Customer relationship management (CRM) is a key growth driver for business organizations of every size and industry. As both a strategy and a tool, CRM can help strengthen your brand’s customer relationships, drive customer acquisition and retention, streamline your marketing and sales activities, facilitate data-driven decision-making, and contribute to increased revenue and profitability.
Calculate your potential increase in revenue when you implement an effective online review management strategy.
Customer Retention Revenue Calculator
Your results
What is Customer Relationship Management?
Customer relationship management is defined as a set of business processes, strategies, and technological solutions designed to help businesses manage their interactions with customers and build and improve customer relationships.
CRM typically involves using a system that collects, organizes, and analyzes customer data to enhance customer satisfaction, build customer loyalty, and improve overall business performance. CRM systems store this data so that teams across the organization can access it when they need to. This, in turn, empowers teams to recognize and communicate with customers in a seamless and scalable way.
Common features of CRM systems include:
- Customer data management
- Customer interaction management
- Sales and opportunity management
- Marketing automation
- Customer service and support
- Customer experience analytics and reporting
Sales teams, for example, can leverage their business’s CRM database to automate tasks, manage leads, and track opportunities, thereby reducing manual administrative work and lengthy sales cycles.
Why is Customer Relationship Management So Important?
Customer loyalty and retention are two of the most significant factors that impact a company’s revenue. Customer relationship management is important because it helps businesses build the type of relationship with their customers that creates loyalty and improves customer retention.
As a management strategy, CRM helps businesses achieve a better and more complete understanding of the customer. With all customer-related information — from operational data like name, contact information, and purchase history to analytical data like online reviews, social listening data, and user experience information — centralized by a CRM system, teams can work together more effectively and deliver consistent customer experiences across different touchpoints.
Let’s look at some of the ways brands can benefit from implementing an effective customer relationship management strategy.
Improved Customer Satisfaction and Retention
CRM helps organizations centralize customer data and interactions, allowing them to provide personalized and efficient customer service. This, in turn, leads to a better understanding of customer needs and expectations, resulting in improved customer satisfaction and retention.
Streamlined Sales and Marketing Processes
CRM systems today can offer real-time visibility into your organization’s marketing and sales activities. They can also provide marketing and sales teams with the ability to capture and manage leads, track opportunities, manage pipelines, and streamline their processes.
Effective customer relationship management will allow your sales team to close deals faster and shorten their sales cycles. Marketers, meanwhile, benefit from CRM systems by having access to information essential to refining campaigns, segmenting audiences, delivering personalized communications and messaging, and driving conversion.
Enhanced Decision-Making and Planning
CRM technologies have the ability to capture and organize large amounts of customer data. Companies can leverage this data to eliminate the guesswork and drive their decision-making in areas such as product research and development, customer service, staffing and human resources, marketing and reputation management, and other business operations and processes.
CRM Helps Your Brand Focus on the Customer
At its core, customer relationship management as a strategy empowers your organization to go beyond transactional interactions and instead focus on the customer in order to deliver improved, personalized, and meaningful customer experiences. CRM comes in a variety of tactics, tools, and applications, which your organization should explore as you look into improving efficiency, profit, and overall business performance.
