Whether you are running a business venture or a non-profit organization, the demand to improve your undertaking never stops. Over the years small, middle size or large enterprises change their goals, explore new technologies, face more competition. Everyone looks into effective ways to establish continual improvement. Customer service satisfaction, pure optimization, achieving better results, cost reduction or maintaining the steady level of productivity, there is a thousand and one small reason to look into improving business processes.

Regardless of the processes you consider mastering, the improvement procedure follows a very similar path: map, analyze, design, implement, and review. It therefore sounds natural keeping up with technologies, exploiting the power of IT. There are tools meant to facilitate the execution of any of the above steps collectively known as CRM software.

What is CRM software?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a technology that helps to manage customer-facing processes handling and managing any of your dealings throughout the end-to-end customer journey. Modern CRMs offer tools for lead and opportunity management, workflow automation, order and invoice management, etc. The best practice recognized by the leading technology research companies lies in replacing manual or outdated business processes with solutions that are automated and optimized. In addition, it will store and analyze data providing performance measures and metrics so that you can make better and quicker business decisions.

Aligning business processes and IT systems, which CRM software is, with company strategies, goals and objectives helps organizations solve specific problems. You can gather market research on your current buyers in real time, generate sales forecasts and coordinate details between sales and support teams, again in real time. With CRM tools you are getting the full information about your customers, also known as 360-degree view, anticipating their needs and requests.

CRM is an essential part for sales organizations but not only. By enhancing your ability to measure and manage your sales team, you will see sales numbers increase. Adopt it for other departments integrating it with your service desk for example to enhance customer experience. There are also integrated or native solutions to run multiple marketing, sales and support processes in parallel turning CRM into the heart of the entire business keeping all the departments in the loop.

CRM system drives business relationship with your customers, both current and potential. With a good CRM system like bpm’online CRM you can also streamline your technical support needs. Recording all the connections and interactions with contacts, partners, customers, prospects and any other related parties in every area of your business will be reported within an intuitive dashboard. Such analytics will help you to determine the strong or weak performances, help to identify the priority areas and provide comprehensive analytics for sales, marketing and service operations.

Process improvement is fundamental to business management. It makes total sense to take advantage of industry best practices which will improve the full performance of multiple teams. When done right, your CRM will stimulate the growth of your customer base improving the income per every customer. Additionally CRM will target your customer satisfaction affecting their loyalty and retention. Designing promo campaigns inside your CRM you can improve cross- and up-selling opportunities effecting your business profitability and market share.

Which CRM system is right for you?

Choosing a CRM system that will handle your customer relationships is one of the most significant commitment a business can make. Software automating your marketing, sales and service will guide its end-users through the most viable actions. Pay attention to the interface design making sure it is easy to use. It should keep your employees focused on what is relevant.

Another significant subject to consider is where you would like to host your CRM system. Bpm’online, for example, offers two options to choose from: on-premises and in cloud. With the latest option you can access the CRM system anytime from anywhere including your smartphones and other devices.

The best CRM for you depends on your own precise requirements as well as detailed functionality that is going to take your business to the next level. A well-performed implementation of the system may go through different scenarios. After evaluating the project and designing its concept, fine-tune your solution and teach the end-users how to use the system.