Taking care of your customers is always the right strategy and a good way to do business. In this way, you can not only reduce your new purchase costs, but also increase your profits. Whether you're in banking and finance, retail or any other industry, customer relationship management has a huge impact on your profitability. This is also possible with CRM. At the heart of CRM architecture is a good CRM program that will help you consolidate customer data and integrate sales, marketing, and service processes. Because CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a vision in which customer relationships are centered. Organizations get to know the customer better, store this information and effectively apply this information, responding to the wishes and needs of the customer. CRM software or CRM systems support sales and marketing in this regard. For this reason, CRM is very important for all companies and organizations, both in the long and short term. Let's look together at what you need to know about CRM and pay attention to in order to choose a good CRM software.

What is CRM?

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, that is, Customer Relationship Management. CRM can be explained as a strategy for managing all relationships and interactions of your company with (potential) customers. But CRM is not limited to customer relationships. Customers are a broad concept here and include all stakeholders involved in your company, such as your colleagues, suppliers and dealers.

CRM or customer relationship management is concerned with the structural and systematic application of a strategy aimed at optimizing customer relationships. Optimal customer relationships and their proper management are decisive for customer satisfaction, customer return and loyalty.

CRM provides a lot of data about your relationships. With this data, you can continuously organize your sales processes better and make them more successful. For the implementation of customer relationship management, you need software.

What is CRM for?

The goal of customer relationship management is to be more active in establishing long-term relationships between companies and their customers. Therefore, CRM objectives can often be explained as combining strategies, processes, tools, and technologies to develop, retain, and attract customers. The best way to do this is to use a CRM system.

CRM system is an IT support and tool that gives you full control of your customer relationships, helps you with research, sales and marketing strategies, and creates flexible solutions for customer support and analytics.

The goal of Customer Relationship Management and CRM software is to get happy customers who stay with you and speak positively about your business. In short, CRM is at its best a simple and profitable philosophy combined with smart technology. In line with this philosophy, making a profit by improving customer relationships, which is the heart of a business, is the main goal of CRM.

Why is CRM important?

Customer relationship management CRM has a huge impact on the efficiency of your sales processes. It determines the quality of customer relationships and therefore has a huge impact on your sales results and on the profitability and continuity of your organization. Your potential and existing customers can choose from a variety of solutions and suppliers. Because whether your customers give you a tender and want to do business with you depends on the services and solutions you offer. Another aspect of this choice is how your potential customers experience you as a supplier. This, in turn, has to do with your customer focus, the way you talk to them, your expertise, the way you provide services, and how all other aspects of your service are experienced. All this determines the quality of the relationship perceived by customers and prospects.

CRM helps you shape that relationship. It determines how you manage all business processes, how you communicate with customers, and how you deal with the large amount of data associated with customer communications. You can make this process much more practical, you can support it with CRM software.

CRM software, or a CRM system, is also a tool for sales and marketing to manage relationships and sales opportunities. Company and contact information are stored in the system with links that contain interactions, sales journeys and other data intended to manage and process potential leads. These features make CRM one of the most important tools for B2B marketers, account managers, new business sales professionals, business managers, and board members. Therefore, the CRM database is a very valuable asset for many companies. It is one of the foundations of modern marketing departments.

What are the types of CRM?

CRM not only facilitates communication, but also benefits from the point of view of internal processes. Since the same information is managed in a single central application, colleagues can easily take tasks from each other by sharing information about customers (for example, when someone is on vacation or leaves the company). It also becomes much more efficient to analyze numbers with a single location for all your data. Dashboards help you see things like sales goals and your team's performance at a glance. With qualitative data, you make better decisions to move your company forward. But to take advantage of all this, you need proper software to implement a good CRM strategy. In general, CRM software is divided into three types: operational, analytical and strategic. CRM types and usage scenarios can be listed as follows:

• Operational CRM: Automates sales, customer service, marketing and sales processes. Its purpose is to generate leads and automatically collect all the necessary contact information. For example, when a prospect or customer contacts you, the CRM software provides a summary of the entire communication. You can immediately grasp the issue and provide a hassle-free service.
• CRM Analytics: It analyzes your customer data and provides more information about your business to improve your operation. The goal is to make more efficient decisions, empower your business based on real data, and track the results of your efforts. For example, you can produce solutions by collecting and analyzing the reasons why a sales strategy fails.
• Strategic CRM: It shares customer data between different teams, such as your sales, marketing and customer service. The goal is to improve customer experiences and sales figures. For example, as soon as the prospect becomes your loyal customer, the customer service department has access to all the information. Because all emails, contact information, contact history can be instantly made available by all departments.

How to Use CRM Programs

CRM is based on a database that is built in different ways. With this data, employees can organize the marketing, sales and service process more efficiently and better. CRM programs establish links between data, provide reports, alerts, and automatically perform actions. For example, if an opportunity is moved to a different stage, tasks can be automatically added to the account manager's calendar or sent emails. Data can be entered into CRM software in the following ways:

• Salespeople, office workers, service workers, account managers, and marketers can enter data into the CRM system. This allows it to make the database even richer.
• Data can be uploaded automatically from database providers such as the Chamber of Commerce.
• The data is enriched with data from social media platforms such as LinkedIn.
• Data from external systems, such as email marketing software, can be integrated into the CRM program through a link.
• Data can also be obtained from forms on websites.

CRM software offers many advantages, such as easily sharing information, improving customer service, and automating demanding and time-consuming daily tasks. However, it is also possible to store all customer and company information without taking up space by taking advantage of cloud-based storage systems. If you want to take advantage of cloud-based data storage systems and improve your customer relationships with CRM strategies, you can take advantage of the services in Komtaş's ecosystem.

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