What is CRM (Customer Relationship Management)?

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a system for managing a company’s interactions with current and future customers. It often involves using technology to organize, automate and synchronize sales, marketing, customer service, and technical support. CRM (customer relationship management) is a term for methodologies, software and Internet capabilities to help manage enterprise customer relationships.

What is the Characteristics of CRM (Customer Relationship Management)?

Relationship management is a customer-oriented feature with service response based on customer input, one-to-one solutions to customers’ requirements, direct online communications with customer and customer service centers that help customers solve their questions.
Sales force automation: This function can implement sales promotion analysis, automate tracking of a client’s account history for repeated sales or future sales, and also coordinate sales, marketing, call centers, and retail outlets in order to realize the sales force automation.
Use of technology: This feature is about following the technology trend and skills of value delivering using technology to make “up-to-the-second” customer data available. It applies data warehouse technology in order to aggregate transaction information, to merge the information with CRM solutions, and to provide KPI (key performance indicators).
Opportunity management: This feature helps the company to manage unpredictable growth and demand and implement a good forecasting model to integrate sales history with sales projections.

How to Implementing CRM (Customer Relationship Management) to the company?

The following are general guidelines on implementing a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system:

Make a strategic decision on what problems you want your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system to address, what improvements or changes it should bring in the business processes of the organization.
Choose an appropriate project manager. Typically IT will be engaged, however a manager with a customer service/sales and marketing business focus should be involved, as the impact of the project will be mainly on the business side.
Ensure executive sponsorship and top management support.
Empower team members with the required authority to complete the tasks.
Select the correct implementation partner. They must have both vertical and horizontal business knowledge, as well as technical expertise.
Define KPI’s that will measure the project’s success.
Use a phased approach. Work towards long-term enterprise-scale implementation through a series of smaller, phased implementations.

What are the Benefits of CRM (Customer Relationship Management)?

The biggest benefit most businesses realize when moving to a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system comes directly from having all your business data stored and accessed from a single location. Before CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems, customer data was spread out over office productivity suite documents, email systems, mobile phone data and even paper note cards and Rolodex entries. Storing all the data from all departments (e.g., sales, marketing, customer service and HR) in a central location gives management and employees immediate access to the most recent data when they need it. Departments can collaborate with ease, and CRM systems help organization to develop efficient automated processes to improve business processes. Other benefits include a 360-degree view of all customer information, knowledge of what customers and the general market want, and integration with your existing applications to consolidate all business information.

What is the Difference between CRM (Customer Relationship Management) for B2B (Business 2 Business) and B2C (Business 2 Customers)?

B2B and B2C marketing operates differently, that is why they cannot use the same software. All the differences are focused on the approach of these two types of businesses:

B2B companies have smaller contact databases than B2C.
The amount of sales in B2B is relatively small.
In B2B there is less figure propositions, but in some cases they cost a lot more than B2C items.
Relationships in B2B environment are built over a longer time.

B2B operations require special CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solutions that are not the same as for the B2C industry:

B2B industries require specialized CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solutions, which are different from B2C companies’ requirements. This is the main reason for ineffective adoption of applications, despite both B2B and B2C industries having the same aim: to “understand its own customers better”
There must be different CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solutions for industries within the B2B market, because of the special needs of each one. Also there is a demand of designing solutions using special color schemes.
B2B CRM (Customer Relationship Management) must be easily integrated with other companies’ IT-solutions. Such integration enables the creation of forecasts about customer behavior based on their buying history, bills, business success, etc.
An application for a B2B company must have a function to connect all the contacts, processes and deals among the customers segment and then prepare a paper
Automation of sales process is an important requirement for B2B solutions. It should effectively manage the deal and progress it through all the phases towards signing
A crucial point is personalization. It helps the B2B Company to save strong and long-lasting relationships with the customer. To communicate with them more effectively, there should be integration with the email solutions

So, all the B2B applications must be both personalized and be able to establish communication channels for support of customers

What is the Features of CRM (Customer Relationship Management)?

Customer-centric relationship management is used in marketing, customer service and sales, including:

tailored marketing, one-to-one customer service, retaining customers, building brand loyalty, providing information customers actually want, Subscription billing, Rewards.

What is CRM (Customer Relationship Management)?