise and organise a wide variety of functions including Marketing, Sales, and Support and communications within the company and with the customers. Ultimately the adoption and proficient use of all functions of a good CRM system by all relevant members of staff in an organisation reduces costs, increases profitability, increases customer loyalty and brings about a better relationship and a greater understanding between and by both the company and the customer.

The Relationship

Some important marketing concepts and models underpin the need for a CRM in businesses of all sizes e.g. relationship marketing, the ‘lifetime value of the customer’, and moving customers up a ‘ladder of loyalty. Some challenges to organisations achieving an effective system with these ideas at their heart include:

Not having an effective way of grasping potential sales opportunities.
Poor usability, poor functionality, over complication, limited scope or simple inadequacy of an existing software system or database.
Fragmentation of use of all the functions in the existing or new CRM, and / or a CRM that is not centralised and / or not shared and used across the whole organisation.

Used By the Organisation and the Customer

New CRM software systems aren’t just for use by staff members / employees of the organisation providing the service, but also by clients who can access specified areas of the CRM. This not only saves time, and costs of the company providing the CRM but also helps to make the client feel more like a partner in the business, thus contributing positively to the relationship building. A good CRM software system will be able to keep the balance between security and ease of use by all relevant parties.

What are the Main Benefits of Buying / Using a CRM Software System?

Being able collect, store, share and distribute information across the whole organisation can contribute to informed decisions by employees, more positive perceptions of the organisation by customers. The result of this could be increased loyalty, a better reputation, and better ‘word-of-mouth’ from the new ‘social customer’. This in turn could lead to increased new and repeat business. There are actually relationships happening with customers on a number of levels throughout most organisations and not only can a CRM software system identify and make these visible to all members of an organisation, but they can also bring about the understanding that this multi-level relationship exists within the organisation where it may not have been understood widely before.
Greater efficiency of customer-facing staff means that they can concentrate on generating leads, closing sales, making contact with more customers.
A more comprehensive view of individual customer needs and requirements can lead to a better identification of their needs. This in turn can be used to improve and target communications, and create new, more attractive products, service and offerings thus bringing more new and repeat business.
Better lead tracking, and better contact management means that valuable opportunities aren’t lost, thus leading to more sales and a lower cost of sales.
Better customer satisfaction, better customer service, better customer retention comes from better anticipation of their needs and greater awareness of when contact with them is expected and is timely. A good CRM can help with this.
Cross-selling, up-selling, and upgrading can be facilitated by the CRM through increased knowledge of the customer’s requirements, and the ability to communicate these potential opportunities in an organised way to the correct member of the sales team. This means more loyalty, a stronger relationship, and maximising of the lifetime value of the customer.
Identification of the most profitable customers is also made easier by a good CRM.
Time can be saved by having all the information available in one place. This time could then be spent / provide benefits by allowing staff the time and space to focus on and think about how to better develop the relationship with more customers and generate more opportunities and sales.
An organisation can work better as a team with a better company-wide understanding of customer relationships, a better and more organised ways to communicate, store and use information. This can lead to a much higher quality service for the customer which in turn could increase loyalty and sales.

A good modern CRM therefore with a high quality contact management system at its core, an intuitive design and ease of use can bring lower costs, more sales, greater profitability, and increased customer loyalty. The first real step to ensuring that better decisions are made by people within your organisation at all levels is the decision to adopt a new CRM software system.