How can you manage your customer relationship and database effectively? The answer lies in CRM, or Customer Relationship Management. “Do what you do so well they will want to see it again, and bring their friends”, said Walt Disney. Therefore, the management of customer relationships and relevant databases is crucial for your business to deeply understand your target audience. So in the end, what is CRM, and how can it help your business? Let’s discover everything about this system with us in today’s article!
What is CRM?
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It’s a software system solution that gives business owners the freedom of managing and processing customer data. For this reason, this system helps these owners maintain their relationship with a large number of customers and fetch customer insights that would further improve customer service.
The majority of market leaders chose to have their own CRM system customized for their company based on their unique demand instead of choosing a pre-built CRM platform. This is because each business has different issues and organizational structures.
Various reputable businesses often pay great attention to customer private information and commit to not revealing such discreet information for profit reasons. And a CRM system built per request will be a must for each business to complete this mission. In other words, a tailored CRM system is helpful to any business due to security reasons, especially in protecting the confidentiality of customer data.
What Can CRMs Offer Your Business?
So you wish to up your business’s ante in the game of positive and long-term customer relationships? Learn how a CRM system can benefit your business performance.
1. First, understand who your customers are
Whether your business is in traditional fields (e.g., agriculture production) or newly emerging fields (e.g., eCommerce), customer management always proves the key to a business’s longevity. The whole business world already changes from product-centric to customer-centric mindsets. Therefore, the unwritten secret to success is to treat all customers as if your world revolves around them.
So how can we treat them better? The answer lies in understanding them through their data collected from different sources. Today, with tech advancements like CRM systems, we can easily extract basic yet private information from your customers. Such information includes their demographics, shopping preferences, transaction logs, and past interactions.
Based on this data, you can build a near-perfect portrait of who your customer is. This allows you to put yourself into their shoes to understand where their demands come from.
2. Improve data collection
Time equals money times efforts at the right timing. This means, by proposing suitable solutions at the optimal moment, you can improve customer experience and importantly, boost sales. Therefore, various companies make a growing investment in data collection to better understand their customers in real-time.
Today, with a CRM system, you can speed up the process of gathering your audience’s basic information (e.g., their name, age, gender, education, or geographic location). This adds up to a gigantic database that is more valuable to your business strategy than anything else.
Additionally, a custom CRM system also helps you as a business owner to fast monitor customer feedback and save past interactions (e.g., call logs, emails, and past purchases) in a vast database. Real-time information collection allows management and other departments (especially customer service reps) to propose personalized solutions and campaigns for a more satisfactory experience.
3. Further, manage your social platforms
Instead of micromanaging each social platform in a different place, a tailored CRM solution can enable the presence of your social posts on one platform. Therefore, you can have a better comparison among your choice of social sites. Further, you can make faster minor decisions on social activities and improve social interactions with potential customers.
4. Forecast upcoming sales volume efficiently
A custom-built CRM system helps your business collect all essential information about customers in one centralized place, where it’s about past sales performance periodically, current marketing trends, or customer preferences. Based on this crucial data, you can make more accurate predictions about the upcoming sales performance.
Moreover, this helps you make necessary changes to your overall business goals and make adjustments to a more attainable target or KPI of your campaign.
Recommended reading: The 5 Advantages of CRM in Banking Sector
3 Real-World Examples of CRM from Giants
With those given benefits, it’s no wonder why the number of CRM systems has been increasing at a lightning speed. In 2025, its estimated value will surpass $98 billion worldwide. So, how are big companies globally using these CRM solutions to benefit their business activities? Let’s take a look at three real-world examples as follows:
1. Unilever
The market leader had their own CRM system named SAP CRM, which allows them to improve the call center’s quick response and problem-solving.
“It enables faster response time to queries and needs raised by consumers, provides for effective maintenance of customer databases, and gives easy access to customer information for analysis and strategy development”. Efren Samonte, Commercial Director at Unilever Philippines asserted.
2. Zara
The ‘hotshot’ Europe-based fast fashion brand uses its custom-made CRM to track customer preferences and sales. Each customer who made a transaction with Zara would have a profile including their birthday, phone number, and past purchases. This makes maintaining a close relationship with customers super smooth for Zara since fashion buying is about understanding customers’ needs as if you – a business owner – are their close friend.
Zara’s CRM system was developed with a new feature called digital assistants or DAs. This functionality stores customer input and allows designers to map out next season’s style and rebuy existing orders based on customers’ requests.
3. Amazon
The eCommerce giant selected an Oracle-provided CRM system. This system specializes in customizing the micromanaging data of each customer and automating personalized marketing newsletters to each customer with recommended purchases. Also, it can expand the purchase panel with more items that might be of customers’ interest, saves cache so that customers could avoid the hassle of re-logging personal information at every checkout, and tailors the interface of the customer feedback segment.
