Customer relationship management (CRM) refers to an organization’s polices and practices in its interactions with customers or clients. CRM software can be used within a company to improve hiring practices, solve problems and create more effective measurement tools.
Over time, companies have come to recognize that CRM software is not a silver bullet for addressing every aspect of business operations. Instead, CRM is most effective when it is strategically applied to address critical pain points. Specifically, using Infor CRM software allows business owners and managers of comX`panies of all sizes to leverage its clean functionality and customizability to enhance management policies and sales, marketing efforts, and customer support to generate a healthier bottom line.
Establishing Marketing Success Metrics
Establishing metrics to measure the effectiveness of marketing efforts is essential. Without the precise data provided by CRM software, gauging the effectiveness of marketing initiatives is largely a matter of guesswork.
CRM software provides immediate feedback on a granular level about the effectiveness of marketing efforts. Armed with this valuable information, managers and business owners can apply more resources to effective marketing strategies, along with refining or discarding marketing approaches that are falling short. The result: consistent processes that result in increased profits and higher customer retention rates
Predictive Data For Increasing Sales
According to a 2015 study, 85 percent of all organizations struggled to generate effective sales forecasting figures, largely due to a lack of accurate predictive data. Another major problem revealed by the study was that sales reps averaged only one third of their time actually selling and 20 percent of their time managing CRM, reporting and doing administrative work. The right CRM software application provides sales staff with critical customer and prospect information, allowing them to spend less time crunching sales numbers and more time doing what they were hired to do: interacting with customers and nailing down more sales.
Management And Personnel
CRM software provides an effective, minimally intrusive means for management to gather intelligence about the performance of their sales team and critical sales revenues. CRM software also discloses areas of under-performance early on while it’s still possible to take corrective action. Team members who are not performing up to par can receive training or guidance to get them back on the right track. In a worst-case scenario, CRM provides precise measurements to inform managers when it is time to let under-performers go.
Customer Support
CRM software can also enhance customer support, resulting in higher customer satisfaction, not to mention a healthier bottom line. During the late 1990s, the U.S. division of Brother, which manufactures printers, sewing machines and similar hardware, was plagued with high return rates. The company utilized CRM software to determine that the root cause was poor call center performance, where less than half of incoming customer calls were being answered. The company used CRM to refine and beef up its call centers. The result was that by 2004, the company estimated that its savings exceeded $600,000 in that year alone.
Looking Ahead To 2020 And Beyond
From record tracking to revealing pain points, freeing sales staff to generate sales and revenue, CRM software is a potent tool for business owners and company management. Companies that invest in CRM software can feel confident going into 2020 that they will reach and even exceed their business goals.