Customer Relationship Management (CRM) entails understanding the customer. Segmentation, measurement and listening skills are the most important elements of a marketing strategy in order to scale your customers, and your company, in the long term.
How important is CRM software?
When we talk about CRM, we talk about software or tools that support the design of a customer journey.
These types of CRM systems give you a clear overview of your customers. In the best case, you will have access to a decentralized dashboard that shows you detailed information about your customers and previous communications. You will find information regarding the status of a customer order, an outstanding support request or different contact requests. You get the information when clients get in contact via several communication services like newsletters, social media or messengers.
Your marketing team can use CRM solutions to manage entire campaigns and lead journeys with a data-driven approach, whilst better understanding the pipeline of incoming purchases or leads. This also makes forecasting easier and more accurate. Through Customer Relationship Management your company can trace the path from the first contact through to the final product sale. This is important to optimize these processes in the long term.
Although CRM systems are traditionally used as sales and marketing tools, customer service and support is a growing segment in CRM and a crucial component in managing a holistic customer relationship.
Today customers can address a problem via one channel (e.g. Twitter) and then easily switch from one platform to another contact via email or telephone. With a uniform CRM solution, you can manage these inquiries across different channels, ensuring a seamless service for your customers.
The integration of a Customer Relationship Management solution
This provides sales, service and marketing departments with a holistic customer overview, allowing all activities to run simultaneously with no confusion. The ability to connect these three functions, and the teams that perform those functions, on one platform is invaluable in delivering relevant and connected experiences.
CRM pursues a far greater goal than the efficiency scaling of end customer relationships. CRM tools can now be used to manage customer relationships across the entire customer lifecycle.
Some of the greatest productivity gains come from the fact that CRM is no longer used as a pure sales and marketing tool, but is integrated throughout the entire company – from finance to customer service to supply chain management; highlighting that customer needs are in the foreground of any business process and innovation cycles.
