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 opportunitiesHow 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" Let's take a look at the advantages that a CRM or Customer Relationship Management system can bring.1. Shared or distributed dataAs companies realize that customer relationships are happening on many levels (not just through customer service or a web presence), they start to understand the need for sharing all available data throughout the organization.
A CRM system is an enabler for making informed decisions and follow-up, on all the different levels.2. Cost reductionA strong point in Customer Relationship Management is that it is making the customer a partner in your business, not just a subject. As customers are doing their own order entry, and are empowered to find the info they need to come to a buy decision, less order entry and customer support staff is needed.3. Better Customer ServiceAll data concerning interactions with customers is centralized.
The customer service department can greatly benefit from this, because they have all the information they need at their fingertips. No need to guess, no need to ask the customer for the n-th time. And through the use of push-technology, customer service reps can lead the customer towards the information they need. And, most of the time, the customer can do this on their own, as the CRM system (remember, the 3 P's) is more and more able to anticipate the need of the customer. The customer experience is greatly enhanced.4.
Increased Customer SatisfactionThe customer feels that he is more "part of the team" instead of just a subject for sales and marketing (the proverbial number), customer service is better, his needs are anticipated. There is no doubt that customer satisfaction will go up. If the products sold exceed the customers expectation, of course, no CRM system can help you with shoddy products. In my opinion, the term statisfaction is a contaminated. Many companies think that if customers are satisfied that this is a good predictor for repeat business.
However, this is not the case. Only delighted customers have a great level of loyalty.
