Focusing on customer retention strategies and increasing sales are the goals that no organization should forget. For this, there is an approach to manage the company’s interaction with its current and potential customers. The process is customer relationship management (CRM).
Customer relationship management helps to fulfill customer requirements. Also, CRM improves relationships with the current as well as potential customers. According to the latest market sizing and market share research that Gartner published, customer relationship management is the largest and fastest-growing enterprise software category today.
By understanding customers better with the help of CRM,
- Cross-selling and up-selling opportunities become clearer
- Gives organizations a much better chance to win new business from existing customers.
IMPORTANCE OF CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
With CRM, businesses can:
- store customer and prospect data,
- track customer interactions, and
- Share this information with colleagues
CRM systems exist to address that issue. Thus, it can transform a business. Also, CRM helps in tracking every phone call, email sent, meeting held, and presentation delivered. Similarly, CRM systems can also be used to add notes, schedule follow-ups, and organize the next steps that need to be taken. Hence, it ensures that opportunities to deals or improve customer accounts, won’t be missed.
TYPES OF CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
Different types of CRM software exist. Most are capable of performing fundamental CRM functions, such as:
- storing the customer data
- tracking the customer
- sharing your customer data.
Some examples of CRM are:
- general use
- inbound lead management (for example, HubSpot CRM)
- sales tracking
- social tracking (for example, Zoho CRM)
- fully integrated system (for example, Freshsales)
Freshsales has all the fundamental features built into its infrastructures for
- sales
- marketing
- support
- analytics
STATISTICS RELATED TO CUSTOMERS RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
| SOURCE | YEAR | DATA |
| Forbes | At the end of 2018 | Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software revenue overtook database management systems. |
| SuperOffice | By 2025 | Customer Relationship Management is expected to reach more than $80 billion in revenues. |
| Forbes | 2018 | Worldwide spending on Customer Relationship Management reached 48.2 billion US dollars. |
| SuperOffice | 2019 | The percentage of businesses using cloud-based CRM increased from 12% to 87%. |
| Forbes | By 2025 | Customer Relationship Management is expected to cross 80 billion US dollars in revenue. |
ADVANTAGES OF CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
- Work becomes easy
CRM manages all the data. Also, it keeps the data up to date. It saves time and energy of the employees. Thus, they can work quickly.
- Better resource management
With all the data of the customers, managers can know what their customers need the most and the least. In this way, there is an optimum use of resources. Hence, the resource management becomes better.
- More efficiency
The use of CRM makes the work efficient. It saves time, energy, and money. Also, it increases the achievement.
- More effective
The work becomes more effective with CRM. It gives the actual data. So, there is almost no chance of errors. Also, the data are updated. Therefore, it provides better results.
- Increased sales revenue
CRM helps to know the customers in a better way. Thus, customer satisfaction increases. Then, more sales increases the revenue.
- Great customer service
With CRM, you can know every detail of your customers. Then, you can work according to their preference. It increases the quality of the service for customers.
- Structured data
CRM provides structured and streamlined data. These data help in better decision making. Also, it improves the actions.
