UNDERSTANDING CRM - (Customer relationship management)

•Wikipedia.com defined CRM as Customer relationship management (CRM) is an approach to managing a company's interaction with current and potential customers.
 It uses data analysis about customers' history with a company and to improve business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on customer retention and ultimately driving sales growth.


•And also went on futher to say that One important aspect of the CRM approach is the systems of CRM that compile data from a range of different communication channels, including a company's website, telephone, email, live chat, marketing materials, and more recently, social media.
 Through the CRM approach and the systems used to facilitate it, businesses learn more about their target audiences and how to best cater to their needs.
 However, adopting the CRM approach may also occasionally lead to favoritism within an audience of consumers, resulting in dissatisfaction among customers and defeating the purpose of CRM.
•Also Investopedia.com said Customer relationship management (CRM) refers to the principles, practices and guidelines that an organization follows when interacting with its customers. From the organization's point of view, this entire relationship encompasses direct interactions with customers, such as sales and service-related processes, and forecasting and analysis of customer trends and behaviors. Ultimately, CRM serves to enhance the customer's overall experience.

With the growth of the Internet and related technologies, customers are concerned over the privacy and safety of their personal information. Therefore, businesses need to ensure the storage and analysis of their customer data has the highest levels of protection against cyber criminals, identity theft and other breaches of security.
Types Of (CRM).
As Published on techonestop.com
1. Operational CRM Operational CRM streamlines the business process that includes Sales automation, Marketing automation and Service automation. Main purpose of this type of CRM is to generate leads, convert them into contacts, capture all required details and provide service throughout customer lifecycle.
2. Analytical CRM Analytical CRM helps top management, marketing, sales and support personnel to determine the better way to serve customers. Data analysis is the main function of this type of CRM application. It analyzes customer data, coming from various touch points, to get better insights about current status of an organization. It helps top management to take better decision, marketing executives to understand the campaign effectiveness, sales executives to increase sales and support personnel to improve quality of support and build strong customer relationship.
3. Collaborative CRM Collaborative CRM, sometimes called as Strategic CRM, enables an organization to share customers’ information among various business units like sales team, marketing team, technical and support team. For example, feedback from a support team could be useful for marketing team to approach targeted customers with specific products or services.
In real world, each business unit works as an independent group and rarely shares customers’ data with other teams that often causes business losses.
Collaborative CRM helps to unite all groups to aim only one goal – use all information to improve the quality of customer service to gain loyalty and acquire new customers to increase sales.
•Different types of CRM applications have different features and advantages. So before implementing CRM system, it is very much important for a business to decide future goal and strategy. If you want to choose the best CRM for your business, read our article on ‘How to choose the best CRM software for your business‘.
•Visit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CRM_software_companies for CRM software companies


•Anubha Garg, senior reasearcher at GetApp.com answered a very interesting question on Quora.com about the best CRM for small businesses: There are various CRM solution suitable for small businesses that are easy to use and easily customized to meet your specific requirements. Here I’ll cover the details of few CRM solutions that might help you in taking the right decision. Salesforce: The tool is built on Force.com platform that provides custom application development environment for developers. They can easily customize the app by accessing tools and resources required to design and deploy the application. It offers various features including marketing automation, sales management, customer service and partner relationship management. Salesforce for Outlook enables users to sync calendar, tasks, emails and contacts at both the places and reduces duplication of effort. It also provides a dashboard that allows users to access reports and dig deeper for more details. Starting price: $25.00/month
•Pipedrive: The solution offers a customizable interface and a mobile app that makes it available on any device type from anywhere. Pipedrive provides various features including goal setting, customizable reporting and data migration from other CRM systems. The tool provides a funnel view of the leads which enables users to easily track and assign the leads. It also offers APIs for custom connection and allows integration with other software including RightSignature, MailChimp, Ecquire and Contactually. Starting price: $12.00/month
•Insightly: This app is designed specifically for small businesses that enable users to track contacts and manage projects, communications and other sales related tasks. The solution offers many customizable options and is used widely in multiple industries including business consulting, financial services, retail, non-profit, travel, media, and technology. It also integrates with majority applications such as Google Docs, Google Calendar, Outlook, Dropbox, MailChimp, QuickBooks and many more. Starting price: $12.00/month
•Apptivo: The tool offers a customizable interface that enables users to do almost anything with the software. It has a suite of approximately 50 modules to manage various business functions including human resources, supply chain, and financials. CRM apps have modules for lead, opportunity, contact and ticket management. Other CRM features of Apptivo are lead capture, lead conversion, sales tracking, and integration with Google Apps. This integration enables users to share contacts, sync calendar, and tasks. Starting price: Free for starters and $8.33 for premium edition
• Zoho CRM: Zoho offers an open source solution that enables users to customize it as per their needs. It allows businesses to generate leads, manage tasks and follow sales pipeline through a single interface. The main features of Zoho CRM include lead management, workflow management, lead follow-up, and email integration. It also offers APIs that enables developers to customize and integrate the solution with any business application. Starting price: Basic plan is free and standard plan is available for $12/user/month.


Conclusion Benefits One of the benefits of CRM marketing is it allows companies to determine who its best customers are. Once a company knows precisely who its target audience is, the company can then tweak its marketing messages to attract more of the ideal types of customers that the company has been servicing. The gathering of this information with the use of CRM also allows companies to create new products and services that meet the needs and wants of its customers.