What is a Customer Relationship Management System (CRM)?

Customers are the most valuable asset of any business. Therefore, maintaining accurate customer information and responding promptly and appropriately to customers is of high importance. At the start of a business, various pieces of customer information such as names, contact details, purchase history, customer interactions with company employees, and customer payments may be scattered across different parts of your system, such as the CEO's mind, the marketing email inbox, the accountant's invoice list, etc. As the business grows and the customer base expands, having a central and integrated place to keep all customer information becomes essential. In other words, the lack of integration of customer information in the system leads to the loss of important information, time wastage, and ultimately customer dissatisfaction. Additionally, from the customers' perspective, they expect to interact with a company, not a collection of individuals and different departments. Therefore, it is necessary that every person in your team is aware of each customer's needs, requests, and current status.

To address these issues, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems can be used. In other words, having a centralized system to organize customer information allows employees of any company to easily access the necessary information about each customer through the existing CRM system and respond to them in the best possible way.

The main question here is what a CRM system is and how it can be used in your business. Essentially, Customer Relationship Management refers to the strategy and tactics of interacting and engaging with customers. In other words, a successful CRM system looks at our business from the customer's perspective and helps us address its shortcomings.

It is worth noting that nowadays when people talk about CRM, they are referring to CRM software or systems, which provide features such as managing individual and company information, sales data, activities, reports, and more.

Who Needs a CRM?

You might wonder who needs a Customer Relationship Management system? The answer is very simple! Any company that seeks to establish better communication with its customers needs a CRM system. Specifically, two groups of companies have a greater need for a customer relationship management system:

• B2B companies (business-to-business) that need to track customers through long sales cycles.
• B2C companies (business-to-consumer).

Additionally, there may be many other companies that, even though they do not fall into any of the mentioned categories, still need to use a CRM system for their business. Therefore, another method to determine the need for a CRM system in your business is to answer the following 3 questions:

• Do you need a centralized list of customer information? Is this information scattered across your system?
• Do your customers interact with different members of your team?
• Are you looking for ways to increase the productivity of your sales team?

If your answer to one or more of the above questions is yes, you are likely to need a CRM system for your business.

What Is the Goal of a CRM System?

The goal of a CRM system is very simple: to improve business relationships. In other words, a CRM system helps companies maintain and improve effective communication with current customers, simplifies processes, and enhances profitability. It is also very useful for acquiring new customers.

In all organizations, customers are the most important asset and the main factor in the formation and growth of the business. Therefore, special attention must be given to them. On the other hand, customer expectations from any business are different. Customers also expect that their reasonable needs are met within a system. On the other hand, it is only possible to meet customer expectations if there is a proper understanding of their needs.

Here, a Customer Relationship Management system can be used to address these issues and meet customer needs.

Benefits of Using a CRM System

A CRM system, if implemented correctly, will bring many benefits to your business. In summary, the benefits of using a CRM system include:

• Better understanding of customers: As mentioned earlier, a CRM system can store various customer information in a centralized database, thus gaining a better understanding of customers.
• Time-saving: Sales and after-sales services are time-consuming activities within an organization. Sales employees spend a lot of time daily on tasks such as marketing and responding to customer calls, which ultimately reduces the overall efficiency of the organization. Although some sales activities cannot be performed by a CRM system, it can significantly reduce the workload of employees by automating tasks like recording requests, sending messages to customers, etc., thus saving time.
• More effective marketing and advertising: Communication in selling a product is very impactful. The sales department can be considered an interactive department where communication between customers and sales employees plays a key role. A CRM system can automate a large portion of these communications, such as SMS and email advertising.
• Attracting more customers: Using an appropriate CRM system can increase sales, improve profitability, enhance the loyalty of existing customers by providing tailored services, and consequently attract new customers through the trust established among other customers.
• And more...

What Are the Features of a Reliable CRM System?

As you can see, CRM systems offer numerous features and help businesses manage customers more effectively. However, due to these various features, determining the needs of different buyers can be challenging. On the other hand, because of the various functionalities in a CRM, if a customer relationship management system is not implemented properly, it might not only fail to help in managing customers but also complicate your business further. Therefore, the best CRM system is one that, while being simple and easy to use, facilitates the achievement of organizational goals.

Another important feature of a CRM system is data security. As mentioned, all customer information, including personal data and purchase history, will be stored in a CRM system. Therefore, proper maintenance and protection of this information are crucial. A reliable CRM system should adhere to security standards and protect your data against various hacking attempts.

Pingo CRM System

Another service offered by PingoTeam is the design of a CRM system tailored to your business needs. Unfortunately, many CRM projects fail due to incorrect analysis of requirements! At Pingo CRM System, we will initially plan the project implementation carefully by analyzing customer needs. This ensures that accurately determining requirements plays a key role in the success and progress of the project. Also, the system will be delivered on time. To register your CRM request, you can do so through this link. Our experts will contact you as soon as possible, and if both parties agree, our collaboration will begin.