What is CRM? CRM software benefits, processes and features

What is CRM?
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) or customer relationship management is a strategy to improve the relationship between businesses and potential customers. Leveraging CRM helps businesses optimize conversion rates based on information collected from customers.

What is CRM software?
CRM software is a tool to help businesses realize their customer relationship management strategies. From there, team or company leaders can analyze and understand customers through their shopping process on the system.

The goal of CRM is to maintain business relationships, devise a strategy to attract many potential customers to profit for the business. Use a CRM tool with many functions to help businesses manage relationships across the entire customer lifecycle from marketing, sales, commerce to customer service interactions.

Operation process of CRM software in business
The operating process of the CRM system is a closed circle with 5 points including: Sales – Marketing – Service – Analysis – Collaborative. Customers will be the center of those 5 activities.

Marketing
Marketing will perform activities to attract potential customers. Through content and marketing mediums, businesses reach customers and stimulate their needs. Customers will then leave contact information for the business.

Sales (Sales)
Sales staff will record the information of potential customers and perform a series of activities in stages from contact, appraisal, proposal to turning the opportunity into a successful customer. Activities include emailing, calling, sending quotes, requesting demos, etc. After performing the necessary activities, sales staff will convert potential customers into final customers.

Customer Service (Service)
These are the activities businesses take to retain customers. Customer care activities include sending thank-you emails, greetings, giving gratitude gifts, etc. or answering and solving customers’ problems during the process of purchasing and using goods and services. With customer care activities, businesses will create sympathy and retain customers.

Customer Data Analytics (Analysis)
Once you have a list of potential customers and successful customers, businesses need to analyze customers. In addition, the sales and management team need to analyze the problem and come up with appropriate solutions to meet the needs of customers, improve the conversion rate into successful customers, as well as come up with strategies. Marketing, Sales and Customer Service strategies for the next period.

Create customer relationships through channels (Collaborative)
With the integrated feature of CRM software, businesses can contact customers on channels from email, phone, message, website, etc. From there, manage customer files and serve them better, building Build and strengthen relationships between customers and businesses.

Benefits that CRM for businesses

Improve customer service
CRM provides a tool to store customer information automatically to help businesses easily access customer records, transaction history and feedback from multiple channels (social networks, email, chat, …). This not only saves time but also increases communication efficiency, gets to know customers, thereby improving customer service..

Most importantly, when the service is improved, the introduction of new customers by old customers will be a free channel for you to find new customers. You can absolutely increase profits or revenue thanks to this feature.

Manage and adjust marketing activities accordingly
With CRM, businesses can perform marketing activities quickly and effectively. Businesses can create marketing activities such as sending emails to notify events, promotions, planning to implement marketing campaigns, …. Tasks can be customized to ensure connection with every client.

Increase sale revenue
With the current sharp increase in omni-channel sales, it is very important to integrate multiple means of communication via social networks, emails, chats, etc. on the same platform to streamline and improve the sales process. . CRM tools allow businesses to do that easily, even increasing customer transactions and delivering brand messages through the right channels at the right time.

This also partly solves the spread selling factor. Managers can also participate to see which customers a salesperson spends a lot of time with, as well as see if they are neglecting any customers.

Effective customer retention
Customer retention rate and customer churn rate are two important ratios for business success. The use of many CRM tools such as customer psychology analysis, customer support support will help increase the customer retention rate. The analytics tool also helps to provide statistics when looking directly at the customer lifecycle and predicting the reasons for the increase in customer abandonment rate, so that businesses can promptly propose the right solution.

For example, you sell a consumable product or software. When consumers use the product or the product expires, sales staff can actively seize the opportunity to invite consumers to continue using the product.

Improved data analysis

Integrated with many effective analysis tools, with CRM, businesses can easily access the data warehouse and make decisions quickly with an easy-to-operate interface, and information is flexibly and appropriately arranged. with the business purpose of the enterprise.

This improvement in data analytics is not only relevant for managers, but also for salespeople. Salespeople also fully know their time, revenue in real time. This is similar to not forgetting a customer at all.

Features of CRM software
The CRM tool includes many different functions designed to suit your business purposes.

Automate customer information storage
CRM automatically stores customer information, transaction history and feedback from many different channels such as social networks, Email Marketing, SMS, etc. on the same platform. This helps information to be centralized, easily accessible, businesses can classify customers according to each functional category corresponding to marketing plans, plan to care and attract customers.

Analyze potential customers
Based on customer data provided by CRM, businesses will know information about customers, thereby classifying customers and have an accurate view of customer behavior. Enterprises can propose implementation or consulting scenarios according to different types of customers.

Lead Management
CRM allows businesses to create, edit and track leads before and after purchase. In addition, CRM also supports allocating appropriate care staff for each object and recording customer transactions, feedback and evaluations on integrated multi-channels.

This is one of the most important elements of CRM. With CRM statistics, you can completely determine which customers should be the priority customers to handle first. Avoid focusing too much on less profitable customers.

Automate business operations
Activities from sending emails, arranging meeting schedules, sending quotes, etc. are all automated with the CRM system. Users can cut time, increase work efficiency and reduce risks when performing such activities.

Support statistics, automatic reports
Based on a data warehouse of information and transaction history, customer feedback, CRM conducts statistics and detailed reports in the form of charts. From there, businesses can evaluate the ROI of the marketing plan through potential customer analysis data, offering more effective customer care services. From the statistics table, businesses can easily track sales, increase lead conversion rates and track the progress of KPIs in real time.

Increase team work efficiency

When customer data is integrated on the same platform, it allows Sales, Marketing and customer care teams to easily share information with each other when working in groups. In addition, CRM allows businesses to build a knowledge base, establish an effective team workflow: remove duplicate tasks, mark important tasks, etc. Dashboards and breakdown pages Analytics helps the team to gain a deeper understanding of their work and thereby optimize business processes.

