What is CRM and why every business needs it

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From product-centric to customer-centric mindset, whether your business is in traditional fields such as energy exploitation and agriculture production or in newly emerging fields such as e-commerce and ride-hailing, customer service has more and more been proven to be the key of a business’ longevity. The unwritten secret to success is to treat all customers as if your world revolves around them.

Staff members who have the privilege to meet customers face-to-face in your company such as market researchers, salespeople and PR executives could spend thousands of hours approaching, connecting and maintaining a relationship with your business’ customers.

Each file of a customer, including basic information their name, age, gender, education, career choice, likes and dislikes, geographic location and past encounters with your company, adds up to a gigantic database that is more valuable to your business strategy than anything else. You cannot understand your customers any better without your hard-earned database.

As a result, the organization of your database – how you manage to store and gain access to such data – is the hinge of your business understanding towards your dear customers. How to efficiently and effectively manage your customer database and customer relationship? The answer lies in CRM.

What is CRM

CRM stands for customer relationship management. CRM is a software system solution that gives business owners the freedom of managing and processing customer data so as to maintain your relationship with a large number of customers and to fetch customer insights that would further improve customer service.

Majority of market leaders chose to have their own CRM system customized for their company based on their unique demand instead of choosing a pre-built CRM platform since each business possesses different issues and organizational structures.

A CRM system built per request is beneficial to a business due to security reasons since it is a must to protect the confidentiality of customer data. A well-respected business is a business who pays great attention to customer private information and commits to not revealing such discreet information for profit reasons.

Unilever: The market leader had their own CRM system tailored named SAP CRM, which allows them to improve call center’s quick response and problem-solving.

”It enables faster response time to queries and needs raised by consumers, provides for effective maintenance of customer database, and gives easy access to customer information for analysis and strategy development”, Efren Samonte Commercial Director, Unilever Philippines asserted.

Zara: The ‘hotshot’ Europe-based fast fashion brand utilized their custom-made CRM to track customer preferences and sales. Each customer who ever made a transaction with Zara would have a profile including their birthday, phone number and past purchases. This makes maintaining a close relationship with customers’ super smooth for Zara since fashion buying is about understanding customers’ needs as if you – a business owner – is their close friend.

Zara’s CRM system was developed with a new feature called digital assistants or DAs which store customer input and allow designers to map out next season’s style and rebuy existing orders based on customers’ request.

What CRM offers

So you wish to up your business’s ante in the game of positive and long-term customer relationship? Learn what a CRM system can benefit your business performance.

– Boost data collection

Time equals money times efforts at the right timing. Statistics and real-time information tracking help business owners and customer service representatives to gain access to each customer’s profile with a little lead given by asking the customer one or two questions before proposing solutions that satisfy customer experience. Difficult customers offer you the greatest chance of learning about them, so keeping tracking of their demands and feedback on their experience using your service can improve your sales and marketing teams’ performance, and in turn, sales performance.

A custom-design CRM system also helps you as a business owner to fast monitor customer feedback and save past interaction between your business and the customer such as call logs, emails and past purchases based on their preferences, making your future and potential encounters with customers a more satisfactory experience.

– Further manager your social platforms

Instead of micromanaging each social platform in a different place, Designveloper’s customer-design CRM software can enable the presence of your social posts in one platform, therefore, you can have a better comparison among your choice of social sites and make faster minor decisions in social activities and social interaction with potential customers.

– Forecast upcoming sales volume efficiently

Based on past sales performance on a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly basis as well as current marketing trends and customers’ preferences that you already have acquired thanks to your custom-built CRM system, you can predict the upcoming sales performance. This also can help you make necessary changes to your overall business goals and make adjusts to a more attainable target or KPI of your campaign.

– Further understand who your customers are

Basic yet private information extracted from your customers such as demographics, shopping preferences, transaction logs and past interaction with customer support system, you can build a near-perfect portrait of who your customer is and thereby, allows you to put yourself into their shoes to understand where their demands come from. This should be the top priority for your business, especially if you adopt a customer-centric business target.