Introduction to CRM(Customer relationship management)

What is CRM ?

 What does CRM mean to you?
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a widely-implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new clients, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former clients back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and client service.Customer relationship management describes a company-wide business strategy including customer-interface departments as well as other departments.
 
Benefits of CRM  

The use of a CRM system will confer several advantages to a company:

• Quality and efficiency
• Decrease in overall costs
• Decision support
• Enterprise agility
• Customer Attention

CRM Systems

• Many IT systems have been developed to assist improving the efficiency of CRM, they have been grouped together and are now generically known as CRM software.

• They range from contact databases to campaign management software.

• They help get winning strategies for acquiring and retaining customers by leveraging the latest advanced technologies.

• Refers to a software-based approach to handling customer relationships.

• Information about customers and customer interactions can be entered, stored and accessed by employees in different company departments.

• Used to implement CRM goals like- to improve services provided to customers, and to use customer contact information for targeted marketing

• Software is often necessary to explore the full benefits of a CRM strategy. 

Major Components

• Sales functionality

• Account management, Contact management, Opportunity management
• Sales management functionality
• Pipeline Analysis, Roll up and drill down reporting
• Telemarketing/telesales functionality
• call list assembly, auto dialing, scripting, order taking
• Time management functionality
• • single user and group calendar/scheduling, email
• Customer service and support functionality
• Incident management, problem management, Warranty/contract management
• Marketing functionality
• Campaign management, market segmentation, lead management 
• Executive information functionality
• extensive and easy-to-use reporting
• ERP integration functionality
•  legacy systems, the web, third-party external information
• Excellent data synchronization functionality
• mobile synchronization
• Field service support functionality
• real time information transfer to field personnel via mobile technologies  

Benefits 

• Increased sales revenues  
• Increased win rates Increased margins 
• Improved customer satisfaction ratings 
• Decreased general sales and marketing administrative costs 

Eight Building blocks of CRM