Every business depends on customers in some way or form, and in a time when there is immense competition in every industry, earning and maintaining a relationship with customers is crucial to the success of the business. The concept of customer relationship management (CRM) has evolved, so as to encourage, enhance and overall manage the relationship of a company with its customers and potential customers. CRM software incorporates the use of technology to manage customer relations in a more effective manner and to further drive sales growth.
CRM software is applicable for B2C and B2B companies, and streamlines customer communications from all different data channels, compiling data that can be used to make customer-targeted business decisions. CRM software can be used to help businesses with customer data, customer interaction, accessing business information, automating sales, tracking leads, customer support, contracts, and supporting vendor/partner relationships.
Ways The Growing CRM Software Market Is Helping Businesses Improve Customer Management
The global CRM market analysis shows steady growth driven by demands for improvement in customer retention, customer acquisition, customer voice, customer experience, lead management, and field management. The high market maturity regions are in the U.S. and Western Europe while the medium market maturity regions are China, Australia, and India. Other regions of the APAC and LATAM are considered to be emerging markets for CRM software with a greater focus towards analytics, SaaS and mobile CRM.
The growing CRM software market is greatly helping businesses in improving the overall customer management experience in many ways.
- Modern-day CRM software is capable of sending automated marketing messages, that help keeps customers updated with news and offers from the company with minimal effort from the company directly. Maintaining regular communication with customers helps enhance customer relationship and encourage more sales. In addition, the marketing messages are generally easy to forward, making it more likely that customers will share the deals with others.
- Any customer would enjoy personalized treatment; however, large volumes of customers might make that tricky. With CRM software, personalization becomes easy and effortless, whether it is sending personalized e-mails or messages, birthday bonus promo codes or personalized suggestions for purchases. Personalization helps in developing a long-lasting relationship with the customer.
- For customers, consistency is important in terms of interactions from the business they are dealing with, as it increases their comfort level and encourages them to return to the same business again. With CRM software, it is easy to maintain uniform processes in terms of customer interaction. These processes can be evaluated by the businesses periodically and changed as per the requirement to further enhance customer satisfaction.
- Understanding the customer, their preferences and past history is an important aspect of customer relations, and it becomes easy to do so with CRM software. With capable CRM software, businesses can keep track of customer information, preferences, past purchases, comments, problems, and any other issues. This data can help in providing relevant information in case of any difficulty and also in suggesting products that are more likely to elicit a response from the customer.
- Customer support has become an essential part of businesses, and being able to effectively and swiftly provide resolution to any difficulty a customer faces is paramount. CRM software is automated and can quickly respond to any customer concerns, even identifying typical cases and suggested resolutions or even redirecting the customer concerns to a suitable representative. By keeping track of frequent grievances, businesses can flag recurring issues and work on preventing their occurrence directly.
- Customers’ needs and requirements are bound to change with time, and with CRM software, businesses can keep track of the changing requirements and develop their services accordingly. By directly engaging with the customers and their needs, businesses can avoid spending extensive funds in market research and instead focus on delivering the current needs of the customers in their particular industry and field.
CRM pricing models include fixed pricing and time and material based pricing. The core cost components are implementation, customization, and training. CRM offers numerous cost-saving opportunities, including through deactivation of unused licenses, minimal customization, effective training and adoption of SaaS. Contract periods are typically of 2-3 years duration. Buyers have shown a preference for CRM software solutions that can be used for multiple business functions in addition to customer support, for example, sales and marketing, and that are accessible from different channels such as social media and mobile.
Consumer behavior and customer needs have changed greatly, with customers becoming more informed, knowledgeable and demanding. These needs, coupled with increasing competition in the respective industries require businesses to boost their customer relations in order to retain customers and draw in new customers. The growing CRM software market is playing an important role in helping businesses improve their customer management capabilities and customer experience overall.
