CRM, in the parlance of the Software industry refers to Customer Relationship Management. CRM is used to understand customer needs, behaviour to develop a strong relationship with them and ensure that your business gets the most out of their patronage. CRM bring together information about customers, marketing effectiveness, actual sales and current industry or market trends to help you take your business to the next level.
Let’s take a look at 3 golden rules that will help you in your endeavour to implement CRM…
- CRM Strategy – The whole point of using CRM is to become more customer-centric. This will probably require changes in your organization. A good look at the organizational structure, culture, processes & people. Also revisit the support systems you have in place for your customers. How you deal with your customers may change depending on whether you are a B2B or B2C company. However, the fundamentals of Customer Service never change. Depending on what you consider important for your business will help you choose features that your CRM package must have. For instance, if your customer focus is already in place & you want to improve business by providing value added services to the customer, you would want to cross-sell or up-sell products when a customer contacts you. This in itself requires research on customer behaviour. If on the other hand, you wish to improve customer support, then the focus would be on helping your customers with questions or dealing effectively with complaints.
- Prioritize Implementation – Each CRM module has its own functionality & is each created to reduce costs and/ or increase revenue. Results are pretty quick. The best way to prioritize is by calculating the ROI each module will fetch you.
- Involve Customers – Whether you decide to have regular customer focus group meetings or survey forms, or plan to have random one x one conversations, it is imperative that you speak to your customers. This will help you organize processes and systems better. After all, your CRM is going to be used to serve them better.
Usually, companies organize themselves around the products or services they sell. However, to implement CRM every process has to be viewed from the standpoint of customer centricity. Have you planned your CRM strategy yet?
