CRM - Customer Relationship Management

CRM: What are the benefits?

Excellent customer service is about being aware of customer needs and reacting to them effectively. CRM helps you to understand, anticipate and respond to your customers' needs in a consistent way, right across your organization.

Practicing CRM requires an efficient and integrated internal business system. Many businesses benefit from the organizational discipline CRM imposes, as well as from the technology itself.

CRM will help your business if you view it as a set of tools that let you do more more for, and get more from, your customer.

CRM can:

• Develop better communication channels
• Collect vital data, like customer details and order histories
• Create detailed profiles such as customer preferences
• Deliver instant, company-wide access to customer histories
• Identify new selling opportunities

How can you measure CRM benefits?

CRM benefits can be measured and quantified. Using CRM applications can lead to increases in revenue from:

• Reductions in operating costs - it cost around £25 to handle a customer call via a call center but only £2 via a website
• A higher percentage of cross-selling due to offering a single point of contact with your company
• More success in attracting new customers and closing deals faster, through quicker and more efficient responses to customer leads and customer information
• Simplification of marketing and sales processes by understanding customer needs
• Better customer service - through improved responsiveness and understanding that builds customer loyalty and decreases customer "churn"