What Is A CRM System and Do You Need One?

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, and that’s exactly what a CRM system does. Businesses use CRM systems to hold their customer data and to facilitate customer communication.

For example, a business might use a CRM system to write to all of their customers to tell them about a new promotion or to arrange call lists of people to be contacted by call centre staff.

Your CRM system will also hold the history of all of the communication you have had with a customer, so when they call in, you can immediately see who they have already spoken to, what letters or emails they may have received, and the progress of any disputes or queries.

Provide Excellent Customer Service

The point of a good CRM system is to facilitate excellent customer service. For businesses with a large number of customers, trying to provide good customer service and keep track of everything without a CRM system can be very difficult indeed!

Customer service is incredibly important not only for retaining your existing customers but for gaining new ones. The business world is competitive, with many companies offering similar products and services. A lot of the time, the reason that somebody will choose your company over another is down to the experience they have of your customer service, which can be just one phone call or email, so the service must be great every single time.

A happy customer will automatically leave you positive reviews online and recommend you to their friends. Equally, a customer who experiences just one instance of poor customer service may choose to go elsewhere, and they won’t be shy about telling anyone who will listen that they should do the same.

You can have the most conscientious staff in the world, but if they can’t access the information that they need on the customer, then they won’t be able to provide the expected level of service.

Everything in One Place

The benefit of a CRM system is that everything is in one place. Smaller businesses may run out of excel spreadsheets and access databases, but if your customer data is stored in multiple places, this causes a few problems:

• Customer service staff will take longer to find the information they need, which will impact on the service they can provide.

• There may be discrepancies in the data held in different places. For example, if a customer address is updated in one place and not another, then you could potentially be writing to a customer at the wrong place, which is a data protection breach.

• Automation of processes is difficult when you have to consider multiple systems. If you have everything in one place, each piece of automation work only needs to be done once.

CRM.com.au is a wealth of information on CRM systems, and they can provide you with guidance and support regarding what you can and should expect from a CRM system, and how to go about getting it.

Development of New Features

If you choose a managed CRM system, then responsibility for fixing bugs and developing new features lies with the CRM provider, not with you. This is a tremendous value and takes away a lot of additional work for you. Contact the Zoho consultants at Fi Digital for a more in-depth consult.

In particular, CRM providers will have to keep up to date with legal obligations around customer data, so having a CRM system often means that you will automatically be compliant.