What is CRM -Customer Relationship Management, for Startups

CRM is an acronym for Customer Relationship Management and it is widely used nowadays in competitive environments to win the customers by understanding their need and requirements and for maintaining a long term relationship with them.

What is CRM

As the name indicate CRM is a tool/software to manage your business relationship with your customers. Nooo… lets not give a superficial explanation and to give you more clear understanding of it, imagine you call your telephone service provider and instantly you hear them say that “welcome Mr …..(your name ) and thanks for being our valued customer since year… ” no need to ask how will feel right? Now that work of storing customers information and their past and present preferences and serving them according is CRM. State Bank of India -SBI send me a Birthday wish through mail every year and that makes me feel great!

So in short it is about using technology to find, attract and win new clients and also to maintain a good relation with existing customers so that they return back to you and also spread word of mouth about your brand.

How does CRM works for your Startup

CRM system is automated in the form of CRM computer software. Whenever you interact with a new customer or an old one you will have to add the details about it into your CRM software. And your software will store it in your computer or on cloud, based on which service provider you have taken. This information about your customer can include many thing, but basically it is phone numbers, addresses, best times to call, and previous calls made, it can include information on products which the customer owns (including past purchases from your organization).

For Startups, now you don’t have to invest huge amount of money in setting up your own CRM software but instead you can use web based or SAAS/ PAAS based CRM which will be free for a small team and you can upgrade when your team and customers start to grow. You can find huge list of CRM service provider here 

Benefits of having CRM

In this highly competitive world attrition is seen everywhere, so CRM can help a great deal in customer retention and attracting  new customers.

• Customer data is stored with the organisation so it become independent of the sales people who have dealt with the particular customer.
• Sales and marketing start winning more business as CRM enables them ways to better lead tracking and management.
• Sales, service and support staff deal more effectively with customers because they have instant access to a complete view of all customer interactions.
• It gives you one single place to check the complete progress on you sales, prospecting and leads generation.
• Centralized Customer Interaction – This means no more blaming game among sales people as the status of the customer ( Contacted, prospected, Purchased or denied etc) is made known to all your sales people and is centralized and makes it easier for other expert to contribute, in case someone fails at it.
• It builds great customer experience and add customer loyalty towards your brand as customer service becomes central to your organization
• Bring in more customers through targeted emails and word of mouth by happy customers
• Decision making becomes more informed and efficient with all the data at hand, and help to bring in more revenues and profitability for the company.

Suggest Read for you

1. How CRM Works
2. How-to-choose-CRM-software-and-CRM-service-provider
3. Cloud technology for Startups