In a business climate where acquiring new customers and retaining existing clients is becoming increasingly critical, an agile CRM system is the answer to bridge the gap between business processes and managing customer expectations. CRM can be broadly defined as a set of processes to manage the company’s interaction with clients and sales prospects. It often involves technology to organize, automate, and synchronize sales, marketing, customer service and technical support. The goal of every organization is usually to create a strong bond between the organization and its clients. You can learn more from the Salesforce online certification.
In short, customer should always be the prime focus for any organization.
The 3 important aspects of Customer Relationship Management are:
#1 Retaining
Most organizations spend a lot of time and money in their attempts to acquire new customers. At a time when customer acquisition is rising, the organizations should be more proactive and innovative in retaining their clients. The longer customers engage with you, the more they spend on you. Competition can replicate your offerings but never the experience you provide.
Here’s why customers usually leave you for competition:
- 68% leave because they are unhappy with the service they receive.
- 14% are unhappy with the product or service.
- 9% decide to use a competitor.
#2 Acquire
Customer acquisition is very important for the growth of any company. A large number of customers are always on the borderline. They are called fence sitters and could easily swing over to your competitor’s side. You ideally don’t want be losing these people because it is very hard to win them back from competition. Fence sitters generally don’t have too much of an idea about your competitors as well so they are relatively soft targets.
#3 Extend
When we think about CRM, we always look at how a CRM can help enhances a company’s value to its client. For example, when a cosmetic brand decides to launch a new product, they don’t directly flood the market with their products. Rather they reach out to their few loyal customers first because they know that would surely buy the product and their feedback is very critical. CRM helps us in identifying such customers.
Why CRM?
Companies always had data around who is buying and who is selling. Couple of decades back, we always had the customer data written in a diary or stored in a spreadsheet but the main drawback was that the data was not reused to get further insights about customers. Also, the focus was not on customer relationship management, rather they had bigger concerns in their supply chains and logistics which were more critical to business.
Different customers might have different problems. One solution can’t solve all of them, and this is precisely where CRM helps us. CRM helps resolve individual customer problems at a micro level. From an organizational point of view, CRM contributes to high revenues by reducing the maintenance cost and time.
Four important benefits of CRM Salesforce are:
- Flawless exchange of information across all customer channels.
- Consistent user experience across all touch points.
- Real time access to all customer information to enable quick decision making.
Additionally, CRM Salesforce also provides personalized products or services based on specific needs and specification. Personalized products or service is a very important matrix around which customer satisfaction is measured. A dissatisfied customer has higher chances of being disloyal.
Two types of CRM systems:
On-premise/Traditional System (Siebel)
On-premise would mean that a company would have to install servers, networks, systems and will have to own all of this to get their CRM systems working. This is how typically a Siebel system would work. The main drawback of an on-remise system is that a lot of time and money had to be invested upfront.
On-demand/Cloud-based System (SFDC)
In a cloud based system or SFDC, you don’t own anything. All you need is a laptop, internet and saleforce.com licenses. As a company all you need to do is buy the licenses because servers, networks, database and infrastructure are all maintained by the company called Salesforce. We have many cloud based applications today like google apps, cisco, citrix etc.
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing might sound something really complex for many people but it is nothing but internet-based computing, where you would be using a network of remote servers hosted on the internet to store manage and process data rather than local server or a personal computer.
Three basic benefits of cloud computing are:
Multi-tenant: Multi-tenant is an architecture in which a single instance of software applications serves multiple customers. Each customer is called a tenant. Tenants may be given the privilege to customize some parts of the application. Multi tenancy can be economical because software development and maintenance costs are shared.
Pay per use: You don’t pay for all the services available, but you just pay for the services you require. This would help in reducing the overall cost and you would be having an estimate of how much you would be spending at the end of the year.
Scalable: Scalability is one of the rich features that cloud computing provides. Cloud Computing offers organizations the ability to scale their computing resources as and when required.
Types of cloud:
Sales Cloud
It’s about selling products to your customers and building a relationship with them. Sales cloud tracks all the customer information and interaction in one place. It also helps in nurturing a lead till they are sales ready, and also helps in converting a simple lead into a quality lead.
Marketing Cloud
It is a collection of cloud-based marketing services that make internal marketing functions more efficient and external marketing programs more effective. It’s about understanding your customers’ needs, selling them what they require, and also using channelized marketing. Marketing cloud also helps in setting up campaigns and analyze results of the campaign.
