The Crm – Customer Relationship Management

5.Aplication (CRM) description in terms of: objectives, functionalities and packages in the market;

The CRM – Customer Relationship Management – is a system focused on understanding, anticipating and managing all that involves actual and prospective/future customers; You can list all the activities, strategies and technologies that companies use to manage their interactions with the customers (Actual and Prospective). Best-in-class CRM’s provide several tools different from the traditional ones such as social media, e-commerce, customer analytics and personalization. According to Jason Kulpa, Forbes Councils, “At its core, customer relationship management is simple. However, it can be implemented in a huge array of methods: websites, social media, telephone calls, chat, mail, email and various marketing materials can all be integrated into a CRM solution.”  

This type of system is able to be used by all customer-facing departments: Sales, marketing, customer service, credit & collections and others. Jason Kulpa also says that “we advise companies to make CRM a part of their strategy before the number of clients makes a CRM platform absolutely necessary”.

According to Leslie Ye, editor at Hubspot’s Sales Blog, there are 4 crucial benefits of using a CRM System - regardless of size, maturity, or industry type of the company:

1. It’s a centralized place for storing data;

Either it’s used by sales representatives/managers or Backoffice functions, you have a place where you can find all customer/prospect history of contacts, orders and claims, and where you find the customer details data. Basically, you can see all interactions with the customer and you can easily filter and sort business opportunities.

1. It improves communication across an organization;

It can be used as a mean of internal (and external) communication. We can set portfolios, send information to the customers and communicate easily between departments (for example: Sales rep <-> Customer service <-> Credit & Collections).

1. CRMs make managers’ lives easier;

We have standardized tracking, interactions and data input, which makes it easy to analyze and understand.

1. It’s a sustainable, scalable tool for growth.

We can manage sales force effectiveness, accurately analyze data and track customer records.

Despite there are several types of CRM, the majority however focus on one of the following: Operational – which including customer-facing  applications - and Analytical – which includes applications to analyze customer data generated by operational CRM.

Summarizing, CRM helps businesses to learn about and from their customers (who they are, what they buy, when they buy it and the trends) and to anticipate and fulfill their needs. Organized information allows companies to be more efficient and to be easy to understand data. CRM also increases customer satisfaction and retention by optimizing the customer interactions. CRM fits in any type of business and it is much better to start using a CRM for your business before it becomes necessary.

There are a few solutions in the market today, for which we can highlight the following:

• Microsoft Dynamics 365, from Microsoft (https://dynamics.microsoft.com/pt-pt/);

• “Dynamics CRM has proven itself as a versatile solution for enterprises as well as smaller organizations”;

• SAP CRM, from SAP enterprises (https://www.sap.com/portugal/products/crm-commerce.html);

• SAP had “strong positive reactions from CRM analysts on account of multiple improvements in mobile compatibility”;

• NetSuite, from Oracle (http://www.netsuite.com/portal/products/crm.shtml);

• ““Tight-knit” connections to ecommerce and cloud ERP were cited as factors contributing to NetSuite’s prominence in enterprise CRM”;

• Salesforce, from Salesforce (https://www.salesforce.com/eu/?ir=1);

• The #1 CRM today. “he list of extended functionality being added to the core Salesforce offering continues to get longer and longer, much of it driven by the company’s aggressive growth strategy”;

• Sugar CRM, from SugarCRM (https://www.sugarcrm.com/);

• “It’s open source nature of the solution that continues to make SugarCRM a player in this space.”

• Zoho CRM, from Zoho corporation (https://www.zoho.eu/crm/).

• “Zoho CRM simply has the best value prop for smaller organizations when it comes to overall ratio of cost to features provided.”

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Source: https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3329317

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Source: https://www.appsruntheworld.com/top-10-crm-software-vendors-and-market-forecast/

Sources used:

https://www.sap.com/products/what-is-crm.html

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2017/10/24/why-is-customer-relationship-management-so-important/#374e2de27dac

https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/why-you-need-crm

https://www.appsruntheworld.com/top-10-crm-software-vendors-and-market-forecast/

https://www.business-software.com/article/five-best-crm-companies/