Customer relationship management is an important aspect for making or maintaining healthy relationship with the customers. Without it, the service providers won't be able to function properly.
Customer relationship management or CRM is basically referred to the process much in use by the inbound call centers of today. It's a strategy for managing the interaction of a company with its customers. Nowadays, technologies are being used to coordinate the various business processes mainly sales, customer service, technical support and marketing. The main purpose of using CRM is to attract new customers and also to lure the former customers to stay in the fold.
Variants of Customer relationship management
There are several variants of CRM or customer relationship management that can be used to serve the customers at its best. Today, the methods that are widely used by various call center companies are Sales Force Automation, Marketing, customer care service, social media and Analytics.
Sales Force Automation system or SFA are meant to offer vast capabilities of reorganizing the diverse sales processes in an organization. It is even capable of reducing the time, which is normally wasted on manual data entry work. Sales Force Automation System or SFA has a unique feature called Contact Management System. This feature is used to track and record all the stages of sales process for each customer. Some SFA applications include unique features such as territory management, opportunity management, workflow automation, sales forecasting and quote generation.
Marketing automations are now being used by various organizations for the purpose of identification of its target customers. Therefore, this process is also considered to be the best tool for generating leads for the sales team. With the help of marketing automation, a call center service provider can easily manage multichannel campaigns like search, direct mail, social media and e-mail. Apart from this, internal marketing resources, collateral and customer loyalty can also be managed by using this innovative technology.
Social media mainly refers to the websites that are specifically designed for socializing purpose. Familiar names like that of Twitter and Facebook have emerged to be the perfect platform for spreading the message of a customer. Social media is an effective tool for managing customer relationship since social media sites are used by people to share their opinion on various products and services of a company. Companies have decided to become a part of these conversations to gain high quality sales leads.
Customer care or customer support has always been considered to be the core of customer relationship management in a modern call center. In this case, the CRM includes some useful features such as computer telephone integration (CTI), intelligent routing of calls, etc. Some of the companies have even decided to deploy integrated support applications, which is able to deliver knowledge-enabled solutions. Today, the SaaS platforms are used to provide excellent customer service and are now being used by large offshore outsourcing service providers.
Advantages of CRM
CRM offers numerous advantages to a call center set up. With the help of CRM tools, most companies are able to meet their goals quite easily. First of all, it is capable to simplify the marketing and sales processes, thereby increasing the sales and even adding up the opportunities of up-selling and cross-selling. Hence, CRM even reduces the expenses, which aids higher profitability.
The importance of CRM is undeniable. In fact, CRM has developed to be an important tool for the inbound call centers. It allows a company to maintain long term relationship with its customers that further enhances business opportunities.
