Question

Define customer relationship management and explain its associated tools and levels of relationships.

Answer 1

CRM or Customer Relationship Management is a strategy for managing an organisation's relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. A CRM system helps companies stay connected to customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability.

CRM enables a business to deepen its relationships with customers, service users, colleagues, partners and suppliers. Forging good relationships and keeping track of prospects and customers is crucial for customer acquisition and retention, which is at the heart of a CRM’s function. You can see everything in one place — a simple, customizable dashboard that can tell you a customer’s previous history with you, the status of their orders, any outstanding customer service issues, and more.

CRM is now considered the nucleus of business, a primary driver of sales and revenues. Sales teams use it to automate sales processes, store in one easily accessible location all contact information and interaction, and solidify customer relationships. These are all important in the context of the customer lifecycle as you can see in the visual below. CRM tools can be used to permeate, influence, and affect all the phases in the customer lifecycle (see visual below) from establishing initial awareness to conversion as buying customers, up to the stage of reinforcing loyalty and winning them to your side as advocates and promoters of your business.

Businesses hold such importance to CRM tools that they are now the biggest software market in the world, growing at a steady pace and predicted to top $80 billion by 2025. One way to select a good system for your needs is by tracking CRM trends and shortlisting platforms that include these modern features. Another way is to read our in-depth posts and articles, and reviews of popular CRM tools.

HubSpot CRM is a free CRM tool for business that still packs a punch when it comes to robust and effective features. These functionalities include social media, customized views, company database, drag-and-drop communicator, and website, phone, and email integration. You can get started with this application quickly and need not change your existing workflow. The product offers the essential basic features and does not confuse users with complex bells and whistles. For these reasons, it is suitable for small and large businesses in any industry and niche

Salesforce Essentials allows you to track all customer details in one place so that you can nurture more leads. Then, you can utilize its main modules such as sales data, marketing automation, lead management, partner management, and contact manager to track these leads and convert them into profitable deals. One of the highlights is your team can use this app to be productive anywhere – in the office or field. The mobile apps for iOS and Android offer real-time data from dashboards as well as custom reports.

The highlight of Freshsales is it is a single contact management system that you can utilize to control thousands of leads. The application not only offers the standard tools of legacy CRM solutions but also a few unique ones of its own. These advanced features include affiliate management, call routing, call recording, and auto-dialers.

Pipedrive is another excellent CRM tool for business and a strong contender on our list of 10 best CRM software tools. It organizes your leads in a manner that gives you a clear overview of your sales process and empowers you to focus on important deals. Plus, you can utilize this solution to efficiently manage your organization’s sales pipeline. In fact, you can switch modules on and off as per your needs without any effect on your service quality. Key features include sales reporting, timeline view, simple data import and export, contact history, and email integration.

One of the main benefits of customer relationship management tools is that they enable you to focus all the contact channels customers may use to contact you in one dashboard. You centralize information gathered by different team members during customer contact, share any pertinent information, and enable the customer to feel recognized. There is nothing more annoying than calling a company, getting transferred to different people, and having to explain your needs all over again. Zendesk helps keep your team informed regarding contact with customers made by other team members. Therefore, it helps reduce repetition of effort and improves response times to customer queries through workflow scheduling. This customer relationship management tool is cloud based, so you don’t have to install any complicated software, and your team members can access the system from home or while on the move. One element of the Zendesk suite enables you to set up self-help systems, so customers can browse a set of solutions without having to call in for technical support.