From the beginning of the marketing of a product or service to customer service, learn how a CRM works in companies.
CRM – Customer Relationship Management, refers to a focus on customer relationship management. For both sales and marketing, one must have knowledge of all aspects surrounding the business: potential customers, questions, portfolio customers, sales, feedback, relationships, needs, etc. All these knowledge are useful to know how a CRM system works . The basic CRM workflow is:
- start marketing,
- sales process,
- planned orders,
- Provide care service.
The foundation of CRM is workflow management. The “protagonists” of the workflow are the clients. At the beginning of the process, the protagonist can be anyone, since it includes people who are the target audience for your product but with whom you have not even spoken yet.
How a CRM works
How a CRM works in Presale
The process starts with a lead: the name of someone you think you can sell something to. Once the prospect’s data has been recorded in the CRM system , the software will guide you through the sales process. Therefore, it is the CRM system that will remind you to call someone at a preset time. Every time you interact with a customer, you’ll record this fact in the CRM system so that when you deal with that person again (or if someone else interacts with the same customer), there’s an exact record of what was said and what was said. the actions that have been carried out.
At the same time, the CRM system is a repository for documents, calls, and messages. When an interaction with a customer is required, by acting on the interaction from within the CRM system itself (by letting you send an email or initiate a phone call), you get instant and automated follow-up on the interactions. By having the documents stored within the CRM software (or by having links pointing to external elements such as product data sheets or quotes you’ve sent), you’ll have all the information you need at the click of a button to resume a conversation with the customer.
How a CRM works in the After Sales
Once the customer has been engaged, the role of the CRM system changes to a post-sale environment. However, the concepts remain the same, as the ones used in the pre-sale phase are relevant to post-sale operations. In this phase, the CRM will record, for example, the emails sent by customers and the responses we offer them. The document repository will grow, but this time with invoices and loyalty offers instead of simple quotes.
The CRM system in its most basic form, therefore, is a workflow planner that can be integrated with personal information and communication mechanisms within the organization. Although you could use a CRM system with its own integrated email client, its own document editor, its own billing tool, etc., the result would inevitably be a system that does not perform any of these functions as well as the tools that already exist on the market (Outlook for email, Word for document processing, Sage for billing, etc.). The most sensible answer is therefore for CRM software to handle the scheduling and workflow tasks and offload the actual messaging processing and document creation to external applications.
Low-level systems integration
In addition to application integration, the CRM system is also expected to interact with lower-level systems within the organization. The integration with the telephone system is a great advantage. It is very useful that a customer’s data appears at the moment the phone rings. Similarly, outbound calls through the CRM are a great alternative to manual dialing to avoid calling the wrong numbers.
Summary of CRM operation
CRM, therefore, is the art of monitoring the relationship between the employees of your company and the people to whom you sell your products and services. The more you can automate this task, the more reliable (and less prone to error) the customer engagement process will be. The ideal CRM system will integrate with as many elements of your company’s infrastructure as possible. And it will be based on them to implement the workflow processes necessary to maintain an effective interaction with the customer.
