Considering what Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software can do to the business, it is heading from nice-to-have to need-to-have. Earlier, the large enterprises which could invest huge budget in IT infrastructure could afford to have CRM software but it’s not the case anymore. The CRM software has evolved over the years to make it more suitable to the SMBs segment since they account for the major segment of the market. According to a report highlighting the cover of CRM software in the SMB market, 91% of SMBs with more than 11 employees now use CRM software. SMBs have eventually realized how vital it is to manage the past, current customers and equally focus on acquiring new ones, to stay in the market, cause you could lose your valuable customer in a wink! Having said that, SMBs need CRM software which could do more with little investment.
Here are the top 5 reasons, why an SMB needs customer relationship management software;
Automation
In the current era, people want to automate as much process as possible, leaving no scope for human errors. Today’s CRM does things better than one built 10 years ago. It’s easy to pull (from social media), add and search contacts, update information. It functions very well as an activity tracker. Track the emails, attach documents, add notes, etc making all the information available on a single page, to create high visibility. Today’s CRM software can be easily linked to other applications. It creates reports, dashboards, charts, and graphs, which helps in analyzing your internal workforce better. Customer service is evolving with automation, and making life easy for the sales, marketing, and customer support teams.
Make Better Decisions for Your Business
With the right CRM in place, SMBs can take right decisions at the right time. If the information is stored in individual silos, as it was in the traditional methods, it is as good as no information at all. To take the right decision, we need an amalgamation of all the important pieces of data, and if it is on a single page (eliminating the use of different applications)…what more do we need? CRM software blends the efforts of sales, marketing, and customer support teams to create a common forum. CRM software can guide employees through best practices, by creating checklists. This helps in streamlining their focus on revenue generation.
Social Selling
Gone are the days when the marketing budget is dedicated to posters, pamphlets, radio and TV Ads, now, the budget should be focused on social, email and mobile market. SMBs are cognitive of the importance of social media for their business. 25% of Facebook and Twitter users expect a reply to their complaints via social media in less than 1 hour. 66% of social media users expect a response within a day. CRM does this effortlessly. With CRM software, you can have answers to questions like, what do customers like about your company, what are their favorite products and services, what can be improved, what customers would like to see in the future.
Customer Retention
You might be aware of the fact that it’s much easier (in terms of efforts and money), to retain the existing customer over finding a new one. It is 6-7 times more costly to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. SMBs are focusing 54.6% of their budget towards improving customer experience/ retention; SMBs don’t have the liberty of losing even a single customer. CRM software for SMBs helps in personalizing customer experiences, by storing information about their potential customers. 83% of customers are likely to make a referral based on a positive customer experience.
Better Return on Investment
It is fact that most of the SMBs don’t unleash the full potential of CRM software; the costs associated with implementation and business interruption during the deployment period are material. Even a semi-successful CRM software implementation can show a return on investment. Studies show that CRM pays back $8.71 for every dollar spent. Once you understand your customers, you can easily avail the opportunity to cross-sell and upsell to the customers, using the humongous data generated through CRM software. This is directly linked to maximize the productivity of employees.
Whether it’s an SMB or a large enterprise, it is crucial to gain a 360-degree view of the customer relationship to stay in the business. CRM system is going to require an investment, but its advantages far reach the cost invested. Agile CRM is one such CRM software for SMBs, exclusively created keeping small and medium businesses in mind. Don’t wait to implement CRM, Gartner research director Claudio Marcus says, “CRM is not part of a business strategy; CRM is the business strategy.”