Customer relationship management (CRM)

CRM

 

What it is an asset for a business? You can hear very different answers depending on the manager you are asking. Consultancy agency would value brains of their workers. IT business will name hot technologies and latest trends, team work, ethic etc. But there is an umbrella which protects them all. Literally, any type of business follows the path of meeting new customers and keep existing ones as happy as possible.

There are many reasons why customers stop being customers: relocation or go to the competitor company. But this is only one third. The rest of loss is because customers feel they were ignored when interacting. The good news is that technology could help with this.

How technology can help

Some things computers do better than people. If we talk about technologies which help in customers relations management (CRM) we have to outline the following system specification:

  1. Let the system register new customers and keep tracking your leads and categorize them to generate your profit on each of them when they are ready to consume your services. Maybe, some of them are not ready now but will be in some time or in other circumstances.
  2. The system must be tracking all interaction of the customers with your company. Obviously, machines perform in this situation better than human. So, your organisation will be able easy to recognize why customer left and you can learn from failures in order to avoid them in the future.
  3. No sales in your organisation. CRM remembers this negative choice. So, the next time you will be prepared to make unbeatable offer to your client.

There is a range of CRMs on the market which you can choose according to your business model and your requirements.

Types of CRM

  • One of the leaders is  Zoho CRM. It does not require installation because all is in the cloud. As a standard feature is an availability of  API. Special features of Zoho is you pay for every registered user(one user – one license). For example, there is one Director controlling reports and one customer relationship manager. So, these are already two licences. A big plus of Zoho is that it has module structure and if you need some specific feature, you can easily add it by changing existing or writing your own module.
  • Salesforce – Could be on the first place because it is a monster. This CRM was a pioneer across all CRMs and probably the very first on the market. If you select this player, you automatically get plenty of benefits as Corporate Chat Mobile apps for all platforms and many more. However, if your business is small and you count every penny, then it could be too many not very necessary features for which you have to pay.

Installable:

  • Base CRM is mainly designed to manage sales force. However, it could also be used for managing projects. It is a mobile application which you have to install.  There are different plans which can suit business of any size. One of the killer features of this particular CRM is VoIP.

Here I have mentioned only few of them which I used before. But there are plenty more. If you need any help in choosing the appropriate CRM for your organisation, or have some question about CRM to discuss, please contact.

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