According to the leading CRM provider (and more on them in a moment), CRM software grew out of the contact management software of the 1980s, which in turn was meant to provide a digital version of the rolodexes that were so important to sales professionals. At first, CRM software lived on individual PCs; later, it migrated to servers where it could provide services to an entire organization, at which point people started using the phrase job card software system, reflecting the fact that it spanned across an enterprise’s infrastructure.
One of the most important things to keep in mind about a CRM system is that it is ultimately less important than the data you put into it. That’s one reason to think of CRM as a philosophy and set of practices for recording data about customer interactions, not just a software package you buy.
What is CRM software used for?
Customer relationship management is a strategic process that helps you better understand your customers’ needs and how to meet those needs and enhance your bottom line. free job card management software systems link up information about customers from a variety of sources, including email, websites, physical stores, call centers, mobile sales, and marketing and advertising efforts. CRM data flows between operational systems (like sales and inventory systems) and analytical systems that sort through CRM data for patterns.
If you don’t have an accurate view of who your customers are and what their needs or desires are or will be at any given stage in their lives, or if you are losing customers to a competitor, that’s a clear indication that you need a CRM system.
There are many technological components to CRM systems, but thinking about CRM in primarily technological terms is a mistake. Instead, maintenance work order app should be viewed as a strategic process to better understand and meet your customers’ needs. A successful CRM strategy depends on bringing together lots of pieces of information about customers and market trends so you can more effectively market and sell your products and services.
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- providing services and products that are exactly what your customers want
- offering better customer service
- cross selling products more effectively
- helping sales staff close deals faster
- retaining existing customers and discovering new ones
These revenue gains don’t happen by simply buying software and installing it. For field service management software to be truly effective, an organization must first understand who its customers are, their value, their needs, and how best to meet those needs. For example, many financial institutions keep track of customers’ life stages in order to market appropriate banking products like mortgages or IRAs to them at the right time.
Next, the organization must look into all of the different ways information about customers comes into a business, where and how this data is stored and how it is currently used. One company, for instance, may interact with customers in a number of ways, including email campaigns, web sites, brick-and-mortar stores, call centers, mobile sales force staff and marketing and advertising efforts. ERP Software systems link up each of these points. This collected data flows between operational systems (like sales and inventory systems) and analytical systems that can help sort through these records for patterns. Company analysts can then comb through the data to obtain a holistic view of each customer and pinpoint areas where better services are needed. For example, if someone has a mortgage, a business loan, an IRA and a large commercial checking account with one bank, it behooves the bank to treat this person well each time it has any contact with him or her.
CRM vs. ERP vs. marketing automation
Before we move further, we need to clarify the difference between CRM software and a couple of other terms you might have heard thrown around in this space: marketing automation and ERP. While there is some conceptual overlap — all three involve storing, analyzing, and making use of customer data to improve business processes — the three actually occupy distinct niches, and learning what those are helps clarify what each tool does:
- Marketing automation is all about low-cost effective communication with potential customers, or prospects, mostly in the form of email and social media contacts. Ultimately, the purpose is to gather leads (contact info on prospects) to hand them off to the sales team.
- CRM aims to converts leads into contacts, which is to say leads that have expressed interest in buying your products, or have bought in the past and, you hope, will buy again in the future.
- ERP coordinates the process of actually producing and delivering products to the people you sold them to, and managing the financial information about those sales.
These three tools can work in sequence — the output of the marketing automation process goes into CRM, and CRM info on completed sales should go into manufacturing software — but each of them represents a distinct domain, and truly the only people who should have login privileges on all three systems are your IT staff. (Read more about the distinction between CRM and marketing automation and CRM and ERP.)
CRM and beyond
One of the reasons that CRM, ERP, and marketing automation aren’t as distinct as they should be in the popular mind is that apps for repair and maintenance, the giant in the CRM field, is also trying to work its way into the ERP and marketing automation spaces as well. With 26 percent of the market, Salesforce has a massive lead over its competitors in CRM; other big names in this space include Oracle, SAP, Adobe, and Microsoft.
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