CRM: What is it and what are the benefits for business?

What is CRM?

CRM is described as Customer Relationship Management and can be defined as all the strategies, practices, and technology used by businesses in different industries to create and maintain strong and lasting relationships with customers.

The use of a CRM software allows the storage and maintenance of leads and customers information and data centralized, as well as makes possible the management of different areas of a company - sales, marketing, customer service and support, among others - in order to improve efficiency and customer experience.

It also enables better collaboration between departments and teams that allows a better understanding of each customer's needs, increases the possibility of customer loyalty, and boosts business growth.

Businesses use a CRM with the main objective of improving the efficiency and effectiveness of work processes as well as, increasing customer satisfaction, for the improvement of results and growth of each company. Achievable by analyzing data about customer behavior and purchase history to deliver improved service and more relevant and personalized experiences.

Main benefits of using a CRM for companies

Improvement in management and customer relationship

A CRM software can significantly improve the management and relationship with customers because it allows centralizing relevant data about each customer, such as personal data, purchase history, preferences, previous interactions with the company and feedback, all in a single platform.

By joining all the data it is possible to get a complete view of the history of customer-company interactions, which makes it easier for the teams to understand the customer's needs and provide solutions more quickly and accurately, allowing to increase customer satisfaction and enable customer loyalty while reducing the average time to solve the problems.

By centralizing everything in one place, companies can provide better service, communicate more effectively, identify sales opportunities and improve service, leading to improved management and better relationships with their customers.

Insights based on real data

CRM software can provide useful information to the sales team about customer behavior such as buying patterns or average response time, which can enable them to identify new sales opportunities, enhance customer service and improve decision making.

Through data storage and management enabled by CRM, it is possible to get a better understanding and analysis of the actual data in order to extract valuable insights to improve customer service, predict future situations, behavior trends, marketing and sales process automation, among other possibilities depending on the goals and objectives.

As far as marketing is concerned, insights can be obtained from the analysis of the collected data to create segmented campaigns and test different strategies.

Regarding the different teams and departments that use a CRM in a company, it is possible to monitor and analyze their performance because CRM can also provide value-added metrics about their performance such as conversion rates or average customer response time. Through the metrics presented it is possible to identify areas where there is need for improvement or development of more effective strategies.

Increased efficiency of teams and departments

A CRM allows automation of most of the tasks and daily work of different teams or departments that integrate different business areas, such as:

• customer relationship management;

• organization and storage of data;

• management and qualification of leads; automation of marketing strategies;

• sales management through, for example, creation of commercial proposals and issuing of invoices, which can reduce manual data entry and human error;

• automation of customer support tasks and generation of automatic reports, which can be accessed by multiple employees according to existing needs.

A CRM can integrate features for real-time collaboration such as chats, forums or comments so that teams can collaborate on projects and share data and information instantly, without leaving the CRM.

CRM software can be a powerful aid to improve collaboration between different departments and teams as they can access and share up-to-date information about leads and customers, allowing them to communicate more effectively. They can also work together to provide better service, such as the sales team sharing information with the technical support team so that they can resolve a situation or problem more quickly and efficiently.

CRM can also be beneficial in increasing the efficiency of teams by allowing them to automate repetitive tasks - sending emails, reminders or scheduling meetings - which allows them to optimize time and resources while giving teams more freedom to focus on strategic tasks of greater value to the business.

Companies by replacing manual and obsolete processes allow a greater business progression. Therefore, CRM is an excellent tool in the sense that it allows businesses in different areas to build relationships, build customer loyalty and retention, increase the ability to satisfy them, and simultaneously improve the results and efficiency of the teams.