What is CRM – Customer Relationship Management?

Key Customer Relationship Management Process Under Control

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a customer-oriented management and business approach characterized by the active creation and maintenance of long-term mutually beneficial relationships with customers. These relationships must be beneficial for both the customer and the company (a win-win situation), which excludes unethical behavior towards customers.

CRM systems are a modern term for well-known and widely used business processes related to marketing, sales, and customer service. Their mission, simply put, is to successfully attract, acquire, and retain customers.

In simple terms, CRM is sometimes considered a database technology-supported process for collecting, processing, and utilizing customer information. It allows companies to know, understand, and predict customer needs, desires, and purchasing habits and supports two-way communication between the company and its customers. In a broader sense, CRM also refers to the software, hardware, and personnel resources of a company dedicated to these functions.

Overview

CRM is becoming a key concern for organizations of all sizes. Today, marketing professionals increasingly emphasize the need to shift focus from products to customers. After all, it is the customer who brings in the revenue.
With the emergence of market research, manufacturers and sellers began to focus more on what the market demands and started developing products that customers use because they solve their problems or bring them tangible benefits.
Every company faces these challenges:

1. Retaining existing customers
2. Understanding customers
3. Ability to listen to them
4. Identifying key processes
5. Increasing customer satisfaction through process improvement
6. Developing marketing strategies to retain existing and acquire new customers
7. Ability to reach new customers

The key to a successful CRM initiative is accurate and consistent customer data accessible online across the entire IT infrastructure. It is essential to realize that CRM solutions affect sales, service, and marketing while maintaining customer satisfaction.
Customer relationship management is a strategy focused on building and supporting long-term customer relationships. It is not just a technology but a shift in company philosophy that emphasizes the customer. Failure to follow this strategy is why most CRM implementations fail.

• Campaigns and their evaluation
• Finding potential sales channels, cross-selling, up-selling, customer retention, etc.
• Customer behavior analysis – pricing, product development
• Decision support – forecasting and analyzing customer profitability, etc.

Collaborative Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Includes special functionality that enables communication between the company and its customers through various channels to achieve higher quality interactions. Operational CRM provides valuable information created during customer interactions to departments such as sales, technical support, and marketing. This includes providing information about specific customer requirements or inquiries for new services from technical support or sales to marketing. The goal of Collaborative CRM is to share this information across departments to improve the quality of customer service.

CRM Philosophy and Benefits

CRM is an approach to identifying, acquiring, and retaining customers. It allows organizations to manage and align customer interactions. Effective customer relationship management helps companies increase the value of each interaction and thereby achieve better business results.

Today's organizations must manage customer interactions across multiple communication channels – including web, call centers, field sales, and partner networks. Many companies also have multiple business units sharing the same customers. The challenge is to provide customers with an easy way to do business with the organization, at any time, through any preferred communication channel, in any language, and in any currency. The goal is to make the customer feel like they are dealing with a single unified organization that recognizes them at every time and place. The benefit of CRM is clear: streamlining processes and providing sales, marketing, and management with better and more detailed customer information. Customer Relationship Management helps companies build more profitable relationships with customers and reduce operational costs.

Built-in workflows can relieve your salespeople from administrative tasks that are essential to the business. Time-consuming actions can be automated. Workflows can notify salespeople about new orders, expiring contracts that need renewal, or even remind them to wish customers a happy birthday.

CRM systems introduce a new approach focused on integration with other applications, emphasizing complete and detailed knowledge of customer behavior, continuous communication, and individual customer focus.

Sales organizations can shorten the sales cycle and improve key performance indicators such as revenue per salesperson, average order size, and revenue per customer. Marketing organizations can increase campaign response rates and marketing-driven revenue while reducing the cost of customer acquisition. Service organizations can increase technician productivity and customer loyalty while reducing service costs, response times, and resolution times. Across all industries, effective customer relationship management is a strategic necessity for growth and survival. Studies show that companies creating satisfied and loyal customers achieve more repeat business, lower customer acquisition costs, and stronger brand equity — all translating into better financial performance.

CRM Solutions We Specialize In

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM – the most recognized CRM from the globally renowned manufacturer Microsoft