What is CRM ?

• CRM is an approach that helps businesses improve existing customer relationships and acquire new customers faster.

• A CRM tool lets you store customer and prospect contact information, identify sales opportunities, record service issues, and manage marketing campaigns, all in one central location and make information about every customer - interaction available to anyone at your company who might need it.

• Today, when you hear about CRM, it mostly refers to CRM software.

• This software ensures that every step of the interaction with consumers goes smoothly and efficiently in order to increase the overall profits. The software gathers customer data from multiple channels. Hence, CRM stores detailed information on overall purchase history, personal info, and even purchasing behavior patterns.

TYPES OF CRM :

1. Operational CRM

2. Analytical CRM

3. Collaborative CRM

1. Operational CRM

As the name suggests, an operational CRM assists businesses in managing their day-to-day marketing, sales, and customer service operations. It is specially designed to help facilitate activities that have to do with customers. An operational CRM is conceivable for every interaction that your brand has with current and potential clients.

i. Sales automation

It provides a standard for handling sales processes and general phrases for sales processes for all the company's sales department. This might involve automatically tracking a contact and updating their status from prospect to qualified lead once they've completed certain actions or met specific criteria. Designed to simplify the sales process for a company, it allows its staff to spend much more time communicating directly with potential customers and solidifying the loyalty of the customers already on board.

ii. Marketing automation

This type of operational CRM makes it possible for the marketing team to handle monotonous and time-consuming tasks. Tasks like calling contacts, organizing email campaigns, dispersing substance offerings, that would have otherwise taken a chunk of the team's time are delegated to the machine for better efficiency. In marketing campaign, management involves marketers to use customer specific information to determine, evaluate and develop communication that are targeted to customers in individual

2. Analytical CRM

While operational CRM facilitates front-line business activities, analytical CRM works behind the scenes to crunch collected data. Analytical CRM tracks multiple performance metrics to provide actionable insights to inform business decisions across your company.

An analytical CRM system is much concerned with gathering customer data and studying it for patterns and trends. These data include the customer's contact info, feedback, and any other relevant info that will help to identify patterns or preferences.

The more data your business gathers on consumer behaviors, patterns, and pain points, the better you can tailor your marketing and sales strategies to new and existing customers.

Analytical CRM accumulates and analyzes consumer data of various kinds, including:

Sales data: purchase and return history, brand preferences, etc.

Financial data: payment and credit history, including payment type, credit scores, etc.

Marketing data: customer response rates to marketing campaigns, customer satisfaction data, retention data, etc.

3. Collaborative CRM

Collaborative CRMS require different groups in an organization to exchange client data. This is also known as strategic CRM which helps your organization to share the information of customers to various business units like marketing team, sales team, support team, technical support, etc.

Collaborative CRM can be broadly identified by two aspects:

1. Interaction Management

2. Channel Management

OBJECTIVES OF CRM :

1. To simplify marketing and sales process

2. To make call centers more efficient

3. To provide better customer service

4. To discover new customers and increase customer revenue

5. To cross sell products more effectively

ADVANTAGES OF CRM :

1. Better Knowledge of Customers

2. Retain More Customers

3. Better Segmentation

4. Minimizes Cost

5. Enhance Corporate Image

6. Increase Business Growth

7. Controls Customer Defection Rate

WHY IS CRM SO IMPORTANT?

• CRM helps businesses build a relationship with their customers that, in turn, creates loyalty and customer retention. Since customer loyalty and revenue are both qualities that affect a company's revenue, CRM is a management strategy that results in increased profits for a business.
• At its core, a CRM tool creates a simple user interface for a collection of data that helps businesses recognize and communicate with customers in a scalable way.