Cloud services

Customer Relationship Management

Lets start defining what is a Customer Relationship Management system (CRM).

A CRM is a software for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers.

CRMs provide a great way to assure that every time a customer gets in touch with anyone in your company all previous interactions from this customer, regardless the channel, are available in one place to enhance their customer experience.

Sales can also be easier with a CRM. Let me give you an example, a sales representative can start a sale today, let the customer sleep on it, and finish the sale tomorrow or any other day starting just where they left off.

So everything seems to be great, easier and faster with a CRM but… when do the investment justifies the benefits?

Having a CRM comes with lots of benefits, but implementing a cross-company system is never an easy or cheap task. Every person working in the company will have to change their daily process to ensure that every bit of information about customers is available in the system.

All customer interactions should be register on the CRM. This can translate to lots of new integrations with your current applications.

As you can imagine, CRMs are not a good investment for every type of company. Small businesses like single stores would be better off without this investment. The cost of implementing such a system, adding steps to their sales routine and storing a lot of information would not translate in benefits to their day to day operations. Small businesses usually work with one time sales, which means if the customer purchase a piece of gum today, keeping this information won’t give you enough benefits or make it ease for your next sale. It is simply too little information and context, so it can not be used to build a customer profile. Imagine if every time you want to buy a piece of gum you are asked a bunch of questions before you can finally get the gum. That would certainly worsen the purchase experience and you would probably lose the customers instead of growing your business.

Medium and big businesses on the other hand often handle more than one interaction with the same customer, which means that benefits of having a CRM start to shine.

In a multi-store situation where sales and customer representatives may vary a lot, keeping an updated customer profile can help a lot to make your customer feel known and experience a personalized attention just as you can get in a small store.

Marketing teams can also use this customer profile to personalize offers and deals to increase sales by just knowing their customer.

There are lots of great CRMs in the market with lots of flavors and price ranges which are good for companies that want to start this migration process.

But there are also all in one solutions that are much cheaper and flexible that can be modularized  and integrated with your applications and not the other way around.

Firehub is one of this solutions. its an all in one application that offers you a full E-commerce, sales platform, leads handler, Marketing Campaign management and customer profile builder.

It is a perfect solution for startup companies that have no development power, or companies that want to expand their business to the digital channels while also keep using the traditional channels and have this information all together in a single place.

Visit www.integralnode.com to learn more about how this can adapt specifically to your business’ current needs.