It would be safe to say that every modern marketer or a sales representative came across the term of CRM. But what does it actually mean? CRM stands for customer relationship management. In simple terms, customer relationship system helps businesses of any scaly to serve their customers more efficiently. In the age of the customer, where marketers, sales representatives and customer support agents are processing vast amount of customer related data, the deployment of CRM software has become imperative. In a world of customer centric approach, customer satisfaction has become one of the most important metrics that defines your business’ success. Second chances do not come often for modern businesses, as the customers change brands or vendors without hesitation. Studies have shown that 86% of consumers stop doing business with a company after repeatedly bad experiences. Over one-third (37%) consider switching immediately after the first poor service occurrence. The importance of CRM cannot be underestimated. Let’s take a closer look at what CRM means for the most important departments in any organization.

CRM: what does it mean in marketing?

In order to generate as many high-quality leads as possible, your marketers have to devise complex marketing campaigns and exploit every available resource to its fullest. Managing these campaigns requires the deployment of proper marketing automation tools. For example, content and email marketing are one of the most popular lead generation sources. In fact, 83% of B2B marketers use content marketing to achieve their lead generation goals. Email marketing, on the other hand, is the most broadly used channel. 97% of marketers confirm using email marketing software. Marketing automation tools seamlessly integrated with CRM helps to keep the entire history of interactions, preferences and other valuable insights in one place which ensure that the customers receive only relevant information and right on time.

The share of social marketing and mobile is continuously rising. That is why, the best marketing automation needs to be equipped with excellent social media tools to extract valuable customer related data from social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Once marketers have given enough enthralling content to the prospects, they can run personalized email marketing campaign and reach every potential customer individually. Despite the rise of popularity of marketing automation, 44% of marketing reps confess that they are not entirely satisfied with their marketing automation systems and a whopping 85% of B2B marketers feel they were not using their marketing automation solutions to the maximum. For that reason, the best marketing automation needs to have intuitive and user-friendly interface. In addition, the software has to be easily customizable to meet the specific goals of your particular business.

CRM: what does it mean in sales?

Oftentimes, the sales representatives are struggling to manage their time effectively. The weight of countless responsibilities they have to balance leads to the fact that some tasks will not be carried out as planned. The latest research suggests that 50% of sales rep’s time is lost to unproductive prospecting. And only 33% of sales rep time is spent actively selling. Another important issue that needs to be addressed is field sales. In order to meet and beat their quotas, the salespeople need to have a mobile CRM at their disposal. Moreover, it will actually make them more productive, as they will be able to keep tabs on the progress of their deals and pull any relevant statistics or presentations during their business meeting. Recent research has proven that 65% of salespeople who utilized mobile CRM managed to meet their sales quotas. On the other hand, only 22% of reps who have adopted non-mobile CRM have reached the same results. Obviously, sales force automation will tweak the slightest business processes to shorten the sales cycle and make your sales activities more effective. In addition, the process of contracting and invoicing will be completely trouble-free due to outstanding document automation tools. That way, your salespeople will be able to concentrate their effort exclusively on customers.

CRM: what does it mean in service?

What makes top performing companies so successful? 57% of today’s business can correlate improved customer experiences with increasing profits. Customer service has drastically changed in the past few decades. It shifted from letters to phones, then it shifted to email and webchat and now it is going to the social media and smartphones. Modern customers are incredibly demanding and want to be serviced on the highest level as promptly as possible. That is why, in today’s ever-connected world, the innovative companies are using all available channels to maintain a permanent dialog with their customers and focusing all of their efforts to creating a loyal community of customers. Simplistic helpdesk can be transformed into a proper contact center where your managers are able to deliver the best customer service regardless of the communication channel your customers choose to use. In terms of application and strategy, www.bpmonline.com/crm/what-is-crm is one of the best automation solutions on the market. The best thing about it is that the system will devise an actual step-by-step plan to guide you on every stage of customer interactions to boost your productivity and generate more profits. Find a customer service solution that can grow to support multiple communication channels – not only phone and email. For instance, over a third of customers have said that they would not do business with a company that does not provide customer service via Facebook or Twitter. Additionally, consider automation, which can drive productivity by enabling agents to deliver services faster, as well as a self-service portal for common requests to improve the customer experience even further.

CRM has come a long path from its earliest days of rolodex to today’s cutting-edge cloud based automation systems with powerful CRM tools. Thus, technological solutions have been developed to tailor the needs of your core teams – marketing, sales and customer support. However, you will be able to take your company to a whole new level of productivity if you choose to deploy an automation solution that seamlessly integrates marketing, sales and service automation on a single platform. That way, you can automate key business processes of your company and gain total control of a complete customer journey while constantly improving the quality of your customer service and increasing revenue.