Today, almost every small and large business relies on a stand-alone, robust CRM. Referred to as customer relationship management software, the system has witnessed shakeups and sea-changes since its arrival. The concept originated during the 1980s, expanded during the 1990s, took shape as a modern CRM during 2000s. Now it has turned into cloud-based, social-mobile-integrated CRM solutions in 2018.
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What do statistics suggest?
When it comes to improving consumer satisfaction and client retention, the concerned software plays a crucial role in managing both aspects. Every small and large enterprise that uses the system reports a positive impact.
According to a report by Gartner Research, the worldwide revenue for the CRM market was $39.5 billion in 2017. Thus, its software market is currently the largest one around the globe. This year, it’s expected to continue leading the software markets and show more than twenty percent growth.
New CRM systems comply with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
All the data management systems that are not in compliance with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) would have to be upgraded during the next few months. So, companies are set to invest more in security consulting, data loss prevention, as well as sales and marketing solutions during the next three years.
Gartner’s research director Bart Willemsen recently interacted with journalists. He shared his opinion regarding why companies need to invest more in CRM during 2018. Willemsen pointed out that all the organizations with poor relationship management software would attract a GDPR sanction as well as a privacy violation. Plus, they would also lose their consumer’s trust.
Cloud and mobile-based systems are in a high demand
These days, more than 87 percent of CRM users use cloud-based platforms. Such systems allow companies to let their employees access the system from any location using a variety of devices. Mobile-based platforms do not just offer convenience, but they improve the company’s productivity by as much as 15 percent.
How much ROI can a company expect from CRM?
Forrester Research had conducted a study to understand how much ROI the customer relationship management software can offer. The results from the concerned research pointed out that small and large organization(S) can expect a whopping 245% ROI.
As a part of the study, the performance of multiple companies with around 2,000 employees was under observation for four months. The organizations were using Microsoft’s Dynamics software. Few months after the installation of the software, the companies reported a 40 percent reduction in customer service labor cost. Some teams showed as much as a 50 percent increase in their productivity. Sales departments in all the companies under observation showed a five percent increase in productivity. The marketing teams managed to save overall $75,000. Total 20 percent of labor cost was saved. On average, every company managed to increase its revenue by 2 percent.
Improving customer engagement factor
As the name suggests, the software solution stores every piece of information about the consumer. This data can help your organization to fine-tune the content that you discuss with your clients. It can help you to up-sell in a better way for the existing consumers while communicating with them.
Inactivity and dissatisfaction are the two prime reasons behind the customer’s decision to leave. With CRM you would be better armed for up-selling products to consumers as per their interests. This would help in keeping the clients satisfied, as well as growing the company’s business. Just make sure that you choose a reputed CRM Software Development Company or a vendor who is into Custom CRM Development to install the system.
Integration with other applications
To get valuable insight about your customers and prospects’ digital body language, adequately integrated marketing automation and CRM is critically important.
Conversion rates and lead quality would increase only if you manage to bridge the gap between sales and marketing. To achieve this, the organization’s staff must be able to share the lead data between different systems quickly. Strategic alignment and collaboration can happen only after integrating CRM with sales and marketing systems.
Even today, some small-scale companies opt for marketing automation without proper CRM in place. Research has already proved that such companies end up wasting a lot of resources and time in tracking their leads.
As per data released by consumer experience firm, CMS Wire, around 54 percent of marketers agree that systems integration issue negatively impacts their performance. To put it in simple words, the damage is caused when sales and marketing divisions fail to work with one another.
System integration needs to be in place to get the best out of the lead-to-revenue process. Else, the organization would keep on loosing due to the underutilization of the existing marketing, sales software, and CRM capabilities.
Sales and marketing teams can immensely benefit due to system integration
Higher-quality leads can be yielded only with the help of scalable campaigns. With appropriately integrated systems in place, all the leads can directly reach the sales team instead of going through a complicated workflow. The company’s sales force would have access to customer behavioral data, firmographics, and other lead-related intelligence. On the other hand, the marketing team would also be able to track leads with the help of closed-loop reporting.
Sales and marketing teams would be able to track quarterly and monthly objectives by creating a service level agreement for using MAP/CRM. Both departments can benefit from understanding the interconnectivity between their roles. The lead hand-off process from marketing to sales would also become smooth.
CRM for better customer support
A consumer would take his business elsewhere if he fails to get consistent support. Unfortunately, this factor is often overlooked by most of the organizations.
Using automation can help in saving a lot of work. These days, automated software solutions can instantly reply to emails with answers for FAQs. Systems can also automatically divert questions to the appropriate person in the organization so that customers’ queries can be resolved quickly.
The customer relationship management system would not only send automated replies but can also update the system with consumer information and solutions offered to them.
