Making good Customer Relations is key for a company to survive the competition. Customer Relations can play a very significant role in any business’s success. When customers repeatedly do business with you, it increases your credibility and potential for new acquisitions. So, managing customer relations is very important to drive your success.
In this blog, you will understand Customer Relationship Management (CRM), the features of CRM, and its benefits. Additionally, we’ll discuss selecting and implementing CRM Software to manage your customer relations. So let’s get started.
What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) refers to the system involving strategies and protocols a business implements in its customer communication.
This communication involves direct encounters with customers, such as sales and service-related activities. It also includes:
- Activity management related to customers.
- Automatic marketing campaigns for constant communication.
- Customer behaviour analysis for better decision-making on the next move.
Finally, CRM attempts to improve the whole customer experience.
CRM Software can help track interactions, data, and notes about customers or prospects. A centralized platform saves each piece of information and is available to multiple employees within an organisation. CRM is a powerful tool that benefits businesses in dealing with customers.
The Benefits of Using A CRM to Improve Customer Relations
CRM Software can benefit your organisation, ranging from better customer relations to increased sales team productivity. Here are some of the benefits of using CRM as follows.
Improved Customer Service
Modern CRM Software has various functions, but its core work is to improve business-customer relations. It is a fact that to maintain better customer retention, businesses have to focus on customer satisfaction. Better customer relations helps business to proliferate because customers attract customers.
Increases Customer Retention
Once you’ve acquired and converted leads, you must work hard to keep them as customers and develop loyalty. The CRM will help you discover and rapidly fix problems with your customers. How? It is possible by providing sentiment analysis, automated ticketing, customer service automation, and user behaviour tracking.
Centralized Database
Another thing software does is create a centralized database with all of your customers’ information. It allows a sales professional to quickly determine which products a specific consumer is interested in. This collected information provides a unified database that you can easily navigate from anywhere. It saves your employees time looking through old papers and records.
Communication with Prospects
Lead nurturing can be time-consuming and complicated, with multiple steps and possibilities for interaction. A CRM automates the whole process, alerts your employees when they should contact the prospect, and tracks every interaction on their mobile.
Accurate Sales Forecasting
You must be able to evaluate past performance and plan strategically for the future. You may detect key trends and gain a sense of what to expect from your future sales performance. It is possible by using automated sales reporting in CRM software while altering your goals and KPIs to match those estimates.
Now, we will discuss the components included in CRM.
What are the Features of CRM?
The features of CRM typically include the following:
Lead Management
It is the process of acquiring and managing leads to make them customers. Lead management includes:
- Lead Generation
- Identity Capture
- Lead Staging
- Lead Distribution
- Sales Contact
- Lead Nurturing
By following those practices, leads can be converted into customers. That is the basic purpose of lead generation.
Activity Management
Your duties, such as open to-do lists, meetings, phone calls, tasks, and finished customer tasks, have been centralized in CRM through activity management. Now, you can edit and monitor these activities through a single dashboard.
Marketing Automation
The CRM Tool uses data to target customers with personalized campaigns. Marketing automation allows you to execute effective campaigns, boost consumer engagement, and increase revenues in a few simple clicks. Many CRM tools, like NYGGS CRM, have pre-designed email and SMS templates, so you don’t have to start with a blank paper.
Sales Forecasting
Sales forecasting is the process of predicting future sales in order to optimize revenue. This feature can be accomplished through various methods, including historical sales data, customer surveys, and market trends. Businesses need sales predictions to have enough inventory to fulfill customer demand.
Customer Support
This component helps the Customer Relations team to manage and resolve customer inquiries and issues. They can answer their queries and mark queries as solved, passed, and closed for the next action. Also, they can schedule queries within the software if it is not solved. The objective of the support team is to ensure total customer satisfaction and improve customer relations.
In addition to the components stated above, mobile CRM Applications are available, allowing users to access CRM from their mobile devices. Let’s look more closely at what mobile CRM involves.
