What are the benefits of CRM?

As well as driving customer engagement, a well implemented CRM solution will deliver benefits.  So what are the main benefits of CRM?  Here are some examples of how CRM benefits organisations across various role types and its customers.

I have split the benefits of CRM into roles to highlight how it can perhaps help you.  One thing to remember is that CRM will not only drive benefits internally but it will enhance your external relationships and drive customer experience – see my note at the end of this blog.  Differentiating yourself in the marketplace and doing this through customer engagement is exciting and a necessity in today’s busy social and digital environment.

 

What are the benefits of CRM for marketers?

In 2007 Forrester suggested that marketing was the “new key metric”.  Repeated interaction and sales develop the brand experience.

Here are the top benefits of CRM for marketers and some examples of how CRM can help marketers:

  • Highly focused targeting. Poor targeting = low engagement.  By using granular targeted data means that you can speak directly to a group, giving them what they may need.
  • Using CRM or a CRM integration to send direct mail keeps your data clean and constant.
  • Using quick campaigns in CRM makes you agile. Giving you the power to segment and react quickly.
  • You can use the information in CRM to gain a greater understanding of your customers. This data will allow you to understand your personas.  Who else you can target and reach?
  • Marketing campaigns are in one place! Collaboration between teams and managing marketing budgets and automation starts in CRM.
  • You can measure which marketing campaigns are actually working. Each customer touchpoint has a value.  Do you know which campaign converted your customer?
  • You can analyse your direct marketing campaigns using your CRM data.
  • You will have a seamless handover to sales giving them the best leads to focus on.
  • You can take your web and integrate with CRM keeping all your data in one place, fresh and relevant.
  • If you have loyalty programs you can manage them through CRM. Using CRM data you can segment your customers, perhaps offering different rewards for levels of engagement or repeat purchases.
  • CRM will allow you to profile customer characteristics based on:
    1. The most growable customers (MGC)
    2. The most valuable customers (MVC)
  • CRM will enable you to understand your products and services. Which are the most popular?  Additional to CRM software for marketing is Dynamics Marketing.  The benefits of this solution is true integration and time saving marketing automation.  Here is a snap shot of the functionality:

 

NB : Dynamics Marketing is only available on Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online.

 

Benefits of CRM free download

 

How can CRM help benefit customer service?

CRM solutions offer organisations the ability to customise and focus on their relationships with their clients, and here are the benefits of CRM for your service staff and some examples to help!

  • CRM keeps all information in one place giving your service teams the information they need to help customers in the way they want and taking their history and needs into consideration. Having this information available is a huge opportunity to generate customer focus and delight your customers every time.
  • CRM solutions can be integrated into several solutions. As Dynamics CRM is tightly integrated with Outlook then communications with your customers will start to improve and generate benefits for your business, as communications are all in one place.
  • Handling customer cases, questions and support will help to increase efficiency in handing these calls.
  • Using CRM Unified Service Desk means that you can empower your customers by giving them a log in to a web service. Here the customer will be able to see knowledge articles that can help them to perhaps answer their own questions, alternatively they will be able to log a support case here helping your customer service team help those customers when they need it.  Generating this knowledge base will reduce customer cases and calls.
  • Using CRM for customer service can extend support for to a 24×7 experience.
  • Improving customer support will help customer retention and enable customer focus.
  • CRM fosters customer centricity and is the key driver to help generate customer satisfaction differentiating you in the marketplace and aiding referrals.
  • Consider running a customer satisfaction survey to measure key goals that CRM has facilitated. Bi-annual surveys can demonstrate where CRM is making improvements on customer experience and where more focus can be achieved to generate more improvements.

Benefits of implementing CRM

How can CRM benefit sales?  

CRM will join your business helping marketing and sales to work together and providing cohesion for service and sales.  Sales professionals have been using CRM solutions since the 80s to manage their sales and relationships but now, more than ever, CRM has started to revolutionize businesses and organisations of all types, providing true benefits.

