Customer Relationship Management (CRM) defines all features of marketing, sales and service-associated interactions that a business has with its customers. Both business-to-business and business-to-consumer firms usually use customer relations management systems to track as well as manage communications through social media, mobile applications, chat, email telephone, Web, and marketing materials. Data stored in CRM systems may include sales leads, clients, contacts, sales history, service requests, and demographic information among others. CRM systems as well have the capacity to automate many sales, marketing, and support processes, aiding firms to provide a consistent experience to prospects and customers while lessening their costs (Loh, Koo, Ho & Idrus, 2014). Also, some CRM provides advanced analytics which can be used by business leaders to measure the success of their current sales, marketing, and support activities and to optimize their different business processes.
Some of the biggest business benefits of customer relationship management systems come directly when the whole business information is stored as well as retrieved from a single source. Before CRM became existent, clients’ data was spread all over office productivity email systems, suite documents, mobile phone data, Rolodex entries and also paper note cards (Kumar and Kumar, 2014). Therefore, storing all the information from all documents including marketing, human resource, customer service and sales in a central location provides management as well as employees timely access to the most recent information when they need it. Also, departments have the capacity to collaborate easily, while CRM systems assist the organization to establish effective automated processes to enhance a business process. Further benefits include a 360-degree access to the entire customer data, knowledge of what customers and the whole market want, and integration with all the available applications to merge all business data.
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Some of the possible downsides of CRM system are that the business does not have control of information. In case the remote CRM system experiences an outage, the business is unable to retrieve data. Besides, there are overhead costs linked to running the software (Loh et al. 2014). Training may be an issue in the circumstance that the business is small.
References
Kumar, M. P., & Kumar, T. S. (2014). E-business: Pros and cons in customer relationship management. International Journal of Management and International Business Studies, 4 (3), 349-356.
Loh, B. K., Koo, K. L., Ho, K. F., & Idrus, R. (2014). A review of customer relationship management system benefits and implementation in small and medium enterprises. Mathematics and Computers in Biology, Business, and Acoustics, 12th WSEAS International Conference on Mathematics and Computers in Biology and Chemistry, Transilvania, University of Brasov, Romania .
