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eVerge Insights

February 18, 2021

Beyond Sales: The Different Uses of CRM

CRM
CRM Implementation

A business gets increasingly complex as it expands. You have more ambitious targets to chase, you need to hire more sales and customer service staff to serve your growing client base, and there’s also the rich bank of data that continues to be filled with every sale and inquiry. It can be difficult for your team to keep track of all these growing factors.

When you’re not on top of your business data, you’ll miss out on crucial information that may forecast potential expansion opportunities or future problems. You’ll likely be engaging your customers across a wide range of mediums, from phones to different social media networks. If you don’t have a unified platform to handle every point of contact, your staff will end up scrambling to answer customer questions and concerns.

Business management in the digital age is fast-paced. And if you can’t keep up, your enterprise’s growth will certainly be stunted. This is where customer relationship management (CRM) applications come in.

What is CRM?

CRM software is used to manage your company’s connections and interactions with current and prospective customers. Its primary purposes are to streamline your sales and customer service process to increase your business’s profitability. You do this by tracking your prospective customers’ contact information through various channels.

You also keep tabs on how your team nurtures these prospects through interactions, like meetings and product demos. As your relationship grows with your prospects, they turn into leads that your CRM scores and moves through your sales pipeline.

A lot of CRMs, however, have progressed well beyond these core functions. The software has a variety of uses and features that advance your business capabilities. Such applications include marketing, data analytics, contact management, and email, among others.

Here’s a deeper look at these features, and why you should use them:

Document Organization & Management

Modern CRMs have powerful cloud computing capabilities. One of these features is cloud storage. It allows you to save and access your documents and other data on an external server through the internet. You save on storage space and you also get to access your files anytime, from anywhere, and using any device.

These cloud storage capabilities allow you to have a single hub for all your documents. Some of them even offer advanced filters and sorting tools to keep your files organized and up to date. When you have a centralized source of information and essential documents, your team spends more time completing their core tasks instead of scrounging their computer folders for customer information.

Reporting Tools

Want to know how your sales are doing within a certain timeframe for forecasts? Need updates about your latest marketing campaign’s performance? Want to pull up employee data for a performance review?

A modern CRM can do all of those and more. They’re equipped with analytics tools that process the data that they automatically collect from every phase of your sales funnel. Precise reporting tools ensure that you’re always on top of what’s going on in your business. You can forecast problems and prevent them before they do any real damage.

Automation

Speaking of automatic data gathering, CRM applications also let you automate different kinds of menial workflow, not just data gathering, analysis, and reporting.

Here are some of them:

  • Marketing automation — There are a variety of automation tools you can use to make your marketing efforts more efficient. If you use e-commerce, you can use your CRM software to send abandoned cart emails to people who forgot or deliberately skipped their checkout. Lead scoring can also be automated depending on the interactions your employees have with them.
  • Sales automation — Improve your sales representatives’ efficiency by automating repetitive tasks, like record creation and data entry. With these tasks out of the way, they can spend more time attracting and engaging more customers.
  • Service automation — Customers expect brands to respond to questions and concerns in under 30 minutes. You can deliver this without sacrificing the quality of their experience through service automation. A common method is to offer artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbots on your website and social media platforms.

These bots can address simple and frequently-asked questions about your products and services. And if they can’t come up with a satisfactory answer, they’ll transfer the customer to an actual representative. It frees up your reps from repetitive inquiries and helps customers get the information they need quickly. It’s a win-win situation.

Contact eVerge for Your CRM Update

Customer relationship management software has evolved beyond streamlining sales tasks. A lot of CRM brands offer features that cover almost every aspect of running a business — from marketing to human resources. Make the most of these capabilities to keep your business competitive in the digital age.

Get in touch with eVerge Group today for details on how we can help you enhance your CRM.

Beyond Sales: The Different Uses of CRM

February 18, 2021

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