What's CRM?
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. According to Gartner Group, CRM is “a business strategy aimed at making intelligent use of customer data, to create, develop and maintain profitable relationships with customers.” Consequently, a CRM approach demands that all of an enterprise’s customer-facing departments – Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, etc. – work in concert towards a shared vision of the customer so as to increase sales and enhance customer loyalty. In short, raise the company’s competitiveness.
Whatever the economic cycle, the critical goals for your business are the same – increase sales revenues and turnover, improve productivity and profitability, gain greater insight into customer needs and market opportunities, and build a more controllable, transparent organisation. These objectives need to be pursued within a sustainable framework that does not require excessive investment and which will not disrupt the daily operation of your business.
While there is no “magic bullet” to achieve these goals, there is a proven, pragmatic and manageable solution you can adopt immediately – putting CRM at the centre of your organisation with Selligent as your chosen partner. Our experience with over 75,000 users of our application worldwide has demonstrated that CRM does improve business performance within tightly controlled budgetary and time constraints.
So what are the core elements of CRM?
Higher customer satisfaction and loyalty
Competitor activity is constantly eroding your customer base, leading to a need to replace lost customers with new sales. If the customers you most want to keep are the ones you are most at risk of losing – ie, the most profitable and most growable – the future of your business is in jeopardy. But increasing the satisfaction of those key customer groups will improve their loyalty, meaning you keep valuable customers for longer. That gives your business a much brighter future.
Improved sales performance
Sales are the lifeblood of your company. But forecasting and managing the sales process can be difficult. Typically, there is a lack of information about the sales pipeline, it is hard to predict the potential of customers, and tracking leads through to sales is often difficult. CRM introduces processes and technologies that dramatically increase the productivity of your sales force, making their work easier and more rewarding and giving your company more control.
Better access to customer information
The heart of CRM is about recognising who has bought from you, what they have purchased, how they choose to do business with you (i.e. choice of channel), and how much they might buy from you in the future, then using this knowledge to support business performance improvements. Selligent provides heightened access to a consolidated view of your customers without the need for lengthy and expensive data conditioning. Business intelligence and analytical tools then give you the power to understand the dynamics of your customer base.
The result of adopting CRM is to become a high-performance company that is better equipped to meet the challenges of dynamic marketplaces. Through clearer processes and management controls, you can ensure that resources are deployed where they will have the maximum effect. That means retaining the right customers for longer, achieving the full range of potential sales and depth of profitability from customer relationships, and increasing the productivity of your sales, marketing and customer service staff.
