CRM, ERP, BI, ASP, ISP, SaaS… What do they mean?! Various acronyms, buzzwords, and other jargon that may seem like a foreign language to many are frequently thrown around within the business world. In this article, we’ll shed some light on one of the most commonly used acronyms: CRM.
So, what is CRM?
What is CRM?
CRM stands for “Customer Relationship Management”, or at times: “Customer Retention Management”, and refers to technology/software/systems/platforms for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers, as well as gathering and maintaining information and data about them.
The purpose of a CRM platform is to manage and improve business relationships to grow your business. A CRM helps you stay connected with customers, streamline processes, and improve productivity and profitability. It helps you focus and better manage your organization’s relationships with individual people including:
- Customers
- Service users
- Colleagues
- Suppliers
CRM provides a clear overview of your organization’s relationships and customers in one convenient place where the data and information can be utilized by multiple departments including marketing, sales, and customer service.
What is CRM management?
CRM management is exactly what it sounds like, the management of your CRM platform. It involves collecting, storing, and managing the information and data from all your organization’s interactions to support your marketing strategies to drive better results.
As a result, you can optimize and improve upon your strategies to deliver a better customer experience and identify areas of improvement through your organization’s different relationships, such as supplier and vendor sourcing.
Advantages of CRM
Now that we know what a CRM is and what CRM management entails, we can go one level deeper and explore why having a CRM matters and what advantages it provides for your business.
- Personalized and improved customer experiences If you want to retain customers and bring in new ones, it’s essential to provide a personalized customer experience. Using the data and information gathered through your CRM, you can personalize and improve your interactions with your customers, enabling you to build better relationships in the long run. A CRM platform helps you keep essential information structured in one central place where you at the same time can easily engage with them and provide better customer support.
- Staying relevant in your industry CRM is both the largest and fastest-growing enterprise application software category. If you want to be able to stay in the game, you will need a strategy that’s centered around your customers enabled by the right technology. Where a CRM previously gave you an edge over your competitors, it has now become a requirement.
- Identify and categorize leads A CRM system helps you identify and add new leads, as well as categorize them accurately. It helps you create important insights into which ones are the “right leads”, such as leads that sales should prioritize to close deals, or for marketing to identify leads that need nurturing to become quality leads.With access to complete, accurate, centrally held information about your clients and prospects, your sales and marketing departments can focus their energy and effort on customers and areas where it will yield results.
- Retain customers to increase ROILast but not least, retention of customers. Where new customers are all very well, it’s a common mistake to forget about current customers and how important it is to retain them. The numbers don’t lie, retaining customers brings in a ton of ROI for your business. Here are a few reasons why customer retention is so important for growth and success and why your CRM and CRM management activities should not only focus on identifying and nurturing new leads:
- The cost of acquiring new customers is several times higher than retaining an existing customer.
- A 5% increase in customer retention can increase your company’s ROI by 25-95%.
- Retained customers buy and spend more than newer customers.
Make CRM the foundation of your business with Caesar CRM
Reach out to Caesar CRM to reap the benefits of a CRM platform in the best possible way. We analyze your organization, set up a meeting to create a tailored CRM solution, and help you integrate the CRM throughout your organization’s different departments according to your needs and requirements.
Contact Caesar CRM for a custom demo and for more information about our CRM platform and how we can help optimize your CRM management.