RS Maan, who is the Managing Director & Global CRO of Codleo, he has been introducing the power of CRM- Salesforce to the corporates in India and North-Eastern USA since 2010. Presently, he heads Codleo with his impressive leadership and business skills that drive sales & improves ROI. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Indraprastha University followed by a Business Marketing Diploma from IIM, Calcutta. He is an occasional reader and prefers reading only KhaledHosseini’s novels. In his free time, he spends his time by playing with his dog, Leo. He finds solace in counseling people around him and hence is always on a quest to build communication and connections.
We all know that survival, success and reputation of a business are significantly dependent on how well it services its customers. Whether a company caters to 100 customers or 10,000 customers, customer relationships are important.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, a valuable asset for large organizations, can be a secret recipe for transforming a small business or a start-up into a vibrant organisation. This is because small and medium-sized enterprises have to face various challenges – comparable prices, a lot of competition, specific customer requirements, price and product transparency etc. In such a competitive industry, the only way to stand out is to build efficient and effective customer relations.
Why MSMEs Need CRM?
Contact list and customer satisfaction hold a lot more importance for small business organisations because your business needs customers to stay alive! While new customers are important for the growth of the business, existing customers also have to be retained for your business to be successful in the longer run. CRM does just that for you! It not only helps in contact management but also helps you to follow up the customers in a better way.
Moreover, CRM helps to track the leads that have higher chances of conversion, enabling to target the prospects effectively and in the right direction. Also, CRM enables a central data sharing point to ensure collaboration with the colleagues and bring coordination among the team.
Now, let’s talk about the best practices for CRM implementation to leverage the above-mentioned benefits for your business.
- Understand Your Requirements and Objectives
Before you evaluate options, it is important to understand your organisation’s needs and goals – what drives your need for CRM? What do you want to accomplish? What problems will the CRM solve or what process will it improve? While some may want to create a central repository of contact data through CRM, others may want to track sales activities or pipelines. So, identify your goals in advance!
- Opt for a Platform that can Provide Tailored Services
It is significantly important to opt for a CRM platform that provides tailored solutions for your business not only today but also, in the long run when your business grows. You can also opt for a future-ready tool that houses data in a secure cloud environment because such a platform will easily scale up with you as your business expands. Also, consider investing in the new generation of CRM that is based on artificial intelligence and automatically generates insights to help you predict how your customers will feel and act in a given scenario.
- A Well Defined Implementation Strategy
If you want your CRM system to perform optimally, you need to have a pre-defined implementation strategy. From preparing the existing data for migration to configuring systems for configuration before importing data to the new system, implementation is a long process.
- Use CRM Analytics to Make Data Driven Decisions
Modern CRM systems are technologically advanced and can perform predictive analytics to enable smarter informed decisions. Hence, organisations should leverage these tools and metrics to boost the overall performance of the system with the help of insights.
- De-clutter Your CRM
It is very important to schedule regular data cleansing of your CRM system as well as do deduplication to ensure that the insights provided by the system are accurate at all times and they reflect the current situation of the organisation accurately.
Summing Up!
With the integration of AI and Big Data, the use and significance of CRM systems have enhanced tremendously and they are no longer used only for contact management. They can be used for improving your customer satisfaction, increase your connectivity and enhance your sales effectively. However, to achieve great results from a CRM system, best practices as listed above must be followed.