The power of Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

The better a business can manage its customer relationships, the more success the business is likely to have.

The term given to this idea is Customer Relationship Management (CRM). It's the act of handling and recording customer communications, interactions and relationships in a structured, integrated manner with the goal of better serving those customers, both existing and prospective.

The CRM module within prof.ITplus enables this approach to positive customer relationships. It is a structured database that allows for the logging of key information such as: contact details, account manager, business size, business type, turnover, purchase history, contract details, product preferences and lead source. It also features a comprehensive notes section in which to document interactions with customers. Moreover, customers can have various flags applied to them to denote a particular behaviour or category of customer. Alongside this are incredible reporting tools for analysing and segmenting your customers using this CRM data.

Maybe you want to flag all customers that are members of a particular buying group so you can offer them a member discount. Or perhaps it would be useful to target customers that haven't purchased from you in the last six months. You could even identify all customers within an hour's drive of your premises and invite them to a special sales event. Without a CRM, how can you possibly segment your customer-base in these meaningful ways?

And what does it mean for your customers if you are using a CRM system to manage your relationship with them? Essentially, it boils down to a better experience with your company and a higher likelihood of repeat business with you. If you're using a CRM to understand customers' buying trends you'll be able to time marketing messages so they have relevance. You'll be able to offer products you know their business type requires. You'll be able to invite them to events that are in their region.

In short, you'll be a company that your customers like to hear from because you communicate timely, relevant, targeted messages and offers. What's more, if a customer tells you something that's important to your relationship with them you have a place to store that information that is visible to the whole company. You may hear that a customer is planning on purchasing new premises in 12 months' time - make a note of it on the CRM so your staff can ask how the expansion is coming along each time you speak with them. Your customer will feel important and valued by your business.

There are a whole range of CRM software products available - varying in cost and functionality. Our CRM product stands head and shoulders above the rest because it is so full of features and functionality whilst being incredibly easy to use.

Originally conceived over 30 years ago, our CRM module has been steadily developed over the last three decades to become all-encompassing. Crucially, we have spent an awful lot of time ensuring the system, despite being very complex in terms of its power and functionality, is easy to learn, simple to use, is intuitive and offers the minimum of opportunity to enter incorrect data.

Our CRM offers everything you need to cultivate strong, profitable customer relationships and furthermore it creates potential in other areas of your business too:

• Staff training
• Staff activity
• Customer service
• Customer profiling
• Marketing
• Online selling
• Contact management
• Multi-branch management
• Document management
• Credit control

Click to read more about our CRM module.