5 Main Benefits of Customer Relationship Management

There are many benefits of customer relationship management, and CRM developers would be the first to have you know these. Well, that’s understandable, because they want you to use their service, so naturally their marketing and needs generation plans entail making darn sure you know the benefits of the service they provide.

However, it’s not just sound marketing for CRM software. It’s also got some real truth behind it. There really are many benefits of customer relationship management as a field to put in use. I don’t work for a CRM company, so I stand no benefit from contributing to their needs creation. But, as a business man, I would be remiss if I didn’t do my part to make other business people aware of the need for this discipline in their practices.

CRM has kind of become a backbone in forward thinking businesses, and you’ll find that every aspect of your business has some link to it that you never noticed before.

#1 – Good Marketing Data

Your CRM framework maintains analytics and customer history by its very nature. This data shows expenditures on the customers’ parts, and can provide hard data used in metrics like churn, loyalty and customer values and average revenues.

That data is immensely useful in many things, among them formulation of marketing strategies and budgets.

#2 – Lead Cultivation

Lead cultivation is something you can do during the second phase of a customer experience, where the customer, actually a prospect at this phase, studies your product and competitors, and weighs options. They’re shopping.

When they contact you, you can go ahead and make an entry for them in CRM, which can then be used in cultivating leads out of prospects. CRM can integrate with email mass marketing and social network dynamics software to maintain a passive aggressive marketing process for that prospect post-contact.

#3 – Solid Product Management

Product management deals with the customer experience primarily during the delivery and use phases. Product managers have to handle customer input, expenses and customer metrics to manage their cycles and for product revision and delivery.

CRM provides solid data for how things are going on the commercial end, which makes their jobs so much easier.

#4 – Customer Service

Customer service, of course, is the one everyone knows CRM is used for heavily. Customer service people may access the customer account information, answer inquiries, adjust account settings and everything else they must do.

#5 – Smooth Finances

The financial departments depend on the same kinds of critical data about customer values, overhead and other variables as do the marketing people. So, with the records CRM can provide, they have easy access to well-formatted data in that department, which makes their jobs easier as well.

There are of course, many more subtle benefits of customer relationship management. They’re nuances to any number of other departments or processes in your business which CRM can be a core to support. But, to go into that kind of resolution would fill volumes. Above are some real benefits, ones that as a business person, I must point out, regardless of the software developers also like that or not.