What is Mobile CRM?
A Mobile CRM is an app that provides the experience and features of CRM software on a mobile device. A mobile CRM may perform all of a desktop CRM’s duties.
In today’s business world, business owners need a mobile CRM App to keep in touch with their customers and team members even when they are moving. Unlike traditional CRMs, which are exclusively available on desktops, mobile CRM ensures that the data is available straight in your hands wherever you are in the globe.
In a nutshell, mobile CRM should be used by businesses and organizations that wish to boost their sales and productivity.
How Much Does a CRM Cost?
CRM is often charged per user, per month. In other words, multiply the base cost of your CRM by the number of employees on your team who will use it to determine your total monthly CRM investment.
The price of CRM in India is also determined by several factors, including features, functionality, vendor, and deployment style (cloud-based or on-premise software). Cloud-based software charges per user per month, while on-premise software has a one-time price slightly higher than the monthly subscription.
CRM Software can cost a few thousand rupees per month to several lakhs per year, depending on the system’s complexity and the number of users. Some CRM software vendors may additionally give different pricing plans based on your company’s number of customer contacts. So, choose wisely after understanding your needs.
How to Select a CRM for Your Business?
While choosing a new CRM for your company, there are several factors to consider while making a wise decision.
Identify Your Needs
You must understand the problem you are trying to solve with a CRM. To identify which CRM tool will be the most effective, prioritize the following objectives:
- Activity tracking of the leads.
- Customer base tracking.
- Monitor opportunities and closing rates.
- Provide inter-team connectivity.
- Produce customized reporting.
- Organise company operations.
- Boost productivity and hence profitability.
Comprehend the Implementation
There will always be a period of implementation when introducing new software. In rare cases, an independent consultant or a member in charge of the deployment may be required. In any instance, there will be a training and testing period during which system issues will be worked out and best practices will be developed.
Implementation can incur significant expenditures and take time away from your team’s current responsibilities but do not underestimate the influence of performance.
Plan for User Adoption
Whatever system you adopt, there will be people on your team who’re resistant to change. The idea here is to reassure your salespeople that they are not at risk of losing or sharing their customers with others because they own a personal relationship with the customer. Involving your sales team in the CRM selection process and keeping them involved helps associates feel less frightened by a new system.
Pro Tip: The greater your employees’ involvement in selecting a new tool, the more likely they are to adopt it and assist their colleagues in doing so.
Adaptability for Business Processes
CRM Tool is designed with a wide range of business processes in mind. Everyone’s procedures are unique. That is not a bad thing; it is what sets you apart from your competitors. Your CRM must be flexible enough to adapt to your processes. Similarly, choose a CRM that can scale up with your business and able to customize it to adapt to evolving processes without requiring a complete replacement.
Integration Compatibility
While compatibility with different systems is becoming less of an issue as more apps are linked via APIs. You should still ensure that the chosen CRM system can interact with your current devices. Look for a third-party platform that can combine your systems to optimize your data organization if you need assistance integrating all your systems.
Try the Product Demonstration
Ensure that you’ve got access to the product demonstration before purchasing it. This is your opportunity to thoroughly evaluate the system and determine its strengths and weaknesses concerning the demands of your company. Too often, clients will seek a product demo only to take a quick look before assuming it will work. Investing a bit more time now will save you time later on.
Choosing the best CRM for your company is an essential and sometimes lengthy task. As you begin your CRM research, the abovementioned considerations might help your decision-making.
Wrapping-Up
In this blog, we’ve covered every aspect of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. We also discussed the cost incurred and the selection roadmap for CRM software. Considering those guidelines will help you make an informed decision about CRM selection.
By the end of this blog, you can understand the purpose of CRM software in streamlining customer relations. You can also select the best CRM, such as NYGGS CRM, a system best suited for small and mid-sized businesses in India.
NYGGS provides a free live demo that lets you familiarize yourself with the system. Book your demo NOW!