Customer relationship management(CRM) is the process of managing interactions with existing as well as past and potential customers. It uses data analytics about customers’ history with a company to improve business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on customer retention and ultimately driving sales growth.

Through the CRM approach and the systems used to facilitate it, businesses learn more about their target audiences and how to best cater for their needs.

At it’s core, CRM is all of the activities, strategies and technologies that companies use to manage their interactions with their current and potential customers. A saying frequently heard and said in many businesses is “customer is king.”

Some well known tools for CRM systems are Sugar CRM, BatchBook, SalesForce, and Buzzstream. These tools integrate with modern-day essentials such as e-mail marketing, social media, messaging, telephony, live chat, and other technologies to provide personalized direct marketing contact to customers and prospective clients.

CRM not only helps in making your task but also does supportive tasks such as assigning of tasks, taking some actions when the lead become inactive.

Maintaining a healthy and productive customer relationship is of utmost importance to the growth & future of a company.

Customer relationship management is almost always important for an organization because :

• A CRM system consists of a historical view and analysis of all acquired or to be acquired customers. This helps in reduced searching and correlating customers and to foresee customer needs effectively and increase business.
• Creating a bond with existing customers ensures that you won’t have to work on getting them again like new traffic.
• CRM contains each and every bit if details of a customer, hence it becomes exceedingly easy to track customer habits and can be used to determine which customers can be profitable and which not.
• Having a bond with customers increases the chance of making numerous purchases, so a bulk of those first-time buyers return for more. When you make your customers feel welcome even after the purchase, they too start feeling some loyalty towards your brand.
• In a CRM system, customers are grouped according to the type of business they do or according to physical location and are allocated to different customer managers often called as account managers. This helps in focusing on each and every customer separately.
• A CRM system is not only used to deal with existing customers but is also useful in acquiring new customers. The process first starts with identifying a customer and maintaining all their corresponding details into a CRM system also called an ‘Opportunity of business’. The sales and field representatives then try getting business out of these customers by sophisticatedly following up with them into a winning deal. All this is very easily and efficiently done by an integrated CRM system.
• The strongest aspect of CRM is that it is very cost-affective. There is very less need of paper and manual work, and the technologies used in implementing a CRM system are also very cheap and smooth as compared to the traditional ways of business.
• All the data in CRM system is kept centralized which is available anytime on fingertips. This reduces the process time and increases productivity.
• Efficiently dealing with all the customers and providing the what they actually need, increases the customer satisfaction. This ultimately leads to more business, turnover and profit.
• If the customer is satisfied they will always be loyal to you and will remain in business forever, resulting in increasing customer base and ultimately enhancing net growth of business.
• With a prolonged good customer relationship management, customers feel obliged, happy even, to advocate your brand to others and that’s how your business rises to success and performance.

CRM is and excellent tool that allows companies to increase not only their customer satisfaction but also their efficiency and profits. CRM comes in a wide variety of strategies and applications, which allows it to be modified to fit virtually any business type. Almost every business can benefit from CRM software, and it is much better to start using a CRM before it becomes an absolute necessity!