What is a CRM?
Why do I have to keep track of all my past / present / future customers?
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Manager.
In other words, CRMs are built with your customers (both internal and external) in mind. Some of the most popular CRMs, which you probably already know, are:
many many more!
So now that you know some resources on CRMs, let’s dive into a couple reasons of why you need them.
Note: The below reasons only offer a sliver of what you can gain from implementing a CRM into your business.
Customer Data
Some analysts are saying that we are in a Data Age with the amount of data that is collected, stored, and usually sold every day! And your business is no different. Your customers are your revenue drivers, so collecting as much data and having it stored in a central database will only help you stay more organized. Would you believe that most businesses operate without having a full list of past and present customers?
Knowing your customer will only benefit your business. Data tends to show trends when analyzed as a whole, and missing out on key parameters of your customers might cost you big time in the long run. Here are some basic customer parameters that can benefit your business:
Full Name
Email Address
Home Address
Phone Number
Age (where applicable)
Industry (where applicable)
By having a central location for all customer data, you’ll never have to dig through old emails (or even outdated business cards) to get in contact with a past or present customer.
Centralized Employee Silos
More often than not, differing business departments do not share the same customer data, and that is beginning to detriment them.
Imagine a car dealership in which the sales team and service department utilize different databases for their customers. Here’s a common scenario they might experience in their daily routines:
Jane Appleseed is due for a routine service at her local car dealership in which she purchased her car from. Jane visits the service department and gives her name and VIN for her vehicle, but the service department simply says that she is not a registered customer and needs to fill out a form to give her information. Jane assures the service department that she purchased her car from the same dealership, so they should have her information already saved. However, the service department doesn’t have access to that data and therefore is treating her as a new customer in their system.
The above scenario might have even happened to you! It’s frustrating as a consumer when one business treats you as two separate customers only because the departments don’t share customer data with each other.
CRMs are built for this with the internal customer in mind: your employees. By centralizing customer data and building a customer profile, CRMs can bridge the gap between different employee silos, and drastically reduce friction when different departments such as Sales, IT, Service, and Customer Support pull up a customer profile. Allowing internal employees to share data about customers in the same business can efficiently allow collaborative work with customer experience in mind.
CRMs are becoming more and more utilized in small to enterprise-level businesses. Even a simple customer database will benefit your business tremendously over everything being on “pen and paper”.