Why is Customer Relationship Management so Critical?

Updated on :October 16, 2023
By :Izabela Rokita

Relationships with customers are one of the most crucial aspects of business nowadays. If you want to run a successful company, you have to take care of your clients extraordinarily. It is indispensable for your business to find the best way to do that. The goal is to build a loyal relationship with customers and maintain it as long as possible. 

Apple is an excellent example of a company that mastered the CRM in their business. The company has been using Customer Relationship Management in its customer service departments for nearly a decade, and this has ranged from sending a series of emails to customers who've used their in-store services to focus upon assessing the feelings of the customers when they are communicating with the Apple staff. The purpose of using CRM in its retail base is to encourage a long-term relationship between Apple and its clients. By using CRM so well, they have effectively produced a lifestyle experience rather than simply a purchase. And this allows them to set a pretty high price for their products, as they resemble a given standard of living that most of the people pursue.

The good news is that currently on the market, we have a lot of CRM tools that significantly can help achieve that similar to Apple's success. Let's take a closer look at the concept of Customer Relationship Management!

What is the meaning of CRM?

CRM means Customer Relationship Management, and it stands for a technical system that aims to perform and control customer relationship management. CRM systems are powerful tools while using them rightly. CRM systems can assist businesses in accomplishing a massive amount of work but businesses need to personalize them according to the current and potential customers' needs. 

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How does it work? CRM captures, collects, segments, and stores customer data. Only authorized team members have access to it. The data allows businesses to analyze and predict customers' behavior, needs, and motivation. Thanks to the CRM generated database, companies can run an effective digital marketing and sales strategy.

Who should implement a CRM system? Well, basically, every company that aims to grow, improve services, and efficiently manage the internal processes should deploy this value-proposition. The sooner you'll start to use it, the better. Using the CRM from the very beginning of business will let you build a reliable database of customers, become familiar with their needs, and enable effective communication.

Customer Relationship Management systems are recognized as powerful tools because they combine a lot of useful and innovative features. Many of them are all-in-one integrated tools. Through CRM, we can connect with clients, schedule meetings, generate leads, run marketing campaigns, organizing teams, and many more. But that's not all; thanks to integrations with external online tools, we can create email campaigns, correspond and call with customers, run social media, or even use live chats.

There are plenty of CRM systems available in the market right now. Some of the most well-known are: HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho CRM, Freshsales, Funnel CRM or Insightly. You can choose from popular ones or develop your own custom solution by consulting with a software company.

Speaking of custom: you don’t need to build a separate application but implement CRM features in your already existing OR planned to be built software. Customization allows businesses to include features that help them visualize customers' data in charts and easily understandable graphs that can be used for making business decisions.

What are the benefits of customer relationship management?

Functional CRM can take your company to the next business level. Keep in mind that the implementation may take some time because it is necessary to familiarize yourself with the tool. Nevertheless, it is definitely worth making this effort - despite your company size. Small, medium, and large enterprises - they all can leverage Customer Relationship Management in their business!

#1 Better customer service

Improvement of customer service is the main goal of CRM systems. Thanks to comprehensive customer data presented in a system, we can analyze customers' behavior, needs, trends, and habits. This knowledge is essential nowadays. When you understand your clients, it is much easier to provide an attractive offer and convince them to utilize it. Through CRM, we can contact our clients in real-time. The quicker you'll contact the lead, the better. Engagement gives customers a positive experience and builds a solid relationship. Finally, it creates an image of a reliable expert. 

The second important thing is that CRM provides a wide overview of order history and client details. Knowing what products particular customers like to order, what time they prefer to buy will allow you to offer the right items at the right moment to the right people.

#2 Easier lead generation

CRM systems are designed to assist sales teams and help them to obtain leads quicker and easier. Usually, sales conversion and lead generation take a bunch of time. Using a CRM tool will give you a lot of possibilities to improve and speed up this process. Most of the systems provide some useful marketing and sales features like creating engaging and graphical customer journeys, automation of activities, cross-sale, or up-sale.

