CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is a company-wide business strategy designed to reduce costs and increase profitability by solidifying customer loyalty. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) involves identifying, understanding and better providing for your customers while building a relationship with each customer to improve customer satisfaction and maximise profits. It's about understanding, anticipating and responding to customers' needs. So where do you start looking for the best CRM solutions?
To manage the relationship with the customer a business needs to collect the right information about its customers and organise that information for proper analysis and action. The secret to an effective CRM package is not just in what data is collected but in the organising and interpretation of that data. A good computer based CRM solution, can increase sales by as much as 40-50% - as some studies have shown.
So how do you go about choosing the right CRM software solution? There are a number of options.
1. External: Using a consultant could save you time and money. Software resellers are often good first line advisers as they have experience and feedback from selling competing CRM Solutions packages. Some resellers offer wider packages including strategic planning and process management.
2. Internal: Put together a team of carefully selected executives/employees to research and choose the right technology to automate what it is that needs to be automated. Then it is a matter of making a list of your objectives and the benefits your organisation hopes to achieve from a CRM solution.
When looking at CRM solutions you want to check:
- The features and functionality "out of the box". Customisation is all very nice but it takes time and may not be as easy as you think
- The support platforms in terms of hardware, operating systems, databases, online activities and online ordering systems etc., (not just your back office systems but third party software you use too)
- Integration with those systems as well as scalability
- Price - preferably a one-off purchase price with no annual license fee for the right CRM Solutions package.
Then once you have narrowed the field down look for references, preferably from companies in a similar industry as you. Test their customer service and look for unbiased reviews of the same. Then ask each supplier to provide you with a full cost (including mods), time frame for implementation, likely downtimes in your current operations during implementation of the CRM solution and breakdown of further costs (including training and licensing).
Most of the big CRM solutions software manufacturers have extensive advice, pdfs and guides on their sites that reputedly hold your hand through the choosing process. They are likely to be biased, of course, but can be good sources of ideas anyway. Sage, in particular, has a pretty neutral sounding Adobe document download.