How to Choose the Right CRM System for Your Business?
No matter what scale your business is, bear in mind what the best is for your business operations and progress tracking on a daily basis. So, we’d like to give you some pointers in choosing the right CRM platform for your business.
1. Easy to use
Let’s be real. A CRM system that requires a long learning curve can prevent your staff members from adopting and learning about the new system. Not to mention that training time to get used to a novel management system also wastes a fortune, time, and effort. The less training time, the better. Therefore, prioritize a CRM system that has a short learning curve. This will allow your employees to be fully ready and thoroughly understand the new system.
2. Mobile accessibility
The number of mobile users will increase to 7.49 billion in 2025. This is not a surprising finding, especially when we’re rushing through life for work.
With mobile accessibility, a CRM system allows us to carry out work tasks on the go. For this reason, we can minimize the time of task response and problem-solving duration from the minute a complaint from a customer is filed till the problem is completely solved with the service satisfaction achieved.
Therefore, a good CRM system must have a mobile-friendly interface to meet a growing demand for working on mobile devices.
3. Analytics
Nobody should invest a large amount of budget on a platform that only stores data and keeps it safe. Microsoft Excel can help you with that thanks to its thousands of convenient calculating features.
An efficient CRM system must be able to carry out more than that. It must possess the ability to cleverly gather, consolidate, analyze, and extract analytical reports that can help you unveil helpful customer insights, trends, and patterns. Further, its capabilities must help you predict the outcome of your upcoming campaigns or suggest you take up a new marketing trend that suits your customers’ preferences.
FURTHER READING: |
1. The 7 Reasons Why Use Drupal for Your Business |
2. What Is Drupal? All You Need to Know Before Starting |
4. Real-time data tracking
Most companies, regardless of their industries, prefer collecting and tracking real-time data about customers and their current campaigns. This data, such as visits, hyperlink clicks, comments, or time spent on a website, helps you better understand your customers’ behaviors and campaign performance. Therefore, a CRM system needs to facilitate real-time data tracking tasks by integrating essential capabilities. Otherwise, you may easily lose your customers in the hands of competitors.
5. Customization
“Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen” – Edward V. Berard. Indeed, each business entity functions as a whole person. Therefore, the business personality has to be flaunted in a suitable way that helps the system users relate to the platform they will use on a daily basis. This means a CRM system must provide customization functionalities to ensure it’ll work in alignment with your business process.
Which One to Choose: Pre-built Platforms vs. Custom-Built System
If you already have a detailed idea for your own CRM system, it’s time to realize it. There are two ways to develop your CRM system: using pre-built platforms or outsourcing the right partner for a customized one. Choosing which one depends greatly on your specifications, budget, and more.
Pre-Built Platforms
There are many pre-built platforms that support your development of a comprehensive CRM solution. Each comes with its own strengths and weaknesses.
However, their common similarity is they’re all more economical than a custom one. They also often lure users with their 30-day free trial with a surprisingly low-budgeted pricing strategy for abundant features.
Below are the top five pre-built platforms you can consider:
| Magnolia |
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| Wix |
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| Bynder |
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| Freshsales |
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| Salesforce |
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Custom CRM Systems
Not every pre-built CRM tool suits your requirements for a new system such as real-time data tracking. Especially if you plan to have a new CRM system fully equipped for a complex workflow in a medium- and large-scale company, we strongly advise you to seek professional help from a software development company. Even when you have no clear objective for the system, the reliable company helps you set a detailed one through its research service.
Inevitably, a custom CRM solution costs more than a pre-built platform. But you can totally negotiate the pricing plan with a software development company as your desired CRM tool would only require specific features.
If you’re looking for a reputable company for your CRM idea, consider Designveloper. With an excellent team of designers and developers, we’ve delivered scalable, customized solutions to resolve our clients’ challenges and boost their business performance. We also integrate the emerging trends into CRM, including mobile-first design, AI-powered chatbots, or real-time data tracking.
Further, we also involve you alongside every stage of the development process. Through regular meetings and collaboration tools like Jira, we keep you updated with work progress and make immediate improvements based on your feedback. Worried about the budget? Contact us and estimate your project now!
Conclusion
CRM is an integral part of today’s businesses. It helps your business gather all essential data in one unified platform, manage all social media accounts, make predictions, and more importantly, understand customers better. However, to choose the right CRM system, you should consider different factors including its learning curve, mobile accessibility, customization, real-time data tracking, and analytics. Once you’ve understood the importance of CRM, it’s your time to embark on this journey. Wanna share your idea with us? Contact us now and discuss further!
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