What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?

Customer Relationship Management

November 4, 2019

In a broad sense, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an approach businesses use to manage communication with current and potential customers. This approach involves the analysis of customer data in order to improve relations and personalize future communication.

Customer data includes any information that characterizes client interaction with the organization be it, for example, the inability to meet on Wednesdays or a preferred tendency to discuss important matters by phone only. With such information, sales reps are able to build the most effective communication model with each client, which allows them to better understand customer needs, increase loyalty and ultimately contribute to sales growth.

Who is CRM for?

The importance and power of modern day CRM systems means it can be, and should be, used by almost everyone within your organization. From the sales, customer service, business development all the way to recruiting and HR departments, CRM offers a improved way to manage your client interactions and relationships. Since CRM systems allow you to store client data, contact information, minutes of previous meetings it allows anyone without the organization to access the information and leverage it for specific purposes such as finding new sales opportunities or improving customer satisfaction by better understanding client needs.  

With access to this data on a single location, CRM allows your organization to collaborate amongst departments, increase productivity and minimize duplicate work. For example, with a CRM system, everyone can see when, and what has been communicated to a specific client, what they purchased, who purchased it, how much they paid and much more. As such, CRM helps companies of all sizes and industries, to truly understand their customer’s needs, and find more efficient ways of working and selling.

CRM as a strategy

Customer Relationship Management strategy exemplifies a business who puts its customers at the forefront of its activities.

This customer focus affects not only the company’s overall business strategy, but also the corporate culture, structure and business processes and operations.

The main purpose of implementing a customer-oriented strategy is to create a unified ecosystem to attract new customers and develop a stronger relationship with existing ones.

CRM as a technology

CRM software is a tool that helps automate business processes, procedures and operations that implement the company’s CRM strategy.

Being the top tool for capturing and retaining customers, CRM software minimizes human error when working with clients and drives better transparency in sales, marketing and customer service operations.

At the same time, it is important to understand that process automation is an important, but not the only and not the paramount step in building a customer-oriented business. CRM software is a convenient tool that is meant to support already existing regulations and processes.

CRM software empowers businesses with all the necessary tools to transform Leads to Customers to Loyal Customers.

One of the leading CRM providers according to analysts from Gartner and Forrester is Creatio (formerly bpm’online). Creatio offers a low-code unified CRM with Marketing, Sales and Service functionality on a single platform. At Flexentric you can order a free guided demo of all Creatio products.

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