CRM systems are now widely adopted, yet many business users are still unclear about what a CRM system actually is. The following sections explain in detail what kind of system CRM is and why companies need it. The term CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. A CRM system gives enterprises a comprehensive management perspective, equips them with well-rounded customer communication capabilities, and maximizes customer profitability. It is both a management discipline and a set of software and technologies. In essence, it is about attracting customers, retaining them, and maximizing customer value. Its goals are to shorten sales cycles and reduce selling costs, increase revenue, identify new markets and channels for business expansion, and improve customer value, satisfaction, profitability and loyalty, creating greater returns for the enterprise. As for the origins of CRM systems, they lie in companies’ emphasis on a long-term view of customer management — the view that customers are an enterprise’s most important asset, and that loyal customers can strengthen a company’s competitive advantage and ultimately raise its profit margins. Accordingly, in the early 1990s the first generation of traditional, on-premise CRM was born, centered on process control and aimed mainly at reducing sales costs. The second generation, SaaS-based CRM running on PCs, emerged in the early 2000s, managing the entire customer relationship process to optimize internal resources. The third generation, mobile CRM, took off in the 2010s, integrating cutting-edge technologies such as cloud, mobile, social and big data to extend business operations to mobile devices. The rise of the fourth generation is marked by the launch of Baihui’s intelligent CRM, which combines data mining and machine learning to intelligently identify key customers, suggest the best times to contact potential customers, and help companies formulate sound strategies. Next, we analyze what kind of system CRM is from the perspectives of marketing, sales, after-sales service, reports and statistical charts.
- From a company’s marketing perspective, a CRM system offers “marketing automation” capabilities
A CRM system delivers the following in marketing automation: 1. Consolidate and capture leads. A CRM system helps companies effectively collect customer information from every marketing channel — including direct conversations with customers, marketing events, and leads acquired through search engine promotion, websites, SMS, WeChat, call centers and advertising — and consolidate it for unified management in the CRM system. 2. Automate follow-up on marketing campaigns and measure their results. A CRM system helps companies effectively plan and improve marketing campaign workflows, optimize lead development, and automatically evaluate campaign performance based on data to raise lead conversion rates. So what can marketers do with a CRM system? Marketers can use it to store lead information collected from various channels, providing sales with more opportunities; during marketing campaigns, they can plan, execute, approve and manage expenses online within the CRM system to improve efficiency; and they can use it to effectively monitor campaign results, report return on investment to management quickly, and analyze customer characteristics through CRM reports to target their efforts precisely and improve marketing accuracy.
- From a company’s sales perspective, a CRM system offers “sales automation” capabilities
Sales automation is the core of CRM, mainly managing opportunities, customers and sales channels. It organically connects all of a company’s sales activities, creating a smooth, customer-centric workflow across remote sales teams, between sales and marketing, and between sales and service. It shortens sales cycles, lowers costs and improves win rates. Let’s look at what sales directors and salespeople can each accomplish with CRM. Sales directors can use CRM to organize daily work and keep the team running in good order; gain full visibility into the sales process; produce accurate monthly, quarterly and annual sales forecasts; analyze key data to build sound sales plans; approve and support subordinates’ requests for assistance at any time; capture the working methods of top performers and replicate them across the team; see the locations of field staff and manage results through process, and more. Salespeople: use a CRM system to plan daily work and avoid running around aimlessly; record customer details thoroughly to prevent errors or omissions; receive automatic reminders of customer holidays and birthdays so they can send timely greetings and care; follow up comprehensively on their own customers and maintain good relationships; and move projects forward in an orderly, standardized way, managing opportunities in detail to keep performance rising.
- From a company’s customer service perspective, a CRM system offers “customer service automation” capabilities
Customer service automation enables standardized service processes, improving efficiency and strengthening service capabilities. It also helps service staff capture and track customer issues more precisely, uncover potential sales opportunities in customer feedback, and enable customers to contribute more value to the business. So what can service staff do with Baihui CRM? Improve the efficiency and capability of customer service; accurately capture customer issues, reduce complaints and raise customer satisfaction; develop existing customers and extend the customer lifecycle; improve service knowledge and management and accumulate proven experience; and rely on clear back-office reports and performance evaluations, giving companies a solid basis for assessing service staff, among other things.
- Reports and statistical charts in a CRM system
A CRM system provides enterprises with flexible, fully customizable reports and statistical charts. Starting with reports: they can be generated on a schedule and emailed to CRM users. Baihui CRM reports, for example, offer more than 40 standard reports covering marketing campaigns, sales, customer service and order management, and can be saved in public or private folders so that access is controlled by user permissions. Reports can also be exported in PDF, HTML, XLS and CSV formats for staff in the relevant departments. As for statistical charts, CRM charts display key enterprise data in real time and make it easy to show comparisons, developments and trends in marketing, sales and customer service data in clear graphical form. Baihui CRM’s Flash-based interactive charts, for instance, offer attractive page output and fast loading, and include a fully customizable range of chart types, including bar, funnel, pie and line. This variety lets companies choose the chart format that suits them best. Today CRM is an essential online product for enterprises, helping them acquire precise customers at low cost and with high efficiency, rapidly improve business performance and deliver the greatest value to the business.
