How to build CRM that works

According to best practices and success cases the business growth and development is accompanied by the smart approach to tracking customer interactions: someone requires to be reminded about paying for services, someone needs to update prices, others need to be given a discount. Manual management of these processes not only takes a lot of time and energy, but also leads to slowing down the operational processes, reducing overall efficiency and, consequently, profitability. That’s why it is important to predict such cases during the product discovery process or when you are thinking on how to organize your software product development process.

If you follow the basic definitions of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) the most common would be the following – it’s a digital system that helps with customer relationship management, that collects, analyzes data and simplifies these processes. Such a web instrument collects and stores the entire history of interaction with customers (including potential and existing ones) – from the first visit to the website and activity on it to the exact time when the customer decided to enter into an agreement.

What are the benefits of using CRM

Using CRM provides businesses with the following benefits:

Collect and store contac’s data

Contact management with CRM lets customer support departments or sales teams aggregate information about consumers, suppliers and all other participants in your organization in one place. CRM allows you to combine multi-channel contact information from social networks, e-mail, LinkedIn, business cards, etc. Knowing how to use this system is crucially important in online services; e-commerce businesses (like barbershops), hotels and niche organizations.

Build a solid client relationships

Knowledge of the consumer allows customer support departments to provide a better shopping experience. By knowing which emails from your organization newsletter they have reviewed, which offers or discounts they are more likely to be interested in, and the seasonality of their products, you can significantly improve the attractiveness of your offers to them;

Better performance

With the help of CRM you organizations can digitalize lots of tasks, such as recording calls and activities of potential customers, generating reports, creating transactions. The less time employees spend on administrative work, the more hours they get to work directly with potential clients;

Strengthening cooperation

The customer support or sales manager can observe and analyse the interactions between buyers and sellers, the consumer service manager can see other flows and report them to the responsible departments. Salespeople on a team are able to learn more information about each other’s best practices. CRM improves the collaboration and productivity of sales professionals;

Greater understanding of all flows

One of the main goals of the CRM is to allow organizations to see the real picture of employee productivity, including conversion rates across the team, the average size of the transaction, the speed of the transaction. A better knowledge of sales flows and patterns at all stages will increase their quality as well as efficiency.

What to look for when choosing a CRM

Ease of use

For small and medium-sized teams, ease of learning and ease of use of CRM should be decisive factors in choosing such digital tools. The best platform will be one that requires minimal study, an intuitive interface, and easy access to and understanding of information.

Settings

Setting up custom features that are unique and important for the specific organization and it’s consumer’s journey are important for any CRM. That’s why the ability to customize CRM is one of the major factors.

Automation

Automating repetitive tasks will save a lot of time. Therefore, when choosing a CRM, you should find a system with the functions of automating data entry, generating reports and emails to customers, updating information fields.

Service support from a CRM provider

In any case, especially if you do not have your own IT department, you need to make sure that your chosen CRM is supported by a professional team, whose specialists will be able to answer all questions and quickly resolve technical issues.