How to Use CRM to Grow Your Business

A CRM solution implemented right offers many business benefits and all of them converge to offer the ultimate business benefit – a growth in business. With all businesses, the aspects to work on for achieving a growth in business are more or less the same. These include broadening your customer base, working to get repeat customers, propagating your product or service to the right prospects, ensuring synergy between the back- and front-end. What differs from business to business is the amount of attention that these aspects require.

The state of your business before you consider a CRM deployment is an important factor in deciding your business plan for increasing your business once you have implemented a CRM solution.

Whether an SMB or an enterprise, there are certain actions regarding your CRM system that can have a direct impact on your business growth:

1. Act to disseminate information: View your CRM system as a tool for enabling informed decision making. The right decision by the right person at the right time demands access to up-to-date information. Use your CRM system to facilitate data sharing across the organization. Remember that customer relationship happens at different levels and not necessarily at the front end.
2. Act to reduce costs: An important step that you can take to reduce costs is to allow the customer a measure of independence. Companies are finding that empowered customers who can look up information and make their own order entries contribute to cost reduction.
3. Act to offer better customer service: Customer service has long moved from offering just plain service, it’s about customer experience now. And you provide experience by empowering customers. Customer service leads to customer satisfaction. CRM comes into the picture by virtue of its ability to offer pertinent data to the customer facing staff, segregating customers on the basis of demographics to aid marketing communication, resolving customer queries, etc.
4. Act on chosen aspects: As mentioned in the beginning of the article, choose your focus areas that you want to develop with the help of your CRM. If its customer retention, then you need to conduct relationship marketing, develop loyalty programs, permission marketing etc for your existing customers. Other factors that have a direct impact on your business growth include employee awareness, issue resolution, employee attrition, and co-ordination between front end and back end.
5. Act at system and human levels: CRM helps your business grow by facilitating the convergence of business aspects that you knew were important but did not have the tools to bring them together. Your CRM enables you to integrate with legacy systems and bringing together data that lay isolated in discrete silos for a long time. It facilitates human interaction not only between customer and business but also between employees.

Conclusion

A CRM deployment enables you to get repeat business and more new business. Both of these contribute to your top-line. By streamlining your marketing communication and offering measurable value as a part of your value chain, your CRM lets you conduct business at lower cost, this leads to business at lower costs which in turn leads to a healthier bottom-line.