CRM—Customer Relationship Management—is a system that aims to improve the relationship with existing customers, find new prospective customers, and win back former customers. CRM software facilitates collecting, organising, and managing customer information—all in one place.
CRMs are no longer just for large-scale organisations with huge databases of customers, but are advantageous to even small and medium-sized organisations. Designed to keep track and streamline your processes, a CRM system can be one of the most powerful management tools in your arsenal. Some of the incredible outcomes from CRM systems include improved customer service, deepened customer relationships, retention of new customers, and much more successful sales and marketing initiatives.
Here's how the benefits of CRM systems can renew and expand your business!
One of the prime benefits of using a customer relationship management system is improving customer service through storing secure customer data. By using this strategy, all dealings involving servicing, marketing, and selling your products and services to your customers can be conducted in an organised and systematic way. You can also use CRM software to provide better service to customers through improved understanding of their issues. For instance, if you need to resolve an issue for a customer, your representatives will be able to retrieve all activity concerning that customer, including past purchases, preferences, and anything else that might help in finding a solution quickly. In this way, you can use CRM to receive continuous feedback from your customers regarding your products and services.
CRM helps improve customer relationships—but how? By using a CRM software for your business, you will be able to improve your retention rates for existing customers - which often translates into increased revenue for your organisation. According to Harvard Business Review, a 5% reduction in your customer defection rate can increase your sales or profits anywhere from 25% to 85%. As far as CRM benefits go, this is a golden one for customer service. By using the data collected, your team can use CRM to proactively address at-risk accounts as well as reach out to satisfied customers at the right moment, to encourage repeat purchases.
Following a CRM strategy helps in building up better communication within the company. Sharing customer data between different departments will enable you to work as a team and help optimise the customer experience—one of several major benefits of a CRM platform. Each employee will also be able to answer customer questions on what is going on with their product or service. By functioning as a well-informed team, will help increase the company’s efficiency overall and offer a better service to customers.
Another important CRM software benefit? It allows you to have a more targeted and cost-efficient marketing program—particularly email marketing campaigns. By understanding your customer needs and behaviour, you will be able to identify the correct time to promote your product and use marketing automation offers by a CRM system to your advantage. A CRM system will also help you segment your customers and give you insight into which are the more profitable customer groups. By using this information, you can set up relevant promotions for your groups and execute them at the right time. By optimising your marketing resources in this manner, you give yourself the best possible chance of increasing your revenue. All this, in turn, will help your sales team greatly.
How well is your organisation really doing? As CRM software stores all the information in one centralised place, this makes it a lot easier to analyse your performance as a whole. By pinpointing important information such as revenue generated, leads, as well as results of your marketing campaigns, you'll be able to easily generate reports. Better reporting data means you will be able to make effective business decisions and improve revenue in the long run.
A CRM system can help maximise your business performance by increasing your up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. Up-selling is where you offer customers an upgrade or premium products that are related to their purchase. Cross-selling is where you offer complementary products that fall into the same category of their purchase. Both these sales strategies can be easily conducted with CRM software, as you will have an understanding about their wants, needs and patterns of purchase. Having this information in a central database means that when an opportunity arises, your sales team can promote as required.
As you can see, there are a myriad of great results through customer relationship management that will improve whatever size business you have. Is your organisation looking for a membership management CRM system? Xplor Recreation powers small business and enterprise-class organisations in 21 countries. Click here to learn more about CRM benefits Xplor Recreation can offer your organisation. Don't forget, you can contact us for a demo of how Xplor Recreation's CRM software can transform your small business!