Understand Your Customers Even Better: How CRM Creates A Better Customer Profile

In business, knowing your customer is one of the most important parts of making a big sale and creating a long lasting relationship between your company and the customer. You need to be able to anticipate the customer’s needs and help match products and services that your company provides with the potential needs of the customer. This will make you proactive and make your company much more attractive to the customers that you already have and customers that you want to woo. The customer needs to feel special and they need to feel like you really care about their needs, and if your company can do this, you will generate a lot of customer loyalty. Customer relationship management, or CRM, is the best tool in your arsenal for customer relationships.

What is CRM?

CRM is a comprehensive set of data collection and information portals that allow you to see a complete profile of the customer every time that you interact with that person. With CRM you will never again have to send frantic emails to other departments asking for contact or payment information, and you will be able to see every interaction that customer has ever had with your company. Sales team members will know when a delivery was made late or if there was a problem with the order. The sales team will also be able to push related products to the customer based on things that similar customers have purchased in the past.

What does CRM replace?

With CRM you will be able to replace the vast majority of the office software that you are currently using and you will have all of the features of those programs in your CRM portal. The email portion of the portal will create a customer contact profile available to all departments, and you will be able to see the contact logs with the customer over time. Sales data portals eliminate the need for spreadsheets or other sales tracking software. You can also integrate social media, so your company can interact with your customers on a more personal level.

How long does it take to implement?

This is really a question of how committed you are to the CRM software. CRM works the best when every person in the company is using it to its fullest, and the more vocal you are about adoption and the more forcefully you insist on implementation, the faster your company will adopt the software. CRM is something that your employees will need to see in action before they will buy into it, especially if they have been with the company for a long time and they are used to using other methods to deal with customers. Like any other tool, CRM is useful only when it is being used.

When you use CRM you offer your customers a much better experience and you will be able to convert more sales leads into sales. As a business owner or manager, you will need to stay on top of your team to make sure that they are using the software, but after a few weeks, they will be able to see the benefits, and the CRM software will be adopted fully by your team. With the pace of modern business, time really is money, and CRM speeds up your ability to do business and will make your company more profitable.

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I am Devin Helling and I adopted CRM from SugarCRM about two years ago. Since then I have been thrilled with the level of service that I have received and with the return on my investment dollars.