newsprompt.coCUSTOMER DATABASE SOFTWARE
Customer relationship management (CRM) is an approach to managing a company’s interaction with current and potential future customers. The CRM approach tries to analyse data about customers’ history with a company, to improve business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on customer retention, and ultimately to drive sales growth.
One important aspect of the CRM approach is the systems of CRM that compile information from a range of different communication channels, including a company’s website, telephone, email, live chat, marketing materials, social media, and more. Through the CRM approach and the systems used to facilitate CRM, businesses learn more about their target audiences and how to best cater to their needs. However, adopting the CRM approach may also occasionally lead to favoritism within an audience of consumers, resulting in dissatisfaction among customers and defeating the purpose of CRM.
CRM benefits for customers
With CRM systems customers are served better on day to day process and with more reliable information their demand of self service from companies will decrease. If there is less need to contact with the company for different problems, customer satisfaction level increases. These central benefits of CRM will be connected hypothetically to the three kind of equity that are relationship, value and brand, and in the end to customer equity. Seven benefits were recognized to provide value drivers.
a) Enhanced ability to target profitable customers.
b) Integrated assistance across channels
c) Enhanced sales force efficiency and effectiveness
d) Improved pricing
e) Customized products and services
f) Improved customer service efficiency and effectiveness
g) Individualized marketing messages also called as campaigns
Some of those benefits which are more significant in customer’s satisfaction are as follows:
a) Improve customer services: In general, customers would have some questions, concerns or requests. CRM services provide the ability to a company for producing, allocating and managing requests or something made by customers. For example, call center software, which helps to connect a customer to the manager or person who can best assist them with their existing problem, is one of the CRM abilities that can be implemented to increase efficiency.
b) Increased personalized service or one to one service: Personalizing customer service or one to one service provides companies to improve understanding and gaining knowledge of the customers and also to have better knowledge about their customers’ preferences, requirements and demands.
c) Responsive to customer’s needs: Customers’ situations and needs can be understood by the firms focusing on customer needs and requirements.
d) Customer segmentation: In CRM, segmentation is used to categorize customers, according to some similarity, such as industry, job or some other characteristics, into similar groups. Although these characteristics, can be one or more attributes. It can be defined as a subdividing the customers based on already known good discriminator.
e) Improve customization of marketing: Meaning of customization of marketing is that, the firm or organization adapt and change its services or products based on presenting a different and unique product or services for each customer. With the purpose of ensuring that customer needs and requirements are met Customization is used by the organization. Companies can put investment in information from customers and then customize their products or services to maintain customer interests.
f) Multichannel integration: Multichannel integration shows the point of co creation of customer value in CRM. On the other hand, a company’s skill to perform multichannel integration successfully, is heavily dependent on the organization’s ability getting together customer information from all channels and incorporate it with other related information.
g) Time saving: CRM will let companies to interact with customers more frequently, by personalized message and communication way which can be produced rapidly and matched on a timely basis, and finally they can better understand their customers and therefore look forward to their needs.
h) Improve customer knowledge: Firms can make and improve products and services through the information from tracking (e.g. via website tracking) customer behaviour to customer tastes and needs. CRM could contribute to a competitive advantage in improving firm’s ability of customer information collecting to customize products and services according to customer needs.
CRM systems in practice
Call centers
As well as tracking, recording and storing customer information, CRM systems in call centers codify the interactions between company and customers by using analytics and key performance indicators to give the users information on where to focus their marketing and customer service. The intention is to maximize average revenue per user, decrease churn rate and decrease idle and unproductive contact with the customers. CRM software can also be used to identify and reward loyal customers over a period of time.
Growing in popularity is the idea of gamifying, or using game design elements and game principles in a non-game environment such as customer service environments. The gamification of customer service environments includes providing elements found in games like rewards and bonus points to customer service representatives as a method of feedback for a job well done. The repetitive act of answering support calls all day can be draining, even for the most enthusiastic customer service representative. When agents are bored with their work, they become less engaged and less motivated to do their jobs well, making it likely for them to make mistakes. Gamification tools can motivate agents by tapping into their desire for rewards, recognition, achievements, and competition
Contact center automation
Contact center automation, the practice of having an integrated system that coordinates contacts between an organization and the public, is designed to reduce the repetitive and tedious parts of a contact center agent’s job. Automation prevents this by having pre-recorded audio messages that help customers solve their problems. For example, an automated contact center may be able to re-route a customer through a series of commands asking him or her to select a certain number in order to speak with a particular contact center agent who specializes in the field in which the customer has a question. Software tools can also integrate with the agent’s desktop tools to handle customer questions and requests. This also saves time on behalf of the employees
Social media
Social CRM involves the use of social media and technology to engage and learn from consumers. Because the public, especially among young people, has increasingly using social networking sites, companies use these sites to draw attention to their products, services and brands, with the aim of building up customer relationships to increase demand.
Some CRM systems integrate social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to track and communicate with customers. These customers also share their own opinions and experiences with a company’s products and services, giving these firms more insight. Therefore, these firms can both share their own opinions and also track the opinions of their customers.
Enterprise feedback management software platforms, such as Confirmit, Medallia, and Satmetrix, combine internal survey data with trends identified through social media to allow businesses to make more accurate decisions on which products to supply
Location-based services
CRM systems can also include technologies that create geographic marketing campaigns. The systems take in information based on a customer’s physical location and sometimes integrates it with popular location-based GPS applications. It can be used for networking or contact management as well to help increase sales based on location.
CRM systems for business-to-business transactions
According to a Sweeney Group definition, CRM is “all the tools, technologies and procedures to manage, improve, or facilitate sales, support and related interactions with customers, prospects, and business partners throughout the enterprise”. The quote assumes that CRM is involved in every Business-to-Business (B2B) transaction. Despite the general notion that CRM systems were created for the customer-centric businesses, they can also be applied to B2B environments to streamline and improve customer management conditions. For the best level of CRM operation in a B2B environment, the software must be personalized and delivered at individual levels.
The main differences between business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business CRM systems concern aspects like sizing of contact databases and length of relationships. Business-to-business companies tend to have smaller contact databases than business-to-consumer, the volume of sales in business-to-business is relatively small. There are fewer figure propositions in business-to-business, but in some cases, they cost a lot more than business-to-consumer items and relationships in business-to-business environment are built over a longer period of time. Furthermore, business-to-business CRM must be easily integrated with products from other companies. Such integration enables the creation of forecasts about customer behavior based on their buying history, bills, business success, etc. An application for a business-to-business company must have a function to connect all the contacts, processes and deals among the customers segment and then prepare a paper. Automation of sales process is an important requirement for business-to-business products. It should effectively manage the deal and progress it through all the phases towards signing. Finally, a crucial point is personalization. It helps the business-to-business company to create and maintain strong and long-lasting relationship with the customer.
