Business Management Software for CRM Should Support a Customer Focused Business Strategy

Business management software for CRM should be aligned to an overall customer focused business strategy that you have carefully developed. Your customer sees you as a single entity. If this entity provides different experiences through its different customer interfaces, such as face to face communications, phone and email communications, website copy and customer service, the customer is likely to be confused and irritated.

Key Functions Helped by CRM

In CRM, there is a focus on customer lifecycle and customer analysis.

• Lead Management: Leads can be generated through various sources, such as your website, Web research, trade shows, seminars and direct mails. Generated leads are assessed for quality and assigned to concerned salespersons or sections. Responses and results are accumulated for analysis and learning.
• Customer Acquisition: Converting a quality lead into a customer typically involves careful tracking and follow up through different stages. In addition to tracking the follow up actions, CRM software accumulates data on successes and failures that can be used for strategy modification or formulation.
• Customer Retention: Once a customer is acquired, the customer account must be managed in a way that would keep the customer coming back. The routines of delivery, billing and payments must be managed. Requests and complaints of the customer must be recorded and responded to.
• Additional Business Generation: Customer purchases and behavior can be analysed and opportunities for additional sales can be identified. The opportunities so identified by the explored and results tracked.

Customer Relationship Management Software Provides Technology Support

CRM software provides technology support for your customer focused strategy. A good business management software for CRM will have facilities to all the activities indicated above. It would have facilities for:

• Easy capture or import of leads from various sources
• Qualifying leads based on relevant factors
• Specifying rules for assigning leads to sales force, and automatic assignments
• Tracking identified prospects through different conversion stages
• Managing customer accounts - quotes, sales, billing, payment, purchase history, additional sales opportunities
• Keeping track of customer communications and responses - emails, requests, complaints and referrals
• Analyzing all the details to generate actionable information such as past purchase behavior and preferences profile

In addition to recording customer interactions and analyzing these, CRM would also typically have facilities for generating sales forecasts and quotas that seek to exploit the insights about each customer gained as above.

CRM Extends Beyond Customer Relations

While the focus is on immediate customer relations and customer behavior analysis, CRM actually extends to other areas. The customer experience can be affected by your vendor management, HR policies, training and development, internal processes and so on. Unless attention is paid to all these other aspects of management, your CRM goals can fail to materialize.

CRM is thus more than just installing business management software for CRM.