Why Does My Business Need A Customer Relationship Management System?

Introduction

Today's businesses are actually a complicated mesh of relationships that seem to get more and more complicated with each passing day. Add to this, the interaction and association that your business is required to maintain with your customers and you will find that the situation can go askew any moment.

In the good old days, you perhaps could remember your customers right in your head, but this does not seem to be possible anymore. As your business grows, your clientele grows alongside, so you need much more than your memory to handle it all. A modern panacea for this problem is the Customer Relationship Management System (CRM), and in a few moments, you will appreciate the advantages of this system.

One of the easiest ways to grow your customers is not to lose them. Simply put, a good CRM system helps you bridge the gap between winning customers and losing them. In a scenario where the CRM market is predicted to be a $36 billion market by 2017 (Gartner), let us discuss some of the reasons why you will need a CRM system for your business:

Recalling From Human Memory Can Be Poor

As business builds up along with more customers, it becomes difficult to handle all the tasks and events that are associated with them. Surely, if you can remember it all in your head then that’s fine, but in practice, it does not work out that way. At some point in time, you need to organize clients and allow a computer to take over. Fortunately, technology is around to help you succeed. You can easily procure a CRM System to store and manage hundreds of clients while the computer handles the task of recalling customers and associated events. Without a CRM System, you would really limit the business that you can do.

Easier Access to Statistics and Figures

In order to remain competitive in business, you need figures to substantiate your decisions. For these reasons, 65% of businesses go in for a CRM within the first five years of their business. (Capterra’s CRM Infographic) For example, you might want to know the number of successful projects you completed in the last year and you would like to justify the expenditures for the next year. It’s quite possible that you cannot remember such figures off hand. It is common-sense that you cannot conjure up such figures in crucial business meetings where you need to validate these figures. With a CRM System, you can obtain access to many different figures and metrics on many aspects of your business. You also get the ability to obtain specific reports that can vindicate your position.

Better than relying solely on Email

You also cannot depend on your inbox as the perfect solution for your customer related issues. You might think that you can easily filter and search for past emails, but in practice, this does not work either. In case you are mobile and require your email to be synced on all your devices, then you may be in for trouble. If your inbox swells to an unimaginable size then you might start having problems with storage space. Additionally, keeping track of events becomes increasingly compounded as you become besieged with problems such as keeping your team informed of the latest developments and even lost communications. Such methods only lead to a loss in productivity; hence, many top performing companies (53%) are investing in CRM so that they can drive sales productivity.

Improved Access to Customer History

With a CRM System, you can easily remember the history associated with a particular contact and the communication string associated with it. A CRM System will easily keep a log of all these conversations in one place so that you can always go back and see how things have progressed. You can easily check customer feedback and if a customer was satisfied in dealing with you. Alternatively, you can easily determine what has made him or her upset or dissatisfied. You can easily check the communication and correspondence between your company and the client and see the reasons for dissatisfaction yourself. Thus, it does not come as a surprise that around 74% of CRM users said that their CRM systems enabled improved access to customer data in a poll 2014 poll (source Ringlead).

No Hassles of Lost Data

With a professional web-based CRM System system at your service, the odds that you will ever lose your data are minimal. Compare this to incidents like a stolen laptop or a lost pen drive. Between a desktop based CRM and a web CRM, it is preferable to choose the former as regular data backups will ensure that your data remains safe and you can avoid problems related to data loss.

Enhanced Integration and Customer Satisfaction

Your CRM system helps you to be organized by integrating your email, calendars, tasks and such in one place so that you can access your information from a device connected to the Internet. From here, you can easily connect the dots and make your organization and business grow. A crucial parameter is also customer satisfaction. It is a common saying that a satisfied customer will share a customer with two – three people, but dissatisfied customers will share their lament with eight – ten people. Since the customer is always right, it was discovered in a poll that 47% of CRM users said that customer satisfaction was significantly impacted by their CRM in 2015 (Capterra’s CRM Infographic).

Conclusion

Like many people around the world, you too might be obsessed to make your business grow. Investing in a CRM system will not only help your business become organized and you will begin to see success. Get going with a well-structured and systematic customer management system in place.