What are the benefits of customer relationship management?

It is not that a CRM does it better than you, but that it puts your tools all in one place and presents a uniform, thought out system to manage sales and after sales.
Typically a CRM will ask your potential customers for the information you need to collect to communicate and store their purchase history.

Added modules let you publish a newsletter, or add an affiliate program.

Sites built in a CRM can be designed to be search engine and user friendly, track inventory, setup multiple levels of customers and pricing, keep communications all in one place for both you and the client logging into their account, and generally ease the collection of data.

Without a web based CRM customers and clients have to give you their data each time they order. With a CRM this is automated.

Hope this helps.
Reg

Hi Tim,
Here are fifteen high-level, day to day benefits of customer relationship management and modern CRM software.

1. Sales, service and support staff deal more effectively with customers because they have instant access to a complete view of all customer interactions.
2. Management improves as the CRM system makes it quick and easy to produce accurate key reports.
3. Sales and marketing start winning more business through better lead tracking and management.
4. Business processes become more proficient as data in the CRM system is inherently well organised.
5. More customers return for repeat business because staff deal with their queries quickly and efficiently.
6. Sales bring in more revenue by keeping a solid grasp on potential sales opportunities.
7. Because the modern CRM software is powerful, fast, user-friendly and reliable, staff throughout the company waste far less time.
8. Purchasing improves and costs reduce because of better forecasting and scheduling.
9. Efficiency and cash flow increase as better pipeline management accurately predicts manufacturing and production requirements.
10. Sales teams are developed more effectively through comprehensive analysis of conversion ratios from lead to opportunity to win or lose.
11. Marketing run far more successful and cost-effective marketing campaigns through better targeting.
12. A greater understanding of customers develops through a single, comprehensive view of all customer touch points and information.
13. Marketing campaigns bring in higher quality leads through better prospecting, market intelligence and profiling.
14. A closer team environment develops as staff share information and gain a better understanding of other areas of the company.
15. Management decision making becomes more informed thanks to an in-depth understanding of the way the business functions.

Please note I’ve taken these tips from the CRM knowledge base on my company website http://www.concentrix.co.uk/software/crm/knowledge-base. Hope they help!

Peter

It comes down to 2 things.

1. Visibility - you probably do not have a single place you can look to see all of the relvant data you need about customers, prospects and pipeline.

2. Accountability - how can you tell if people are living up to their obligations, taking care of customers, moving prospects along the sales path?

A CRM system SHOULD provide that. Remember though - it's just a container. Shifting your company's culture from "flying below the radar" to a culture of accountability takes a serious committment on your part.

I suggest you take Paul up on his offer - I think he can help educate you about the big picture of the world you are thinking of entering - both in terms of the cost of admission, and the benefits to be had.

While there are many "benefits" of CRM, I will focus on a couple of areas that can provide true ROI, a definite benefit. Much of the ROI than can be achieved from implementing CRM comes from two areas; 1) Workflow, and 2) Integration.

Workflow helps automate repeatable tasks, such as scheduling follow up calls to new prospects, reminding users that a product renewal is upcoming for a customer and automatically creating a renewal quote, or escalating a customer support issue that isn't closed in a timely manner. All of these benefits can usually be measured and used to calculate real ROI when CRM is implemented properly.

Integration is the process of automating data movement between CRM and other systems, which is often done manually before a CRM system is put in place. Some examples include automatically entering orders into ERP for processing (instead of re-keying them), auto creation of leads when someone visits your website allowing quicker response to sales inquiries, and customer self-service portals. Once integrated, there are significant, measurable time savings and efficiency improvements gained from integrating to CRM, all of which create ROI.

Michael Sullivan
Quest Business Solutions - Maximizing the benefits of CRM
http://www.questvar.com

Hi

Different companies will have different business objectives, however in all cases CRM will enable these to be met far more easily. It should be said upfront that CRM is a methodology or programme not just a system. The power of pulling all relevant customer data into one place is enhanced by all team members working in a consistent way.

All companies irrespective of size will benefit significantly. Let me pick out some of the main ones:

- All customer facing staff will be much better aware of what their customers are doing and who has said what to whom
- Staff can be proactive rather than reactive
- Immediate knowledge of which products a client takes and more importantly identificantion of which ones they dont take for upsale opportunities
- Improved inter team collaboration
- Ability to check performance of staff (particularly sales), to set, measure and realistically increase targets. Activity taegets as well as financial ones
- Explain how you use CRM to your clients to demonstrate/ confirm how well you will look after them. Another USP why they should work with you.
-etc....

Good Luck.

Mike

On its own, CRM will do nothing to shape the funnel and secure closes. Especially as many CRM systems are just glorified contact management systems.

For a CRM system to benefit a company it must be designed around the working processes of a business not be a generic "do everything".

A business must establish how it wants to work, what it needs to achieve, how it intends to monitor activity, and how it wishes to police itself. Every company should have their own sales milestones which need to be controlled to ensure a successful close..

Once these basic factors have been established, then a CRM solution that matches these can be considered. Any implementation must also involve thorough staff training, not just in the functionality of the system, but also in the change management reasons for the implementation. Only once all these have been established succesfully will a discipline be formed and it is this discipline that makes CRM a success.

If any business just installs a CRM system in the hope that it will solve their problems they are doomed to failure regardless of the size of system.

Nigel Park
www.tpsconsulting.co.uk

It is simply maintain the relation with the customers, just like some actions you take or prepare to take towards keeping and enhancing your relations with your friend.

CRM is giving a customer the treatment of the XIX century supported by the technical capabilities of the XX century. It is a philosophy of how to treat and deal with your customers to get the most of them. The success of its application (in the area you would like to apply it -customer service, marketing, sales, etc-) depends on the people in the organization, not the system itself. If the directive or major management is not involved or not willing to convert to this new organizational culture, it will fail, you won't get neither the leads nor the closes. A CRM SW will make it easier for you, it will let you make decisions faster, since all the data will be right on hand, but it can not go alone.

Hi Tim, I would like to answer first your question --What does a CRM system do better than me? I’ll say it can automate tedious or lame tasks no matter how insurmountable the tasks are. And for the question --How does customer relationship management help shape the funnel and secure closes? CRM captures every activity and business information important to decision making. With all the info gathered, your sales team can easily approach your respective customers with confidence. Web CRM www.worketc.com does this for me, and I say the detailed reports it generate make decision making a lot easier.

In my opinion the most important benefits of CRM is sharing information across the organistion through :
* customer management : a unique database of customers and prospect + conctactpersons
* contactmanagement : collective memory of the company
* business follow up of leads following the sales cyclus

The CRM gives a 360 ° view on the customer needed for sales persons using consultative sales.

Combining information comming from the field (input by sales people) with information availabe in internal databases and external sources of information generates Business Intelligence you can use to generate qualified leads

It's all about making the

PROCESS Consistent

and

INFORMATION Available.

The holy grail is the so called "360 degree view of the Customer" - in practice that means

Who in your organisation has touched the Customer recently and why?
If no one has touched them - then why? Do we need to market to them
If no one in your organisation touches them - then why are you tracking them?

CRM helps automate, make visible and answer all of these questions.