Customer Relationship Management Definition and CRM Software

Customer Relationship Management – More technology means that it is possible to conduct business much more quickly and efficiently than before; transactions that used to take days now take only seconds. Of course, it also means that there is much more information to keep track of, more information, in fact, than it is humanly possible to handle. Business now takes place at superhuman speeds, and it requires software with superhuman memory to keep track of all the data involved. Customer relationship management software can make your work a lot more streamlined, especially if you do wordpress ecommerce business online.

What is Customer Relationship Management?

Definitions of customer relationship management vary. It includes keeping track of data about customers and their buying behavior patterns. It also includes customer support, such as having a hotline that customers can call with questions or concerns. Some customer relationship management definitions even include relationships with employees, vendors, and related businesses within the scope of the term customer relationship management. In its narrowest definition, it includes only business to customer relationships, but in its broader definition, it also includes business to business relationships.

What Is CRM Software?

CRM software is a computer software application that your business can use to monitor and manage its relationships with its customers as well as with other individuals and businesses with which it deals. Its purpose is to automate customer relationship management tasks that would otherwise be very costly and time consuming. It can collect and organize data about sales and customer satisfaction, and it can help you plan advertising campaigns and predict the success of future product launches and other business decisions.

How Can CRM Software Help You?

The benefits of CRM software are many. It can help you get organized and save time and money. Even if your business is small, and you only deal with a dozen or so clients, customer relationship management is still an important part of the success of your business. Even when you only have a few clients, it can be a challenge to keep the details of your dealings with all of them straight. A CRM software program can help you stay organized when dealing with your clients so that you can avoid mistakes and misunderstandings.

With CRM software, the history of all your dealings with any given client is only a click away. You can see all the emails you have exchanged with the client, all the purchases the client has made with your wordpress ecommerce business, and even how many phone calls the client made to your office and how many minutes the client spent on hold. Some types of CRM software are cloud based, so that means that the data will still be only a click away, even if all the computers in your office crash, and even if the employees who access the data work from home.

Customer relationship management software can display data in a variety of ways so that you can study the trends in your e-shop business from a variety of angles. It can generate graphs and charts in response to almost any research question related to your online business and local stores. These charts are especially useful when you are planning a new advertising or marketing campaign. For example, you can use the CRM software to see which customers are more likely to buy products from your wordpress ecommerce business or local store, when they have coupons. You can even see which customers used paper coupons and which used email coupons, and this information can help you determine to whom to send coupons and in which form to make them available. You can even use the software to generate charts depicting a projection of how successful the new campaign will be.

CRM Software and Cloud computing platforms

The best thing about customer relationship management software is that you can access it from anywhere. The newest CRM software programs store their data in a cloud. That means that you can log in while you are on the train going home from work and see what customers have bought in the 45 minutes since you left the office. If a particular product has been selling like crazy, you can send an email to the employees who are still at work and advise them to publish a special shop offer on products that pair well with your top selling ecommerce product. Whereas it used to take weeks or months to follow market trends, it only takes a fraction of a second with customer relationship management software.

Another advantage of being able to log into your CRM software from anywhere is that, no matter what your role in the company might be, when you log into the system, you see a dashboard with a to-do list of all your customer relationship management related tasks. This is convenient because it helps you mentally organize your workday while you are commuting to work.