The CRM Strategy

Customer relationship management is often thought of as a business strategy that enables businesses to improve in a number of areas. The CRM strategy allows you to to following:

1) Understand the customer
2) Retain customers through better customer experience
3) Attract new customers
4) Win new clients and contracts
5) Increase profitably
6) Decrease customer management costs

The Impact of Technology on CRM

Technology and the Internet have changed the way companies approach customer relationship strategies. Advances in technology have changed consumer buying behavior, and today there are many ways for companies to communicate with customers and to collect data about them. With each new advance in technology — especially the proliferation of self-service channels like the Web and smartphones — customer relationships are being managed electronically.

Many aspects of customer relationship management rely heavily on technology; however, the strategies and processes of a good CRM system will collect, manage and link information about the customer with the goal of letting you market and sell services effectively.

The Benefits of CRM

The biggest benefit most businesses realize when moving to a CRM system comes directly from having all your business data stored and accessed from a single location. Before CRM systems, customer data was spread out over office productivity suite documents, email systems, mobile phone data and even paper note cards and Rolodex entries. Storing all the data from all departments (e.g., sales, marketing, customer service and HR) in a central location gives management and employees immediate access to the most recent data when they need it. Departments can collaborate with ease, and CRM systems help organization to develop efficient automated processes to improve business processes.

Other benefits include a 360-degree view of all customer information, knowledge of what customers and the general market want, and integration with your existing applications to consolidate all business information.