Customer Relationship Management

Defining Consumer Relationship Management

How do companies use a CRM, and what can it do for them? At a basic level, companies use CRMs to keep track of interactions with customers. A CRM can provide an overview of sales and marketing efforts, which helps inform strategic decisions around prospecting. Many companies use CRMs to maintain existing relationships as well as find and retain new customers. A CRM can help companies sell more products and services by building strong relationships with customers.

There are some essential components that every CRM should include. Most customer relationship management systems include everything a company needs for building strong relationships with its customers. These elements include contact information, communications, purchase history, and lead management. CRMs typically offer analysis techniques so that teams may pull reports and compare goals to results.

Contact Management

The contact management portion has up-to-date information about the customer. This includes the client’s contact information as well as any relevant communications like service calls. A CRM can track all kinds of client data, depending on what is important to the company. For instance, this client data could include: client history, current client preferences, client social media presence, past interactions with a client, client infrastructure details, past sales interactions, and more. Lead management provides the company with a way to track individual customers as they move through the sales pipeline, all the way from prospect to up-selling. Forecasting is another powerful tool available in most CRMs. Managers use this mechanism to help motivate their sales teams.

Ability to Communicate

On the back end, customer relationship management relies on a team’s ability to communicate seamlessly. As a result, many CRMs include instant messaging between employees, file storage, and email and calendar integration. It’s much easier to manage customer relationships if both client-facing and internal communications can happen on the same platform. Synced across a team, and with up to date calendars and contact lists, a robust CRM can have a powerful impact on productivity.

Finally, some CRMs offer segmentation with customized dashboards for different teams. Organizing customer data is one task, but a great CRM must also offer an intuitive and legible presentation of that data. Sales and marketing teams can benefit from segmentation and visually-pleasing data dashboards.