CRM software: What is it and how does CRM make your business processes more efficient?

CRM systems are powerful software solutions that significantly improve your customer management and help to build lasting customer relationships. CRM therefore plays a key role in corporate marketing (and beyond).

Would you like to find out what it is, how CRM works, and how it can transform your company’s marketing strategy?
This article provides the answers.

What is CRM software?

Let’s start with the abbreviation: CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management.

In other words, it is an application that helps businesses to manage and maintain their customer relationships. The CRM system collects, organises and analyses a wide range of customer information, including personal data, purchase history, communication and interactions.

The most important features of CRM software

This digital tool allows you to perform essential tasks in your company’s marketing and sales departments, for example:

• Manage contacts – CRM provides a centralised database of customer contacts, storing names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and other useful information.

• Monitor interactions – The CRM system tracks all interactions with customers such as phone calls, emails, chats, social media and face-to-face meetings, providing a detailed history of all contact and communication.

• Analyse data – The CRM platform offers analytical tools to extract useful information from customer interactions. For example, you can identify buying behaviour, measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, and evaluate the productivity of your sales team.

• Automate processes – The ability to automate many small tasks is an important feature that makes life easier for your marketing and sales staff. For example, this includes sending follow-up emails, creating reminders for calls or appointments, monitoring leads, and assigning sales opportunities to specific team members.

Advanced features of CRM software

In addition to the basic features, many CRM systems offer extended functionalities such as the following:

• Customer lifecycle management – This solution lets you track all user/customer activities with pinpoint accuracy, from lead generation to conversion, from the sales phase to after-sales service. As a result, you can optimise customer loyalty along the whole trail of contact with your brand.

• Automation of marketing – Some CRMs contain tools for automating marketing processes. You can use these to design and send customised email campaigns for a specific target audience, provide value-added content, and track social media interactions.

• Integration with other platforms – The CRM system can be integrated with other business platforms, such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), to enable a coherent and standardised flow of information.

The advantages of CRM for your business

As described above, a CRM system stores and organises customer data centrally so that all employees can access this vital information in real time. This aspect is hugely important, because it is the only way to prevent data dispersion and a duplicated workload.

Process automation enables substantial time and resource savings.

By integrating CRM into your ERP system, you can also avoid manual document transfers between individual departments, minimise errors, and boost overall productivity.

From the sales perspective, a CRM solution – by presenting a detailed overview of your customer portfolio – gives you the ability to recognise business opportunities, monitor the progress of negotiations, and predict customer needs.

Advanced data analytics can also be used to identify patterns and trends in customer behaviour, while optimising marketing and sales strategies.

Customer Relationship Management software also makes customer service more efficient, since your service or sales staff have quick access to all customer information and can therefore solve problems swiftly.

From the marketing and especially the customer’s point of view, CRM makes a fundamental contribution to improving the user experience. How? Because it opens up the possibility of precisely fulfilling the expectations of individual customer types and maximising the performance of communication and advertising campaigns.

Last but not least, CRM is a scalable platform that adapts to the specific needs and changing requirements of your organisation.

On top of that, there are still other advantages to consider. With the growing importance of data in the world of business, using a CRM is essential if you want to remain competitive, increase productivity and deliver first-class customer service.