At its core, customer relationship management (CRM) is all of the activities, strategies and technologies that companies use to manage their interactions with their current and potential customers. A saying frequently heard and said in many businesses is "customer is king."
CRM helps businesses build a relationship with their customers that, in turn, creates loyalty and customer retention. Since customer loyalty and revenue are both qualities that affect a company's revenue, CRM is a management strategy that results in increased profits for a business. At its core, a CRM tool creates a simple user interface for a collection of data that helps businesses recognize and communicate with customers in a scalable way.
Leslie Ye, editor at Hubspot’s Sales Blog, describes a CRM in the following way: “Beyond contact info, CRMs log reps’ touchpoints with their prospects, including emails, phone calls, voicemails, and in-person meetings. Some CRMs offer the ability to track deal stages and reasons for closed-lost and closed-won deals.”
At UE.co, we advise companies to make CRM a part of their strategy before the number of clients makes a CRM platform absolutely necessary. Small businesses and even freelancers can benefit from CRM processes as well. After all, who doesn't want to increase their customer retention and, as a result, their profits? Some of the major ways in which CRM accomplishes this goal are listed below.
• Learning. CRM helps businesses learn about their customers, including who they are and why they purchase your products, as well as trends in customers' purchasing histories. This allows businesses to better anticipate their customers' needs and, as a result, fulfill them. Effectively using customer relationship management can also provide a strategic advantage. Well organized customer data helps companies select the correct recipients for promotions and new products.
• Organization. CRM allows businesses to become more efficient by organizing and automating certain aspects of the business. From sales processes to marketing campaigns and business analytics as well as customer data, CRM automates and streamlines these processes for businesses. This allows the businesses to organize these processes into simpler, easier to understand data.
• Optimization. Finally, CRM software allows businesses to optimize their customer interactions. By simplifying and streamlining many of the more complex customer interaction processes, CRM increases customer satisfaction.