Interactions between a customer and your website are necessary to make the first contact that can transform into the lead and final deal. With proper CRM, you'll define the client persona and discover the behavior insight. No doubt, thanks to CRM software, you can simplify the most critical sales processes in your company.

#3 Increasing team productivity

The right CRM system will help you to find loopholes in your business structure. As a company, you often don't control every little thing that happens in your company - and that's alright; you shouldn't be forced to do that! Let the technology do that for you. But let's state one thing clear - you shouldn't leverage CRM to micromanage your employees. That's frustrating for everyone, and as studies show - it simply doesn’t work.

For instance, a better choice would be to implement a CRM in your company to:

  • Answer the email that was sent to your ecommerce support mailbox
  • Process the whole complaint process in your B2B business. 
  • Analyze how long it will take to serve people in your restaurant?

Without CRM, all of these precious data are just missing your attention. Do you have a high rotation in your company? Maybe it's because people are overloaded with their work to the point they don't want to work for you anymore. Or the brightest and hardest working employees don't feel appreciated enough, as you overlook their achievements, keeping the eyes on the bigger picture. Customer Relationship Management is not only about indulging your clients but your employees as well. Don't take them for granted, or you might get unpleasantly surprised one day.

#4 Better revenue and cost control

Keeping the hand on the pulse with your company spending and revenue is one of the company owner's biggest responsibilities. Yet it’s hard when so many things in your company fight for your attention. Do you store your company's financial data in dozens of Excel spreadsheets? Don’t worry - you are not alone if you do. But imagine having one dedicated application, when you can store all of these needed data, analyze them, sort them, etc. - like Google Analytics does for websites, but for your company.

CRM helps you to analyze your marketing efforts ROI better, because sometimes - even the biggest ones assess this wrong. Lots of people think that their CRM model based on coupons and dedicated mobile applications might cost more than the revenue it actually brings. When it comes to details, we probably won't know the whole truth, but the right data analysis with the help of CRM systems helps to avoid some part of the unnecessary expenses. 

Why is CRM important in today's business environment?

Everyone wants to run a data-driven business nowadays. After decades of being dependent on luck or the current market situation, now, we can finally help our business succeed through… the math! Numbers don't lie; numbers are not subjective, and they can be cruel, but they will never lie to you. That's why customer relationship management systems are so important, because thanks to it, you can measure how many clients you really have. What kind of products do they like? What changes make them like you more, and which scares them away? Based on all of the data gathered from them, you can do one extremely important thing much better: prognosis your company growth. 

No more guesswork, no more hunches or "now or never" approaches. From now on, every decision you'll make about opening another branch, hiring extra employees, or, unfortunately, closing/firing ones can be backed by hard data. As the COVID-19 pandemic harshly showed us, without it, your business future will be much more unstable. Especially as the competition doesn't waste their time - CRM software size is now expected to reach more than $40.2 billion in revenues by 2023. One of the key factors behind the growth of CRM is accessibility. Companies want access to customer data in real-time, with mobile and cloud solutions leading the way.

When it comes to your organization size - the CRM that would be most suitable for your will just differ regarding its size, data analysis advancement, or data collection. But if you think that Customer Relationship Management is reserved for huge corporations only - you're wrong. This is something that more and more startups use, so the enterprise size is not an excuse here.

Conclusion

Customer Relationship Management systems are important for your company. In plain words, the difference is simple: being highly informed about your client's behaviors vs. wandering like a child in the fog. And you simply don’t have the time and money to do the second thing.

If you want to invest in CRM solutions, you can get more information from the buyer’s guide for CRM software. You can also check the pricings of the top CRM software solutions here. If you have budget constraints, utilize the services of any free and open source crm software.

 

Izabela Rokita
Izabela Rokita

Izabela Rokita author bio: Iza is a data-driven Content Marketing Specialist with a strong eye for details. She works at Railwaymen, a Cracow Poland based software house, building web & mobile apps for industries like construction, education, social, food tech, and more.

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