Member Article

The Agile Guide to CRM


The very foundation of every successful business is, not surprisingly, its customers. Without them, the business would not have any support and by extension, any income. As such, it is imperative that businesses and companies take the time to invest in their relationships to clients and customers. Whether this is through offering returning customers bonuses or discounts in the future, or just providing top notch customer service from the very first interaction, this will go a long way not just in guaranteeing that said customer comes back to you in the future, but also tells others about the wonderful experience they had with you. There is no substitute for word-of-mouth marketing, so guaranteeing that those customers sharing their experience are sharing an outstanding one is of the utmost importance.

Managing all the myriad of ways that you interact with your customers can be tough. Luckily, there are a variety of programs and software items that can aid in this process. While we at Agile CRM do offer such customer relations management software, the most important thing is to find one that is comfortable for your use and that makes the most intuitive sense to you or whoever among your team will be handling the consumer relationship management part of your business.

What is Customer Relation Management?

Since there is a more formalized definition of the topic, it would be helpful before we get into the software itself to break down said definition. There are a number of terms that all speak about this topic, so some of them will be used throughout this article to expose you to their use. Now, customer relations management is considered to be the combination of practices, technology and strategies that businesses use to keep track of and analyze interactions with customers. Why do we want to keep track of and analyze this information? The reason is this: by understanding the strong points of your customer interactions, as well as the weak points, you can adjust the overall customer experience to emphasize the things that are statistically more successful, both in terms of bringing in more business and ensuring customer satisfaction.

What is a CRM System?

Now that we have a working definition of what customer relation management is, we can move on to discuss what role technology plays in it. Customer Relationship Management Software, sometimes called Client Relationship Management Software, is designed to streamline the process of collecting and analyzing data related to customer relationships, interaction and satisfaction. Keeping all of this data in one secure location where it can be accessed and analyzed with ease is essential to getting the most out of the program or software you choose. Many of the Customer Relationship Management Software runs a multitude of useful features, some of which will be discussed in this section.

One of the most important features of any client relationship management system is the customer support management capability. Where many businesses lose in terms of customer interaction isn’t with the initial sale or meeting, but with the follow up support that they offer to customers in need. While the CRM software you choose will not be able to manage these support interactions for you, they do offer options such as customer feedback surveys and other ways of measuring how pleased a client is with the quality of their interaction with the representative of your company. This system can also help you set up a self-service portal that can allow customers to troubleshoot their own questions and concerns based on frequently asked questions that other clients may have had in the past.

Another key feature of this software is that it can help to manage sales and sales data. Among the things that a CRM system is capable of, one of perhaps the most useful is that it can schedule and automate phone calls, alleviating your team of both the time and resources that would otherwise require them to set aside sometimes hours to make all of the necessary phone calls. Calls can also be prerecorded like a message and then scheduled to be made in the future to eliminate the sometimes impersonal nature of automated calling systems. A good CRM system will also have a user-friendly calendar interface for scheduling appointments, identifying the type of appointment and sending reminders in advance of the appointment itself to ensure that everyone, including team members, is where they’re supposed to be when they’re supposed to be there.

One of the final key features of a successful Client Relationship Management Software is the assistance it can offer for the purposes of marketing. The Agile CRM software, for example, allows the setup of automated marketing options, as well as options for planning and executing social media campaigns that can help to boost awareness of your company or brand in a market that thrives when companies have an online presence of some kind. It can also help to keep track of sales data, successful response rates to different social media campaigns and can then help you to use those metrics to gauge how to maximize your return on investment for these different marketing strategies.

Conclusion

Hopefully this article has explained the immense importance of Customer Relations Management to you in such a way that, moving forward, you consider it an essential component of the way you structure and run your business. We now exist in a world where customer reviews are just a click away, so it is more important now than ever to ensure that each and every customer or client of your business has the same, high quality level of service as the next so that when they inevitably make their opinion of your brand known online, it will be a positive one that they share. As we mentioned here, though, this process isn’t as simple as just smiling and being pleasant during your interactions; no, it extends all the way through any follow-up customer service contact and up to any future interactions for the sake of marketing or analytics. A CRM software is a superb way to assist in keeping all of this information stored, managed and reviewed in one location and is a truly essential part of growing your business

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Sandeep Das .