Implementation of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Solutions

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) comprehends all the strategies and technologies put to work to fully manage the relationship between the company and both current and potential clients.

When companies and their customers interact, the footprints marked during that relationship generate uncountable amounts of data that go way beyond the contact data
. In fact, the very beginning of that data generation may vary from websites or social media to telephone calls, online chats, regular mail or email, physical stores or any other marketing attempt.

Consultancy firm Price Water Copa (PWC) highlights that CRM continues to be at the top of the executive agenda. They also underline a statement from fellow research firm Gartner, when defining Customer Relationship Management objectives: "These goals may include improving customer satisfaction, acquiring new customers, retaining existing customers, creating a single view of the customer, cross-selling to customers, improving campaign response rates, increasing digital channel adoption, driving up customer advocacy or referrals, and/or gaining better margins through improved pricing."

Besides being an important concern for company executives, Customer Relationship Management is more than just a strategy. Specialized magazine, CIO further defines CRM as both the process and philosophy put to work to fit those goals and the technology that can be used to achieve and implement that process.

CRM definitions try to grasp, with as few words as possible, an entire side of a business that can be applied in many forms and shapes, throughout any particular sector. More interestingly, as we will see below, each CRM manufacturer/ developer/vendor will provide a different product (maybe shaped by a new and trendy tech) destined to tackle any given issue.

Using data to understand customers

According to prestigious magazine Forbes, CRM platforms can help businesses in three different ways: learning about their customers, becoming more efficient when organizing (and now automating) some processes, and finally, optimizing their customer interactions. Therefore, many types of solutions come to the market, either to provide whole platforms with customizable elements or to fulfil specific duties in any given sector.

Freshsales, an IT startup based in California, US, understands that CRM brings all the information, provided by the customer’s journey, into one cohesive unit. In fact, they use the term “gold mine” to outline the highly valuable source of information that a CRM software can capture.

New technologies on the rise have been included in the search of understanding customers. Another Californian startup, SugarCRM, uses cloud computing to automatically import information about clients from third party data providers and other sources. This kind of data could be otherwise difficult to find or longer to complete.

Artificial intelligence is also one of the most game-changing technologies nowadays. As Techemerge says, the biggest names in the CRM solutions developers sector (Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, Adobe Systems and Microsoft) share the interest in going a step beyond with machine learning and artificial intelligence.

In this extensive article, the online magazine analyses each companies’ new products that embrace this type of tech. In the conclusions, the author lists functions that AI has brought to CRM, which include chatbots, predictive recommendations, voice and object recognition, and in-store robots.

Business software made for its users

Traditionally, business software has been tough to understand, difficult to customize, and more importantly, hard to learn for the workers that will have to handle it. That is the point where user experience and CRM are linked together. All these established companies and rising startups are trying to fill the gap with a user-friendly and powerful system that can provide companies with a great way to better manage the relationships with their customers.

Ultimately, the implementation of a costly tech should go hand in hand with the training of the professionals that can take advantage of its benefits. It may sound like a rather obvious axiom, but there are many cases in which big and small companies have experimented with failure when applying a new CRM functionality.

There is a wide range of Customer Relationship Management solutions and these products are often customizable and scalable to every company’s needs. One key to success is the highly demanded usability, mainly because of the common aversion to clunky, old-fashioned and complex products that business software can be.  

Diving into the deep world of CRM solutions, one will soon find that most manufacturers and vendors outline their characteristics and strengths, which are frequent: simple, visual, usable, fast, scalable, automated, cloud-based, social, AI-powered... The first three are almost always as market claims to catch the eye of the client.

Above all else, analysts consider that one of the trends in CRM solutions is currently an enhanced mobility and an omnichannel approach. Mobile devices present a new challenge to these technologies. According to Gartner, the Customer Relationship Management market already became the largest software market in 2017, so developers will move ahead in the pursuit of an altogether usable, competitive and high-powered solution.