Types of CRM
Classification by deployment method
Classification by cloud deployment method crm
Cloud CRM
Cloud CRM is a customer relationship management software where all data is stored on the CRM provider’s server and the customer accesses the software via the internet. This type of software is called SaaS (Software as a Service).

Features of Cloud CRM:

Rent service by month
Data stored on Cloud service provider server
Auto update
Deploying technology is not too difficult
Build your own secure server system
Fast deployment, investment costs are not too high
Self-hosted CRM
Self-hosted CRM is a type of software that customers will install and store all information and data on their servers. The maintenance and security of data will be the responsibility of the customer.

Features of Self-hosted CRM:

Buy software to use forever
The data is stored on the company server
Deployment takes time, costs a lot
Manually update software
Requires highly skilled personnel to self-deploy.
Need to build a secure server system.
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Open source CRM

Open Source CRM (Open Source CRM) is a customer relationship management tool that uses open source scripts that allow users to download and adapt those codes to suit their purposes. Open source CRM allows businesses to customize to fit the business model and purpose.

Features of Open Source CRM:

Highly adjustable, in line with the needs of expanding or changing business models.
Provides all the necessary features.
Need personnel who can install and customize software to fit the business.
Closed source CRM
Closed Source CRM (Closed Source CRM) is a business management software developed and researched by an organization or company. If you want to use it, you usually have to buy a license and only the company that builds this software can edit and add features.

Features of closed source CRM:

The ability to adjust is low, it is difficult to meet the expansion needs of the business.
If you want to customize, you must ask the supplier.
Offers fewer features but specializes and dives into each area.
Who are CRM tools for?
A CRM strategy is indispensable in any business, and to manage customer relationships most effectively, a CRM tool is indispensable. What this means: CRM is for everyone who benefits from it – from sales, marketing, customer service or any other line of business. Each object using CRM has different roles, specifically

System Manager
These are the people responsible for setting up, installing the CRM, creating the database. Then they will reset the system and group the users.

Manager
Managers use CRM for the main purpose of managing potential customer information and the productivity of sales staff. In addition, based on available data, managers will evaluate the effectiveness of the team and business plans, and make plans to build appropriate business strategies for the next period.

Employee use
Employees use CRM for the purpose of managing specific leads in each stage. In addition, they use CRM to build and execute daily plans such as writing emails, tracking contracts, creating quotes, creating meetings with guests, etc.

Notes when choosing CRM for small businesses

Human resources, limited budgets and incomplete business processes are always the worries of many small businesses today. Choosing an appropriate CRM software will help manage customer relationships better with less human resources.

Most of today’s CRM software integrates many features to support effective customer relationship management. To choose the right software for your needs, businesses need to consider the following criteria:

simple and easy to use
In the digital age where everything is optimized in a user-friendly manner, simplicity and ease of use are extremely important. Not only does it save time learning how it works and instructing employees, but it’s also easy to control and review data.

Integration capabilities
Make sure that the CRM software that the business has the ability to integrate with other systems such as sales management software, accounting management, retail management, etc. The integration of a variety of software helps to optimize business processes, saving time and costs.

Corporate culture
The CRM system needs to be built to fit the culture and processes of the business. Each business will have a different customer care, sales and marketing process depending on business characteristics, products and potential customers.

Budget
Small businesses, in addition to limited budgets, still lack quality IT human resources, do not have time to train staff to use software. Therefore, it is very important to consider the affordability budget for a suitable software.

Manage customers effectively with SimERP’s CRM tool
Currently on the market, there are many different CRM software providers and the most prominent among them is SimERP. With SimERP, businesses can fully use CRM tools to optimize their business operations

Customer Information Management
With SimERP, businesses can update and manage a huge amount of customer information. All information such as name, company, contact information, zalo, etc. are updated and stored in the system. Enterprises can easily manage customer lists through operations such as adding, editing, deleting, creating a list of potential customers and allocating appropriate care staff to each object.

Track your customer’s purchase
Enterprises manage the customer’s purchasing process in stages from the beginning of the approach, to the appraisal, to the appraised, to the proposal, and to success. Sales staff will know the status of each customer, closely follow the customer’s purchase activity and offer appropriate activities to convince them to buy.

Set up operations with customers
SimERP will help businesses set up appropriate activities for each potential customer in stages such as email, call, hold a meeting, create a quote, etc. to turn potential opportunities into successful opportunities. . Users can mark the priority and status of each task, making it easy to keep a close eye on each guest activity.

Manage sales opportunities
Businesses can update potential customer information with complete information about contact information, priority order, responsible sales staff, .. Then, based on the process of communicating with customers, you can judge if this is an opportunity or not. If so, convert to sales opportunities or group pre-sales opportunities into a group that can be easily handled by sales reps.

Evaluate sales opportunities
Based on the process of working with customers, businesses can evaluate whether the opportunity was successful by marking success or failure. With failed opportunities, you will have to update the reason for them.

You can even categorize success and failure opportunities for easy tracking.

Manage sales teams

To improve business efficiency, users can create different sales groups based on regions or product groups. Information about team leader, members, goals, email, etc. will be updated. You can even measure the effectiveness of your team and its members.

Email Management
Businesses can build email templates for customers such as quotes, product exchanges, customer care emails, etc. Indicators related to email marketing are displayed on SimERP, helping users to follow up, evaluate pricing email campaigns.

Support reporting
SimERP’s CRM system has the function of aggregating data, thereby analyzing and reporting analysis results automatically on sales, KPI progress, analyzing lead behavior to evaluate ROI. of the Marketing campaign. From there, businesses can devise new strategies in the future more effectively.