In this post you will find:
What CRM stands for?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – just out of the name you can get an idea what it is for.
Now, even though it is called “customer” relationship management, it is not necessarily only for businesses that have customers.
I applied CRM in various situations and it helped very much to different voluntary organisations, schools, sport clubs and even religious communities.
Every kind of organisation that has contact, interaction with people, can benefit using CRM.
How it helps businesses (and other kinds of organisations)?
Depending on your business/organisation CRM can help you in various ways. Here you can check one of the examples.
Automation
One of main features of every CRM is automation. In today’s world there are so many tasks you must handle every day and you should leverage softwares that offers help.
Sequences
Email sequences are a very powerful tool that is used pretty much in the marketing. However, I find it useful even in communication with friends and family. A lot of people simply don’t open every email they get. But if you send them a sequence of 5-6-10 emails with 2 days in between, you will have more chances to get a reply.
Chat bots
Well, even though a lot of people are not very happy to chat with the robot, statistics says that the majority doesn’t care whether they are chatting with a bot or person as long as they can solve the problem. So, imagine that you help some of your customers without spending a second of your time. Now, sounds like a good idea to invest some time to prepare a chat bot.
Personalization
Did you notice how lately you are receiving emails from total strangers or from your favourite coffee shop next door, school, kindergarten… whatever. Most emails today start with “Hi Name,”. You don’t expect that someone is sitting in the office for 2 days and sending thousands of emails changing names in any email, don’t you? That is what CRM is for. You can personalize emails in many different ways, “name” is just an example.
Templates
Instead of writing every email, you can prepare templates and the whole email will be ready by just one click.
Filtering
This is a very useful tool. Just like you filter in excel sheets, you can filter your contacts by any property that you have in your CRM. Imagine that you want to filter only contacts that were born in January 1997. If you have a date of birth for all of your contacts, you will be able to get this data.
Track record
For each contact you can have a very precise track record.
Source
How did you get to the contact (does it come from social media ads, from organic search, manually, who made this contact manually).
Insight
If your CRM is integrated with your website, if your contact accepts cookies, you can get full insight into what pages are most interesting to him/her.
Record
Every email, call, note, task – everything is stored in CRM. So, if the person responsible for CRM in your company decides to change job, the next one who is taking over can have all the details ready in one place.
Tasks delegation
If there is a team of people working on the CRM, it is possible to delegate certain tasks to different operators. By using this tool, you can be sure that no task is forgotten and that every customer gets the service he/she deserves.
Statistics
Since you have the possibility to send marketing emails, you have clear insight of the delivery, open and click rate. Then you can decide if you need to change the subject line, call to action…
Meeting bookings
This is very important for sales departments. Instead of sending 5 emails back and forth in order to agree about a meeting, simply send a booking link to your prospect and let him decide what suits him best.
Deal flow
Is your prospect in the initial stage, open for a deal, did you close the deal, how much the deal is valuable to your business…
By listing all these benefits, I am just thinking now.
A good CRM covers you no matter how many contacts you have and what are your demands in your communications with customers (members, contacts).
If you are communicating one on one or with all of your contacts. If you are missing something, most likely your CRM is not the best one. Try another one.
Which platform is the best?
This depends on your needs. You can google this information and become even more confused. Of course you cannot try all of them and then decide.
I tried a quite number of CRMs, so I will simply share with you my favourite.
We developed it with the partner software development company and we simply implemented all features we found in various CRMs, put them in one platform and made it affordable for everyone.
It represents exactly what we are standing for: Systemize, Synchronize and Scale.
THE ALL-IN-ONE PLATFORM TO GROW YOUR BUSINESS!
