Customer relationship management (CRM) is a method that combines strategy, practice and technology to create better relationships with your customers. One of the advantages of implementing CRM in companies may require cost and time for adjustments.
However, with the steps of building a good CRM, you can get great CRM benefits. Then, what are the advantages of using CRM for companies? To find out the complete answer, let’s look at the following discussion about the advantages of CRM for companies!
What are the Advantages of CRM for Companies?
The following are the advantages that companies will get after using CRM
1. Improve customer service
The first advantage of CRM is to improve customer service by providing quality service to prospects and customers. Customer service is at the forefront of business, so this is one of the biggest factors that can determine whether a customer will stay or leave.
As customers, of course we don’t want to face bad customer service. CRM allows all employees to have the same knowledge of specific needs and customer interactions.
Thus, customer service will also be better if employees can increase the response to customers and their characteristics.
What’s more, the features in the CRM application can provide everything you need to know about your customers in one view. All customer data, starting from contact details, conversations, deals, and meetings, can be seen as a whole.
In addition, with the integration of WhatsApp with CRM, your customer service will also be better tracked and recorded.
2. Simplify the customer segmentation process
The number of prospects in the market may make it difficult for you to do the right customer segmentation. However, you don’t need to worry anymore, because CRM can help simplify and speed up your customer segmentation process.
CRM will automatically classify your contact list based on the criteria you previously created. In this way, it will be easy for you to find the person you want to contact at any given time.
Not only that, you can also sort your contacts by location, gender, age, buyer stage, and more. So that the process of reaching customers becomes more effective and efficient.
3. Increase sales
Using CRM in companies can help streamline sales processes, build sales pipelines, automate key tasks, and analyze all sales data in one central place. So that has the potential to increase sales and productivity.
By using CRM, you can easily build a sales process that can be customized anytime and anywhere according to your business needs.
4. Maintain customers (customer retention)
The next advantage of CRM is retaining customers. Apart from looking for new customers, one of the important things that you have to do in business is to retain existing customers, or another term is customer retention.
Research by Frederick Reichheld from Bain & Company shows that increasing customer retention can increase profits by 25% – 95%. In fact, according to Harvard Business Review, finding new customers will cost as much as 5 to 25 times more than retaining existing customers.
By using CRM, you can maintain relationships with customers and keep them loyal customers in your business.
5. Centralized customer database system
Another great advantage of CRM is that it provides a centralized database with all the information about your customers in one place, making it easily accessible to anyone in your company who needs it.
This will make it easier for sales reps to see what products a particular customer is interested in, save your employees time digging through old files and records, and create a better and more productive customer experience.
6. Provide detailed analysis and reports
The amount of customer data that needs to be managed can be a hassle, because it will take you a long time to analyze all of this data. Then, is there a solution?
Of course there is, which is using a CRM application that comes with built-in analytics capabilities to contextualize data, break it down into actionable items, and turn it into easy-to-understand metrics.
Using a CRM, you can see not only analysis and reports about your customers, but also the achievements of your members and your team as a whole.
7. Increase productivity and business performance
The next advantage of CRM for companies is the ability to manage meetings, contacts, customer service, and marketing strategies.
Current CRM software has a display that makes it easier for users to see the flow of potential customers through the sales pipeline or quickly find information on the dashboard. This will certainly be much more effective than having to search for data manually.
Apart from that, CRM also helps create workflows to automate your business processes. As an example:
- Send meeting reminders
- Synchronization between data
- Moving customer data from one stage of the pipeline to the next
- Adding contacts from elsewhere (example: Microsoft Excel)
CRM application systems can also help you reduce repetitive and tedious work so you can work more effectively.
8. Speed up communication with customers
Using CRM can make your customers not have to wait long to be able to reply to their requests. So it can save you and the customer time.
A typical CRM application will come with a set of ready-to-use customizable templates of emails, letters, documents, proposals, quotes, invitations, newsletters, etc. to improve communication with your customers.
9. A more accurate sales forecast
The next advantage for companies using CRM is that it allows for more accurate sales forecasts.
The automated sales reporting feature of a CRM application can help you identify key trends and get an idea of what to expect from your future sales cycle.
Plus, you can customize it with goals and metrics to match your sales projections.
10. Establish better internal communication
Apart from facilitating communication between your business and customers, CRM can also make it easier for members and teams of each department to easily communicate with each other.
Team members can send notes or alerts, tag each other on projects, and send messages and emails, all on one easy platform.
Related post:
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- Top 20 Best CRM Software Platforms 2023 for your Business