What is CRM (Customer Relationship Management)?

CRM is a tool that allows companies to track their customers, not only the current but also future customers. If we talk about any company either it’s a product based company or service based company. Each of these companies needs four departments.

• Marketing: They do the advertisement if there is a new product launch or there is anything they take care of the advertisement and we are all aware of it.
• Sales: Sales takes care of product sales.
• Orders: orders which we get for a particular product will be taken care of by the orders management team.
• Support: If there is an issue with the product for ex: if someone gets a handset and that is not working properly or having any technical issues that can be handled by the support team members.

Now, there are many CRM tools available in the market right now, why you need CRM for your business? And what are the reasons that it’s cloud-based?

What is a cloud-based platform?

Cloud is everything & anything that is remotely stored and processed without having to make hardware changes in our local systems. We all know the three V concepts of cloud VOLUME, VELOCITY & VARIETY. For Ex: Just like your Gmail account, all your emails are not stored in your computer hard-disks they are all stored on the cloud. You just need to have a username & password to access it.

Similarly, CRM is a cloud-based technology where you don’t need to have any physical infrastructure to collect, store, process customer’s data & queries. When nothing is stored in your premises you don’t have to worry about application servers, databases servers, and neither you need to worry about maintaining them. Everything will be handled by the cloud and you just need your login id & password to connect to your CRM account.

Compare to other methodologies CRM tools are very low cost. We basically don’t have to purchase heavy licenses for CRM. It caters to the need of every organization form the small, medium to big size enterprise needs.

If we talk about other CRM tools the cost of buying these tools are very huge. Only big enterprises can afford those. But whereas few CRM caters the need of each level company from the small to large.

It also follows the model as Pay-as-You-Go means, I can start a company tomorrow with five employees and I can buy five licenses. I don’t have to buy everything up front. CRM tools gives me the opportunity on the way as you go. Now, let's say tomorrow onwards or after two years my company became huge and thousands of employees are working with me so, based on that, I can go ahead and buy another thousand licenses based on my requirement.

There are different additions of CRM tools are  available

• Individuals
• Groups 
• Professional 
• Unlimited

You can use any one of these as per your requirement. You can also use Salesforce developer addition which is free of cost addition, where you don’t have to pay anything. As it’s not a trial version so you can use it for a lifetime.

CRM in the cloud

CRM tools has different clouds available like Service Clouds, Sales Clouds, Marketing Clouds like below

Basically, you need to buy one license for one user, so based on how many users are there you need to have those many licenses.

Benefits of CRM

The core of everything we do is the customer. In order for us to take care of our customers, we have to care about their needs. that's why we invest in the team which ensures the customer's satisfaction.

Improved Relationships with customers: It helps you perform the marketing servicing & meeting, basically the needs of your customers in a better way.

Optimized marketing

 CRM helps to understand the need of your customers & their behavior as well.

• CRM allows you to know the appropriate time to introduce a new product or services
• Identify profitable customer for targeting them at the right time
• Not waste the time at ones that are not profitable

Increased Sales

 It increases your sales to 99.9% using impactful strategies

• With the information of customers that you have, you will be able to design the marketing campaign. This will be more effective than the last time.

Enhanced Communication

CRM allows your employees to serve your customers with the best high level of service by having access to the same level of information. When your customers have one point of contact, there may be a chance that the contact is busy with some other client and your current client need to contact a new person. In this case, many customers feel exhausted to explain the problem again and again to the new person. Then you might end with an unhappy customer. CRM helps to have detailed information of the customers so that whoever is using it have the same set of information to serve the customer in a better way.

Saving your customer time

You satisfy your customer with faster execution of while avoiding unnecessary time lapse. Quicker responses to customers issues and problems make them satisfied and happy with the services. With help of CRM, you can accelerate the response time while having deep information about the previous purchase and issues related to that.

Multiple team efficiency

Automatically stored data allows you to communicate with your customers in a better way. By providing access to emails, calendars, phone call, services histories in one quickly accessible place. Teams will be equipped with all the information at the same time. Teams can store, process, and fetch data from multiple ends using a single system.

Analytics data & reporting

It provides accurate data for better understanding and analysis. Easy integration with other tools and plugins and automatic report generation gives you the ability to maximize your time in a better way.

There are lots of benefits of using CRM software to promote any business.