  • CRM enables pipeline management helping sales forecasting and reporting.
  • CRM can demonstrate your most valuable and most growable customers enabling account management and planning, using true data.
  • CRM will provide data to measure the revenue per month by sales person. This will also mean time saved managing the sales and accounts.
  • The system can help to speed up sales closing deals and highlight where any sales are dragging.
  • Mobile CRM ensures that your sales people have the system even when they are on the road.
  • Sales data of what customers have bought previously and how often can be used to focus sales and marketing teams to generate campaigns and create more sales.
  • CRM enables sales forecasting which is incredibly important for manufacturing and delivery teams to schedule and predict resource fulfillment.

These are just some of the benefits of CRM for sales.  With CRM firmly focused in Sales from a historic point of view, contact management benefits have been enjoyed by sales teams for many years.

 

What can CRM help do better?

A properly installed CRM solution will add benefits by streamlining processes, joining teams and providing one truth.  Externally customers will be more engaged, they will receive information they need when they need it and in the format they need it in and be able to self-serve.
Customer relationship management is the process that a business uses to find out more about their customers and engage with them further.  By doing this businesses prosper and grow and delight their customers at every turn and these are just some of the benefits of CRM.

 

When planning your CRM implementation, Caltech recommends that you consider SMART objectives to ensure that you can deliver benefits that are tangible.

 

For example, objectives could be:

 

  • To increase customer service efficiency by 30% annually, saving the customer service team 10 hours per week by December.
  • Each sales manager to increase revenue by £5k per month for the financial year.
  • Each marketing campaign to generate 100 leads…

 

By setting objectives you will be able to measure those objectives using CRM and thus know if you have delivered benefits that you set out to achieve.

 

In 2011, Forrester carried out research to understand the CRM benefits to organisations using the software.   It interviewed 9 organisations and found that before using Dynamics CRM these organisations had either used bespoke homegrown CRM solutions or no software at all – perhaps moving from Excel or basic contact management systems.

 

Benefits of CRM reported included improved sales, customer service productivity, streamlined processes and shortened sales cycles.   Forrester also found that marketing realized cost savings and saw better reporting due to automation and campaign management.

 

Other benefits of CRM that were not included in the study but were noted was improved collaboration and improved integration with other systems.

 

Since January 2011 CRM solutions have continued to improve and grow.  The benefits they can offer has increased due to the functionality.

 

By understanding the value of each client and replacing repetitive tasks, as well as taking advantage of integration with social media and marketing platforms, CRM will provide cohesion for your teams and increase your market share.

Case Study Benefits of CRM

What automation benefits does CRM have?

CRM can automate repetitive tasks ensuring that they are done and done well.  Using personalisation, customers will be delighted and an opportunity for sales or communication will never be missed.

CRM can automate using:

Workflows

Development

Integrations

Or Plug ins.

 

The possibilities of using automation are endless.  By mapping out your processes and setting objectives, you can add meaningful automation where it will matter the most and generate the most benefit to you and your customers.  To see more examples and benefits of CRM see our case studies.

 

How can CRM benefit my customers?

As well as internal improvements, CRM will provide benefits to your customers.

  • Customers can use the knowledge base provided by using CRM unified service desk.
  • Customers will get what they need when they need it.
  • Communications will matter to your customers. They will be meaningful and speak their language.
  • Customers will be surprised and delighted by the support and knowledge you teams will have.
  • Expectations will be exceeded.

 

As well as enhancing your customer engagement, CRM implemented properly will expand and facilitate the productivity of your business and increase your market share.

Using information, data, which is in one central place at the heart of your organisation enables targeted marketing, and showcasing products and services that you promote.  It will encourage and enhance what your customers buy, when and how they buy, and will open communication channels.

Using the information that CRM holds is an analytical way increases productivity and profit.   Specific benefits of CRM include:

  1. Greater understanding of your clients and their buying behaviour
  2. Ability to anticipate their future needs
  3. Specific targeted marketing
  4. Increase of customers satisfaction
  5. Enhanced reputation through referrals and partners
  6. Ability to see best and worst performing areas
  7. Make the most of your staff, customers, your services and products

 

More Reading : 

Find out more about how CRM can benefit your industry.

Check out our Top 10 CRM implementation steps 

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