Importance and Benefits of CRM Software to Enterprise Class Businesses

What are the benefits of CRM software? We talk at painful length about CRM here. CRM lists, CRM comparisons, CRM tutorials, CRM pizza. Ok, scratch the last one. It wouldn’t taste very good. Well, there are many reasons why CRM is so important these days, and only some of them are immediately obvious to the uninitiated.

The benefits of CRM software extend far beyond the basic functionality most associate with the concept. Yes, the capacity for it to track the prices of products and services, the ability to manage customers, analyze churn and loyalty, to track the conversion of leads into customers, and to manage marketing campaigns are incredibly useful.

And, these in and of themselves are the cruxes of how it’s so beneficial beyond just this basic functionality. See, the thing is, it’s embedded itself into business as a central backbone that once didn’t exist. This means that almost every part of the business that deals with customer experience, uses CRM to do so. They also exchange data among themselves over it as well.

The marketing people use CRM to track their marketing campaigns, and they tie it in with their email marketing, and they can tie it in with their BI software to track their outreach and their awareness over social networks via mention tracking and trend monitoring among other things.

Sales people use it for pricing, account creation for new customers, renewal of accounts for loyal customers, and to answer initial questions that the potential customers may have. At this stage, the customer is now a lead in the CRM software, and an entry is permanently present, though not as an account.

The conversion to customer makes them a primary entity.

Product management people use CRM to track churn and loyalty, as well as conversion rates, which give them insights into the state of a lifecycle and of supply and demand. It can provide snapshots for them of support issues, popularity and interest as well as price viability and need level among the populace.

And of course, support people use CRM heavily as well. All inquiries about accounts, prices, bills and any complaints made or changes made to account statuses are done through the CRM software, and many support programs can tie into it.

Things like: LivePerson, Parature, ZenDesk and WalkMe are all capable of integrating with some of the more popular CRM like SalesForce, Siebel, Zoho and Sugar CRM.

CRM means customer relationship management. Once, it meant the most bare definition of that, which was just simple account tracking and higher bookkeeping.

Now, however, this is an entirely bigger thing. It is the central nervous system and the keeper of all records for a company’s activity in regards to its customers. It’s evolved to fill a niche above what it once was, and in retrospect, this was a natural evolution, despite it coming as a surprise to most of us at the time.

The benefits of CRM software are pretty obvious, and you need to make sure you choose wisely the solution you use, as the shape of your CRM defines the shape of your company, given how integral the entire niche has become in modern computerized business.