Businesses in all industries have to face intense competition than they had to, some years ago. With the advent of social media, smartphones, and advanced technologies, life in the fast lane has become faster and streamlined. There are many companies who deal with similar kind of products which increases the competition increasing fickle and prone to churn. To succeed, many companies must differentiate themselves through superior service and offer a consistent, convenient customer experience to gain an edge.

A customer relationship management (CRM) solution can provide the tools and technologies needed to deliver more personalized, more proactive service to existing and potential clients. Businesses can gain insight into the requirements and preferences of their audience and respond to them instantly. In fact, a recent study by The Gantry Group shows that 92 percent of companies using a CRM solution have built stronger relationships and improved loyalty by tailoring products and services to meet individual customer needs.

What can a CRM solutions do for your business?

CRM improves the flow of vital, timely, accurate customer-related information across your company, so all employees in customer-facing roles can collaborate more effectively to acquire, retain, and support your customers. With a CRM solution, you can:

Boost Marketing Results

A CRM solution can increase the success of your marketing programs by enabling you to perform more accurate profiling and segmentation. As a result, you can improve response rates by launching highly-targeted and relevant campaigns, using the most preferred communication methods and channels. This use of personalization can increase conversion by as much as 20 to 30%, according to AMR Research. Additionally, CRM solutions allow for comprehensive results tracking and analysis, so you can better understand which promotions are working, and which ones are not.

Enhance Customer Service

With a CRM solution, your call center, support, and field service staff have instant access to information regarding customer histories and interactions. Additionally, a CRM solution can replace manual, disjointed support-related tasks and activities with streamlined, fully-automated processes. Therefore, you can dramatically improve customer satisfaction and retention by delivering faster, more responsive service.

Increase Sales and Revenues

With CRM, sales staff can better manage their prospects and activities, and close their deals faster. Additionally it can help sales reps identify new opportunities, and improve their ability to up-sell and cross-sell. A CRM solution also gives sales management increased visibility into pipelines and forecasts, and can help them more accurately assess and track sales rep performance. It can also enable you to transform cost centers - such as call centers - into profit centers by giving support staff the tools they need to participate in selling-related activities.

Improve Internal Productivity

Most businesses today are challenged to coordinate the disconnected and inefficient customer-facing processes that exist across multiple departments. With a CRM solution, these activities can be tightly integrated and streamlined, which can optimize resource utilization and increase productivity. In fact, a study conducted by IDC last year indicated that as much as 51% of the return companies achieve with a CRM solution can be directly attributed to efficiency increases and business process enhancements.

Reduced Costs

By improving customer-facing processes and related work flows, you can eliminate waste and redundancies, and minimize operational costs. Additionally, a CRM solution can help you better identify and manage opportunities, and uncover and resolve problems - which can eliminate the costs associated with lost deals or customers (it costs a business 8 to 10 times more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one, according to a 2006 report by DM Review).