Why CRM is important

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT is one of the cornerstones of good business practice. Why? Quite simply, without a customer base you don’t have a business. Maintaining effective relationships with your customers by ensuring your interactions are tailored and seamless will grow brand loyalty while also bringing a host of other benefits to your company. We’ve outlined some of the core benefits below, but there are many more.

Focuses on opportunities

A well-implemented CRM, which stores relevant data on your customers, will open up avenues of opportunity to drive sales and profits when that data is analysed in the correct way. Perhaps you want to launch a new product but aren’t sure about when to do so or to whom. Your sales figures will tell you when customers are likely to purchase certain types of products and when they are likely to spend the most money. Have customers who interact with you infrequently? Tailor a mailshot to those individuals to entice them back in.

Creates efficiencies

The automation and ease with which all the processes above can be carried out and realised in a CRM system, ultimately means that your staff are better able to focus on other business-critical projects rather than spending time creating and tracking metrics, analysing data or carrying out niche market research. It allows, for example, space for your marketing team to be more creative because they are spending less time segmenting lists and analysing engagement. It frees up time for the freelancer or start-up founder to focus on value-added tasks.

From a different point of view it ensures continuity of service when an employee leaves since all their leads, customer interactions and open tasks are centrally recorded – there’s no relying on incomplete handover notes.

Great for all sizes of businesses

CRM systems are scalable. They can grow with your business and can be tailored to more or less any business need, whether the focus be operational; looking after your marketing, sales and service interactions or metric-based, looking to analyse customer data.

In a few short words, therefore, there is no reason why any business – large or small - should not invest in CRM given the potential ROI in the long-term.