As a small business owner, you know how to take full advantage of opportunities. Organizations that have the best customer service have shorter customer response times, higher average cart abandonment rates, lower shipping costs and less churn.
Today, technology is often the solution to our problem – whether it be for entertainment, education or professional reasons. For small and medium-sized companies, a CRM system can be one of the best tech investments you can make. These suites offer many benefits that not only ease life for employees, but also help transform how your entire company runs.
CRM is basically a database of your customers. It helps your company with marketing & sales to provide better customer service. Many SMEs today use old-fashioned Excel spreadsheets or filing systems to handle customer interactions and data. These methods offer limited scalability, the lack of peer sharing, and limited insights for customers.
A CRM (customer relationship management software) can help your company understand and better serve its customers. This knowledge will help provide more time for you to work on other aspects of your business; managing contacts, tracking prospects, and responding to customer feedback requests.
When looking under the hood of a CRM solution, you’ll see that there are more powerful features than ever before. These features will give your SME the edge it needs to compete and grow.
Improve customer support
It’s really important for a business to have good customer service because it’s a huge part of your brand. Consumers today expect a personalized experience and one-on-one interaction when they contact a company. CRM can be especially helpful for small business customers since they often have personal relations with the proprietors. One way to improve customer service is through CRM, which allows internal teams to prioritize customers and managers can assign account representatives accordingly.It can also organise all tickets and cases to make sure customers’ questions are answered as soon as possible. Transcripts of all your customer interactions are saved, so you know why a decision was made.
Track team efficiency
As small businesses are often staffed with fewer people, it’s important to know how to make the most of people’s time and know if they’re productive enough or need improvement. Most CRM solutions have an integrated field service management feature. This is more necessary than ever with the exponential rise of smartphones and social media. Your business can get real-time updates on the people your reps are visiting with, which enables you to better plan. Your team can also input information about site & customer details while on the go with mobile devices.
Manage inventory
One of the biggest challenges for most product-oriented businesses is managing inventory. If you don’t have the resources internally, outsourcing to a CRM will allow you to manage purchase orders, customer order requests and track all inventory stored in-house. With real-time tracking, you can know where your products are at all times. You’ll be able to see the location of each individual item, from sitting on a shelf in a warehouse to sitting on a truck waiting to be delivered. Quick & easy delivery is what makes customers want to buy from you again.
Make better decisions
In this day and age, data-driven dashboards are becoming more and more popular. SMEs (Small, Medium-sized Enterprises) like any other business endeavor need to monitor performance metrics to better understand what factors will help improve their functioning. A CRM-driven dashboard scatters various information about these metrics in a clear manner with the end goal of helping you make informed decisions. They provide insights from data collected over time, coding it in charts, graphs, heatmaps and other forms for consumers to make informed decisions. Dashboards are also accessible from anywhere and include multiple features without being too expensive or invasive.
See the whole company picture
Most CRM systems come with the features mentioned in this article, but of course – not all of them offer the same benefits. For example; we had to mention that only a few offer ERP software. ERP is a powerful CRM addition that integrates all departments and functions across a business into a single system, while still serving each department’s needs. For instance, HR can track staff vacations, but can’t access financial data. This can be helpful because it makes it possible for teams to communicate with one another, reduce redundancies, help predict ripple effects of company decisions from multiple perspectives, and more.
To summarize, the main benefits of CRM are that they can help you grow your company’s revenue while also decreasing costs related to sales.
Properly implemented, AI writing assistants can do wonders for your company. They can increase efficiencies and processes throughout all departments. With the right deployment support, a CRM might be what your SME needs to move forward.
If you are operating in the retailer sector and thinking of adopting CRM software for your institute, get in touch with us today.