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What is CRM software? CRM
stands for Customer Relationship Management. It is a strategy used to
learn more about customers' needs and behaviors in order to develop
stronger relationships with them. After all, good customer relationships
are at the heart of business success. There are many technological
components to CRM, but thinking about CRM in primarily technological terms
is a mistake. The more useful way to think about CRM is as a process that
will help bring together lots of pieces of information about customers,
sales, marketing effectiveness, responsiveness and market trends.
What is the goal of CRM? The idea of CRM is that
it helps businesses use technology and human resources to gain insight
into the behavior of customers and the value of those customers. If it
works as hoped, a business can:
- provide better customer service
- make call centers more efficient
- cross sell products more effectively
- help sales staff close deals faster
- simplify marketing and sales processes
- discover new customers
- increase customer revenues
That sounds rosy. How does it happen? It doesn't
happen by simply buying software and installing it. For CRM to be truly
effective, an organization must first decide what kind of customer
information it is looking for and it must decide what it intends to do
with that information. For example, many financial institutions keep track
of customers' life stages in order to market appropriate banking products
like mortgages or IRAs to them at the right time to fit their needs.
Next, the organization must look into all of the different ways
information about customers comes into a business, where and how this data
is stored and how it is currently used. One company, for instance, may
interact with customers in a myriad of different ways including mail
campaigns, Web sites, brick-and-mortar stores, call centers, mobile sales
force staff and marketing and advertising efforts. Solid CRM systems link
up each of these points. This collected data flows between operational
systems (like sales and inventory systems) and analytical systems that can
help sort through these records for patterns. Company analysts can then
comb through the data to obtain a holistic view of each customer and
pinpoint areas where better services are needed. For example, if someone
has a mortgage, a business loan, an IRA and a large commercial checking
account with one bank, it behooves the bank to treat this person well each
time it has any contact with him or her.
How much does CRM cost? A
study in year 2001 survey of more than 1,600 business and IT
professionals, conducted by The Data Warehousing Institute found that
close to 50% had CRM project budgets of less than $500,000. That would
appear to indicate that CRM doesn't have to be a budget-buster. However,
the same survey showed a handful of respondents with CRM project budgets
of over $10 million.
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