How CRM Benefits Can Change Your Company
There are a lot of CRM benefits, and all of them have the power to help your business achieve more success.
CRM. It’s an abbreviation of customer relationship management. It is a term that anybody that has had a business or has worked in the sales or marketing department of a company is familiar with. It entails gathering, storing, and analyzing data about customers, their purchasing trends, and interactions with each one of them. By doing so, a company can learn more about the people they are serving to keep them satisfied.
However, those things would not be possible if they are wholly manual operations. In fact, they are assisted by technologies these days. CRM has its own special software that goes by the same name. It is now the largest software market, a title that database management systems held previously. This can be seen in the numbers reported by Statista: CRM revenue in the U.S. was projected to hit $17.7 billion and in 2021, that is expected to increase to $21.1 billion.
That is not surprising because there is much that a business can gain from using a CRM software. In order to more specifically answer “how can CRM help a business”, we’ve taken a closer look at some of the most important benefits below.
1. Visual Pipeline
People have a propensity to process and retain information better when it is visual compared to when it is verbal or auditory. Visual learning statistics cited by Inc.com also show that people only remember 20% of the information they read when no visuals are available. However, when the info is paired with an appropriate image, individuals retain 65% of it even after three days, as shared by HubSpot.
65% of people retain oral information when paired with a visual cue three days after they learn it.
That is why top CRM software with visual pipeline are advantageous for your company. They can tell many objectives workers are hitting and how much progress they are making towards them. On top of that, they can use it to keep track of tasks and to determine which ones they need to focus on at a certain time. Since these are all visual, employees are more likely to remember what they need to work on during the day or the week.
2. Stay on Top of Trends
How does a CRM increase sales? Since a CRM is a mine for customer information, it can show trends in their purchasing behavior. However, most managers are accustomed to generating reports at the end of the week or the month, which means that it could be too late to capitalize on a trend. But with a CRM, you can detect sales shifts immediately since they can show on the dashboard. A close look at the sales graphs can tell you whether particular products are becoming popular for a certain group of people or in a specific area.
By staying on top of trends, you can keep your company informed and in pace with customers’ needs and wants. This is beneficial because this lets you determine the number of items you have to keep in stock to avoid losing potential sales. Thus, you can increase your revenue.
3. Track Customers
Among the more common CRM use cases examples is customer tracking. This is an essential aspect of a business because acquiring a new customer is 16 times more expensive than retaining a current one, as Annex Cloud cites in an article. On top of that, it can cost companies as much as $1 trillion when customers choose to take their business elsewhere due to irrelevant offerings and other reasons. On average, that is $243 per consumer lost.
Companies can lose as much as $1 trillion if customers stop buying from them and go to their competitors instead.
By using a CRM for lead management and tracking customers, your business can make sure that they stay on the sales pipeline even after their first purchase. This means keeping them engaged and meeting their after-sales expectations to ensure that they are satisfied with your services and continue to patronize your business.
Additionally, a CRM can assist you in detecting red flags with concerned customers. As a result, you can mitigate any losses and keep them and their future transactions.
4. Customer-centric Operations
The customer should be at the heart of your business. After all, they are what keeps your operations going. With a CRM in your technology toolbox, you can put the customer at the center. You can enhance your help desk support and customer service by making sure that agents have access to the right information when they need it. Therefore, they can resolve issues promptly and successfully to prevent further problems from cropping up.
CRMs also allow for better personalization. With it, you can move beyond just using the customer’s names during interactions–you can take it up a notch by tailoring your interactions according to their preferences or at least by talking with them about products and services that could actually be of use to them.
5. Optimized Marketing
Though types of CRM software and their benefits may differ, there is one thing they have in common: information. They can store and process plenty of information about customers, capabilities that come in handy when it comes to marketing.
By generating reports and studying trends, you could read your customers’ behaviors and use them to your business’s favor. What does that mean, exactly? It means that you would be able to tell when is the right time for you to push certain product categories or specific items to consumers.
More than that, a CRM would allow you to create customer segments for more personalized marketing emails. This way, you can provide targeted suggestions and promotions to increase your chances of converting them or of getting them to make repeat purchases.
6. Valuable Insights
Apart from buying trends and marketing segments, numerous CRM software examples offer valuable insights. You can get them by running a general report or by creating a custom one that lets you take an eagle-eye-view of your business. This would show you how you are performing in different aspects so that you could take the appropriate measures to mitigate issues or to elevate your strengths.
Furthermore, a CRM application assists you in your decision-making. With the information it can provide, you do not have to make guesses when faced with choices. Instead, you can take your business down the right path based on the data you have gathered and analyzed through your CRM.
7. Mobile Business
Did you know that businesses can gain an average of $11,000 annually per telecommuting employee? Meanwhile, telecommuters themselves would be able to save between $2,000 and $7,000 per annum. On top of that, both parties can contribute to the reduction of greenhouse gases, shares Global Workplace Analytics.
Telecommuting and mobile work are now possible because of mobile devices, mobile data, and the prevalence of Wi-Fi. They are also happening because of applications and software that support work outside of the office. CRM is one of those–though traditionally accessed only from a workstation, it has become easily accessed from the cloud. And more CRM vendors are creating mobile versions of their offerings, making it less tedious for employees to find and view information about customers.
And, of course, having a flexible application can be advantageous to businesses because it means never having to miss an opportunity on the road again.
So, Why Use a CRM?
Why use a CRM with all the other tools out there? It comes down to utility. What we discussed above are only a few ways that CRM can change your business. There are more and you can discover them as you continue using your software. To find out what they are, you have to employ the application on a daily basis and make it your sidekick for every customer-related thing. In this way, you can find new ways that a CRM can help you drive your operations.
