Introduction
Customer relationship management software CRM is software designed for a use by a company to manage its interactions with customers and clients, both current and prospective. The CRM today is a very popular strategy among the companies and aims at synchronizing and organize various business processes through the use of technology. CRM was principally designed for sales activities, but finds a more varied applicability in the fields of marketing, customer service and technical support today. The goals of Customer relationship management software CRM is to win new clients and retain the old ones while adding value to the service provided and at the same time cut down on costs and time required for marketing and client services.
History
The Customer relationship management software CRM software can provide various advantages to the organization. Those are of increased quality and efficiency, reduction in overall costs, decision support, enterprise ability and thus overall increase in profitability. Today more and more companies are turning towards Customer relationship management software CRM to manage their customer relationships. CRM technology is offered on and on demand or as a Software as a Service (SaaS). The software as a service (SaaS) is often a web based tool using cloud computing technology. The advantages of cloud based software over the others is that the pricing is based on number of subscriptions and it also eliminates the need of the client company to procure additional hardware that might be required to run the other types of software.
Features
The Customer relationship management software CRM today exists in various forms and types. Those can be for Sales Force Automation (SFA), Marketing, Appointment and Recruiting, Analytics and even Collaboration. Sales Force Automation (SFA) is aimed at streamlining of the sales process. It aims at minimizing the time spent by an executive on each phase of a sales process and thus enable fewer representatives to manage the clients of a company. Customer relationship management software CRM for Marketing might help the company in identifying and target potential clients. A vital element in marketing systems is the ability to track multiple channels of promotion through a single tool. Those channels could be email, social media, telephone and even webinars, seminars etc. Appointment and recruiting are Human Resource activities and it has been seen that Customer relationship management software CRM has been effective in the company to hire the right kind of resource, internally or externally for an upcoming project. Analytics and collaboration are relatively new application areas of CRM. Relevant analytics features are often interwoven into the products for sales, marketing and service. Collaboration aims at collective inputs of the employees in a company to promote innovation and new business ideas. Today Social media is also increasingly influencing the decision making in an organization and are actively integrated into the CRM software.
Tips and comments
Two types of Customer relationship management software CRM based on its customization exist today: Horizontal and Vertical. Horizontal CRM manufacturers offer very little customization and are cheap to buy, but has been seen to be expensive on the longer run. Vertical CRM offer maximum customization on the various aspects of a function in a company. They might be expensive to buy but has been seen to be cost effective in the longer run. This is because of its relative ease of usage and better functionality over the horizontal products.
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