Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

CRM, what is it?

What is CRM? The CRM meaning in business

What does CRM mean? CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It refers to a management method that collects and analyzes customer information to make optimal and efficient approaches to improve the competitiveness of the company’s products and services.
All departments that have the opportunity to interact with customers can share and manage customer information and contact history to respond to inquiries and problems.

The goal of CRM is to build better relationships with customers and increase customer satisfaction by centrally managing customer information. As a result, it is predicted that it will lead to the purchase of goods and services, which will lead to an increase in sales.

CRM vs. SFA

In a nutshell, there are two ways to manage customers.
That’s customer relationship management (CRM) and sales force automation (SFA).

The former refers to “customer relationship management,” and CRM systems are mainly responsible for aggregating and linking customer information, as well as organizational information sharing.

Customer information is the information at all points of contact between a company and its customers. These include sales, support, maintenance departments, call centers, e-commerce, and many others.

The idea is to manage all of the information obtained from these sources. The latter refers to “sales support,” and the primary role of SFA systems is to streamline sales activities while managing customer information.
Therefore, customer information managed by SFA is naturally linked to sales activities.

Learn more: CRM SFA difference

Benefits of CRM

Centrally manage customer information
Higher customer satisfaction

Learn more: CRM advantages and disadvantages

Disadvantages of CRM

Costly and time-consuming to build a CRM system to manage customer information
It takes time to realize the effectiveness of CRM measures

Learn more: CRM advantages and disadvantages

Cloud-based CRM system

Cloud CRM system refers to a CRM that can be easily implemented in an environment with Internet access, as opposed to an on-premise CRM that requires the company to own its own servers.

CRM for call centers

CRM systems for call centers are designed to improve service levels and operational efficiency by storing customer information and contact history as data and utilizing it when responding to customers.

Open source CRM

Open source CRM is software that can be used without license fees if you have the technology in-house, and it provides all the necessary functions to manage customer relationships.

Open source CRMs are often thought to be inferior to paid products in terms of functionality, but they now offer functionality comparable to paid products. Open source CRMs are regularly improved by an active community and can be built to have the same functionality as those offered by major CRM vendors.

Of course, there are some requirements compared to paid products, such as the need to be more careful about security, etc., but the reduced licensing cost allows for advanced CRM without putting pressure on the economy.

Lean more: Open source CRM software and tools