A Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) is a software/system used to store and manage all your current and potential customer’s data. It uses data analysis about a customer’s journey to improve business relationships, promote an organisation and help with workflow automation, which leads to an increase in customer satisfaction and customer retention.
As well as the factors above, using a CRM can improve customer service performance massively, it promotes efficient customer care by reducing response times to customer requests, improving the communication and workflow between all colleagues, and ensuring the customer has the best experience with your business.
Keep in touch
A CRM system contains a lot of information about your customers and how they interact with your business. This includes past activities such as previous phone calls, emails, past purchases, and actions they have made. Having all this information stored and accessible in a few clicks allows you to be much more personal in your approach, keep the conversation relevant and send out the right message to the right person.
Improve Communication
Not only does it promote communication between you and your customer, but it also promotes communication between colleagues. Imagine you have a customer you are dealing with regularly – what happens if you go on holiday? If you have a CRM, you can log all communication on the system so that other colleagues can pick up where your conversation ended with customers and know exactly what they are dealing with and speaking about. As well as this, you are also able to set your colleague's tasks and reminders so that the information is stored and notifies them of things that need to be done or whether a customer needs contacting, this leads to customer satisfaction as they are receiving organised, speedy service.
Know your customers
A CRM gives you knowledge of your customer's past behaviours and communications, this gives you the advantage of knowing exactly what your customers are interested in. This means you can offer them products they need or may already be looking for, rather than products that aren’t relevant. In addition to this, you can store and use unique information about your customers (like their birthdays) to send them specialised offers.
Protect data
With a CRM, your customer's data is stored safely. This gives your customers peace of mind and means they are more likely to trust you. A trusting customer is more than likely a returning customer who will continue to stay with you or buy extra products and services. As well as returning, they will most likely recommend your business to other people.
Stay up to date
When a customer has a request, you can log in straight to the CRM and schedule the task for someone to complete it when needed, this ensures your workflow is organised and
structured – allowing customer requests to be an unforgotten priority. You may have contact with a potential customer who doesn’t get in touch again for months, maybe even years. A quick search on a CRM will bring up all the information relating to that customer.