What is CRM? A Beginner's Guide to Customer Relationship Management | Salesforce
What is CRM?
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. The meaning of CRM has changed a lot over the years. CRM is a term that was initially defined and designed to improve customer service. Today, though, it relates to an entire business strategy. CRM system is a technology that allows businesses both large and small to organize, automate, and synchronize every facet of customer interaction. It enables you to focus on your organization’s relationships with individual people – whether those are customers, service users, colleagues, or suppliers. CRM systems compile data from a range of different communication channels, including a company's website, telephone, email, live chat, marketing materials, and more recently, social media. They allow businesses to learn more about their target audiences and how to best cater to their needs, thus retaining customers and driving sales growth.
Moreover, there might be several CRM meaning, such as:
- CRM as Strategy - focus on the business principles about how relationships with customers and potential customers should be managed.
- CRM as a Process - it is a system in order to establish and manage the mentioned relationships.
- CRM as Technology - this is a cloud-based technology product to record, analyze and report interactions between the company and customers.
Why CRM Matters
- Organize - CRM allows you to keep everything in order by means of channel engagement, process, and campaign automation. Additionally, from business analytics to storing and accessing customer data, among others.
- The system helps to discover relevant insight information about customers (who they are, how and why they buy your product, what they like, and what they do not like). Identifying customer trends and willingness are crucial not only because you can depict their needs and address their issues.
- You can improve, build and manage customer-related operations by means of optimizing the main processes. It will give you the flexibility and convenience you need to be responsive to your customers and at the same time make it easy for customers to do business with you.
- Improved and Efficient Customer Service - CRM tools allow you to store information about your past, present, and future customers. And with that information, it enables you to manage everything in one place. It also allows you to see how customers react in various situations. In turn, giving you a better perspective on keeping everything in check.
Don't forget to check out: Essential Tips and Tricks for Successful CRM Data Migration | Salesforce
Types of CRM
- Operational - The primary goal of customer relationship management systems is to integrate and automate sales, marketing, and customer support. Therefore, these systems typically have a dashboard that gives an overall view of the three functions on a single customer view, a single page for each customer that a company may have. The dashboard may provide client information, past sales, previous marketing efforts, and more, summarizing all of the relationships between the customer and the firm. Operational CRM is made up of 3 main components: Salesforce automation, marketing automation, and service automation.
- Analytical - The role of analytical CRM systems is to analyze customer data collected through multiple sources and present it so that business managers can make more informed decisions. Analytical CRM systems use techniques such as data mining, correlation, and pattern recognition to analyze the customer data. These analytics help improve customer service by finding small problems which can be solved, perhaps by marketing to different parts of a consumer audience differently.
- Collaborative - The third primary aim of CRM systems is to incorporate external stakeholders such as suppliers, vendors, and distributors, and share customer information across groups/departments and organizations.
How to Choose a CRM for Your Business?
As you can see, some of the types of CRMs can be found in the same tools, like HubSpot, Salesforce, or Zoho. As these examples offer specific plans for different purposes, it’s worth knowing what type of CRM you need to make the best decision.
If you struggle with choosing a CRM, specify your business goals:
- Do you want to automate your marketing or sales?
- Are you looking for solutions to analyze your customers?
- How would you like the departments at your company to collaborate?
- Do you focus on long-term relationships with your customers?
Based on these questions, you can determine what features your desired custom CRM should have.
Salesforce as a CRM
One of the best-known CRMs available today is Salesforce. There are several reasons why Salesforce has a large fan following since its inception in 1999. Salesforce CRM was awarded as the World’s Most Innovative Company by Forbes Innovators for 4 continuous years (2011-2014). Salesforce also featured in FORTUNE’s 100 Best Companies to Work for in 2012-2014. With over 2 million customers (amassed in a short while) which include popular data giants namely Fujitsu, Facebook, Coca-Cola, L’Oréal, Sony, and Vodafone - Salesforce CRM is truly the undisputed market leader in the CRM Software market. Buyers perceive Salesforce as the platform integral for rendering a qualitative customer engagement experience.
Check out an amazing Salesforce video tutorial here: Connect Marketing Cloud with Salesforce CRM | PART 1
What is Salesforce?
Salesforce is cloud-based CRM software, developed to make organizations function efficiently and profitably by reducing the cost of managing hardware infrastructure. Salesforce offers a wide range of features in all the functional areas of a company:
- Salesforce in Marketing Team - Salesforce professional edition helps the marketing team of a company creates and track various marketing campaigns to measure the success rate and automatically provide leads to the sales team of the company.
- Salesforce in Customer Support Team - Salesforce also keeps a track of various customer issues and tracks them for resolution based on various escalation rules such as the importance of the client and elapsed time. This improves customer satisfaction levels as the issues do not fall through loopholes and are directly escalated to the next level.
- Salesforce in Management - With visual dashboards and extensive reporting features, Salesforce provides the management of a company with visibility on what is happening in different teams.
- Salesforce in Training - Salesforce has very robust training and support features that are above industry standards. Salesforce users can easily find answers to their questions from the extensive online help manual and the video walk facility.
- Salesforce in Application Integration - Salesforce can be integrated with other systems to extend its functionality through the Salesforce business app store - the AppExchange.
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