Whenever companies want to increase their productivity through increased sales, contacts, business relationships and more, what comes to mind is Customer Relationship Management. CRM is an excellent strategy adopted to foster and increase the level of cooperation between the company, the clients, and their customers. By implementing the system, management sustains a sound network with its existing customers, attracts potential customers, reduces excesses, and ultimately increases the company’s profitability.
Put in simpler terms, CRM is a system where you can store details about your customer, your sales figures, and other accounts in a single place. CRMs effectively combine various strategies, procedures, practices, and technology to manage your customers through every stage of the customer lifecycle, analyze their data, process their feedback, and use their interaction to drive your sales growth. The system compiles details of such customers and makes it available across the company.
CRM as a managerial practice
Since the main aim of CRM is to generate positive feedback from every customer and sustain a healthy relationship with them, companies adopt guidelines and principles that regulate all their transactions with their customers.
Research has shown that most companies, especially the new ones, achieve tremendous results from the practice of CRM at the managerial level. Unfortunately, an examination that included 35 U.S and Canadian companies indicated that none of them were completely successful at implementing CRM. As CRM is difficult to get right, it’s important for companies to understand how they can maximize the performance of their CRM.
The goal of Tapdesk is to increase efficiency and productivity while keeping loss at the barest minimum. Although the process involved in Tapdesk CRM can be complex, it is designed to attract leads that are relevant to the business. When it is accurately implemented, it has the potential of cutting lead research time by about 90%.
The first step to improving the CRM in an organization is to maximize its value to the individual customer. This vision can guide the activities of an organization into putting the interest of their customers above theirs. When you make your customers a priority, they feel valued, and it forms a deeper relationship between the two parties. By putting customer satisfaction first, management can then proceed to draw up a plan to implement their CRM. A CRM plan is essential to ensure that an organization can easily adjust to whatever changes occur in the industry without affecting their outlook.
Since the plan is more about the managerial process, the organization should focus more on people and processes. The processes should include ways that the organization can interact with and acquire more knowledge about every customer.
When designing the processes for CRM, organizations should also be careful to recognize their employees’ needs. Although the aim is to satisfy the customers, employees must also be spared of the tedious and demoralizing effects of a poorly functioning system lest they abandon the company and its customers. Hence, as much as you are trying to provide value for the customers, strive to provide value for the employees as well.
CRM is an investment, and as such, there should be a basis of valuing the return on the investment. To effectively manage the behavior of every customer, the best managerial practice is to use any measurement that can manage this behavior efficiently such as Tapdesk. Such decisions include how much an organization needs to spend to retain old customers and how much they need to attract new customers.
To arrive at the overall CRM managerial practice index, organizations should measure the attitudes, behavior, satisfaction, and purchase intent of their customers. This way, they can develop various competitive measures to boost their CRM and gain an advantage.
CRM as a technology
While the managerial process can define the organization’s interactions with its customers, data from such interactions are maintained, updated, and distributed through the effective use of technology. After a clear understanding of the goals, vision, processes, and objectives involved in CRM, introducing technology to smoothen out the processes becomes inevitable.
The ability to merge information about the customer with other data which the organization collects enables a company to get a holistic view of their performance at the touch of a button. More so, the advent of technology has provided customers with many additional channels of communicating with the organization. Consequently, an organization that is looking to maintain its relevance in the ever-competitive market may need to integrate their existing data pipelines with their CRM.
By digitizing all contacts, sales figures, and customer information, organizations can reduce the cost and increase their productivity at the same time. When compared to the manual computation of account information, an advanced technology system ensures that every employee can access and work on the same information at different times and locations.
Tapdesk CRM.
In numbers.
With outstanding 98.7% customer satisfaction and an unmatched speed, customer support and almost no server down time, Tapdesk CRM is built to support your business. Anywhere. Anytime.
Tapdesk CRM provides an elaborate search engine that presents multiple ways of seeking out clients. Tapdesk allows automatic synchronization of data and provides an effective system that allows for employee and customer information to be updated in real-time and thus immediately accessible to those who need it.
When augmented by software, CRMs can make your organization much faster and more efficient at responding to customers’ needs, thus reinforcing the vision outlined by the managerial practices by providing an unrivaled customer experience.
How to make CRM work for you
As stated earlier, the major function of CRM is to help an organization to attract new customers and retain existing ones by promoting a healthy relationship between the parties involved. A report published in 2017 by Gartner indicates that CRM software has successfully dethroned database management systems on the frontiers of the software market.
As a result, CRM software has become a “must-have” for every company. To avoid mistakes and maximize their potentials, new companies need to specify their target audience and categorize them using specific keywords that meet their requirements. Companies that make use of Tapdesk eliminates the risk of repetition and saves time while at it.
To effectively implement CRM, do the following:
Centralize customers
The quote about customers being king is ever true and should be respected if any company wants to achieve success with its CRM implementation. Placing the customers and their needs at the very center of the activities of the company is another way of putting it. Tapdesk CRM provides an effective way to achieve the centralization of customers. Since feedback is the major drive for improvement, Tapdesk makes it possible to switch across different features and customer history without losing track of the procedure. The system determines high priority leads and ensures that the results are added for quick implementation.
Understand that consumers are entitled to their opinion (good or bad). The structure that you have in place will, therefore, play a major part in predicting whether a good or a bad image will be hitched on the customer’s heart. By using Tapdesk to furbish customers with a good experience, the reputation of your organization will be enhanced.
Encourage centralization of data
A major factor that moves a company towards the direction of understanding their customer base is to have a centralized and accessible network that contains every piece of information on those customers. Such a network should contain information such as the addresses, phone numbers, frequency of visits, and other things discussed during contact. This information can, in turn, be used to measure, manage, and keep track of customer activity.
Aside from improving the customer-client relationship, the centralization of data promotes accountability within the company. Since the event of each transaction is captured on a central network, individuals or departments can be held accountable for their actions. This way, one department cannot blame another department for a fault, and any complaint by a disgruntled employee can be filed under the appropriate name.
Enhance customer-facing processes
Processes like sales, customer service, and marketing are usually referred to as customer-facing services. The most effective strategy of CRM is to focus on such customer-facing services and improve on it based on what the customers want. For example, when a potential or existing customer fills out a form, their contact information is fed directly into the system. The system then reminds the department in charge to get through to the customer at the agreed time. Whenever an interaction occurs between the customer and the company, data of the interaction are fed into the system to keep track of all that had been done and said.
CRM platforms act like a library where all calls, documents, and emails are kept. Once the customer engages any of the various means of communication, the interaction is stored in a central place where it can then be accessed by the relevant employees.
One thing to watch out for is to ensure that the processes and activities of each department are well defined. Employees sometimes get overwhelmed by the centralization of the system and tend to bypass the process. By reducing the cognitive strain on the employee, you can be assured of good results.
Written by:
Clemmie Edwards
Content Creator for Tapdesk
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