Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a strategy for managing all your company's relationships and interactions with your customers and potential customers. It helps you improve your profitability.

Customer Relationship Management enables you to focus on your organisation’s relationships with individual people – whether those are customers, service users, colleagues or suppliers. CRM is not just for sales. Some of the biggest gains in productivity can come from moving beyond CRM as a sales and marketing tool and embedding it in your business – from HR to customer services and supply-chain management.

Why CRM is Important
 
If your business is going to last, you know that you need a strategy for the future. You’ll already have targets relating to sales, business objectives and profitability. But getting up-to-date, reliable information on your progress towards your goals can be tricky. How do you translate the many streams of data coming in from sales teams, customer service staff, marketers and social media monitoring into useful business information?

Using a CRM system can give you a clear overview of your customers. You can see everything in one place — a simple, customisable dashboard that can tell you a customer's previous history with you, the status of their orders, any outstanding customer service issues, and more.

You can even choose to include information from their public social media activity – their likes and dislikes, what they are saying and sharing about you. Marketers can use CRM to better understand the pipeline of sales or prospective work coming in, making forecasting simpler and more accurate. You'll have clear visibility of every opportunity or lead, showing you the clear path from enquiries to sales.

And though it’s traditionally been used as a sales and marketing tool, customer service teams are seeing great benefits from CRM systems. Today’s customer might raise an issue in one channel – say, Twitter – and then switch to email or telephone to resolve it in private. A CRM platform enables you to manage the enquiry across channels without losing track.

The Benefits of CRM
Introducing a CRM platform has many benefits which have been shown to produce real results – including direct improvements to the bottom line. CRM applications have a proven track record of increasing:

• Sales by up to 37%
• Sales Productivity by up to 44%
• Forecast accuracy by 48%

Identify and categorise leads
One of the main benefits of a CRM system is that it can help you to identify and add new leads easily and quickly and categorise them accurately. You can create customised pitch documents in less time, cutting down on response time and enabling sales teams to move on to the next opportunity. With complete, accurate, centrally held information about clients and prospects, sales staff can focus their attention and energy on the right clients and gain a competitive advantage.

Increase referrals from existing customers
By understanding your customers better, cross-selling and up-selling opportunities become clear – giving you the chance to win new business from existing customers. With better information you'll also be able to keep your customers happy with better service. Happy customers are likely to become repeat customers, and repeat customers spend more – up to 33% more according to some studies.

Improve products and services
An often overlooked benefit of CRM software is that it will gather information from a huge variety of sources across your business. This gives you unprecedented insights into how your customers feel and what they are saying about your organisation – so you can improve what you offer, spot problems early and identify gaps.