Give your organisation the edge. Working with CRM since 2006.
CRM Online has been working with Customer Relationship Management systems since 2006. Throughout that time, CRM Online has been at the forefront of helping businesses drive growth, improve customer retention and satisfaction, and improve decision making through improved insights into their business.
What is Customer Relationship Management?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) are the systems and processes within an organisation that relate to the customer face of that organisation. Typically, this includes the following systems:
- Sales Automation: from capturing enquiries from websites, routing those enquiries to sales or customer service staff, and providing visibility of sales interactions and new business pipeline to management to enable resource planning.
- Customer Service: Providing a streamlined system for customer service staff to reference when interacting with customers. Typically, this means providing a system that tracks all communication with customers via email, phone and meetings, as well as any other pertinent customer information such as quote and sales history, for example (single view of the customer)
- Marketing Automation: This typically involves leveraging the CRM to profile your customers based on sales history, service history, and subjective elements such as areas of business they might be interested in. Marketing Automation typically involves email, SMS, or social marketing based on targeted messaging based on that contact's profile in your CRM.
It's important to note that while CRM is often focused on helping organisations improve sales, or to drive a positive customer support experience, a number of modern CRM systems have become much more than just a sales and service platform. That's not to say you can't just have a system for managing your sales pipeline or support tickets - you can. However, a modern CRM platform is designed to do solve a whole spectrum of business challenges, including:
- Providing a data warehouse function where a CRM will often be leveraged as a core database that houses all key information about prospects and customers, including items such as sales trends.
- Providing real time management reporting across a whole range of business KPIs in order to improve the visibility of management across the performance of the organisation
- Email marketing, marketing automation and dynamic lead and customer scoring based on email, website and social interactions.
Which CRM Product Should I Choose?
As can be seen, there's a lot that CAN be achieved with a CRM from a functionality standpoint, though it can be confusing to work out which platform is right for your organisation. Can you get away with a commodity CRM that's nothing more than a simple contact database? Or do you need something more sophisticated that can be configured and integrated into the my day to day business processes?
At CRM Online, we believe that the most important step in selecting any CRM is to identify what are the business problems that you're trying to solve and what is the expected return on investment.
"Identify what the business problems are that you're trying to solve and what is the expected return on investment"
Once you've done this, you'll be able to better understand the importance of the CRM in your business, what a reasonable budget is to invest in order to achieve your expected ROI, and what functionality is required in order to help you achieve your desired outcomes.
This may mean that you choose a leading platform that can be tailored extensively to your requirements if the return on investment justifies it, or it may mean that you choose a low cost (or free) cloud based CRM if there is a limited potential ROI from your CRM.
At CRM Online, we do believe that every organisation should have a CRM, but not every organisation needs to spend big $$ to achieve their goals.
How do you make your CRM implementation a success?
That's where CRM Online comes in. We're a full service CRM implementation consultancy that can assist you with:
- Initial requirements and potential ROI analysis
- Solution Design & Architecture
- CRM Development & Technical Implementation
- Change Management & Group Training
- Integration of your CRM with core business systems
- Defining and Aligning CRM Reporting with Management KPIs
If you'd like assistance with your CRM implementation, please don't hesitate to get in touch today!