What is CRM?
CRM means customer relationship management. The CRM acronym is a term used to describe the category of products that enhance effective customer relationship management.
The most important thing about about CRM is that it’s about customers. A CRM stool should help you have a good understanding of your customers, and use the information provided to deliver the best possible customer experience (CX).
It’s becoming hard to use just one channel to reach brands. They now multiple channels like messaging, email, social media, and phone, to communicate with brands. With much diverse ways to research products and make purchases, to understand customers has been more complex. And it’s becoming more difficult for businesses selling lots of products to multiple audiences to manage all this.
According to the latest CX Trends report by Zendesk, not less than 70 percent of customers expect conversational customer experiences when interacting with brands.
Importance of CRM in Business
CRM is generally important for businesses looking ways to optimize their customer relationships, drive revenue growth, and stay competitive in today's market. So, CRM is important in the following ways:
Improved Customer Relationships
CRM systems enables businesses to understand their customers better, track interactions, and personalize communication, leading to stronger relationships and increased customer loyalty.
Increased Sales and Revenue
By managing leads effectively, tracking sales opportunities, and automating processes, CRM helps sales teams close deals faster and more efficiently, ultimately driving revenue growth.
Enhanced Customer Service
CRM systems enable businesses to provide better customer service by streamlining support processes, resolving issues more quickly, and delivering personalized assistance based on customer history and preferences.
Efficient Marketing Campaigns
With CRM, businesses can segment their customer base, target specific demographics, and track campaign effectiveness, resulting in more targeted and successful marketing efforts.
Data Centralization and Accessibility
CRM centralizes customer data, making it easy to access relevant teams across the organization. This ensures consistent and coordinated interactions with customers across all touchpoints.
Improved Decision Making
By analyzing customer data and trends, CRM systems provide valuable insights that inform strategic decision-making, helping businesses adapt to market changes and customer needs more effectively.
Scalability and Growth
As businesses grow, CRM systems can scale to accommodate increasing customer bases and more complex operations, ensuring that customer relationships remain manageable and profitable.
Current CRM Trends
Let’s check the important CRM trends every business should you look out for in 2024 and beyond.
Here are top CRM trend to look out for in the coming years.
1. CRM and AI
Artificial Intelligence is already a key part of some CRM systems especially in the e-commerce industry, that provides leads and deal predictions for a company’s sales team. According to Next Move, the explainable artificial intelligence market is predicted to reach a value of $21 billion by 2030.
AI integration with CRM is as well critical in automation and analytics.
2. Mobile CRM
Mobile CRM is rapidly gaining acceptance since remote accessibility to CRM systems has become very important for effective work. And as we know sales teams are usually mobile, thereby making perfect development for them to access their valuable tools on the go.
According to Salesmate, 65% of sales representatives who adopted the mobile CRM are most likely to hit their sales target. Another report says mobile CRM solution adoption contributes to an increase in sales productivity by 14.6%.
3. Cloud-based CRM software
A lot of CRM systems are moving from on-premise to cloud-based. Cloud-based CRM software is flexible and provides real-time access to data that can be accessible from any device at any location. There is increase in demand as the deployment as it reduces the costs of establishing infrastructure, making it favorable for organizations of all sizes.
The global market size is expected to hit $34.5 billion by 2025.