What is CRM?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a strategy that helps businesses to enhance relationships with existing customers and acquire new customers faster. It uses analysis of customers’ historical data to foresee customer needs and focuses specifically on customer retention and ultimately stimulating sales growth. A CRM system helps companies connect with customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability.
Who uses a CRM system?
A CRM system is often used for B2B, B2C, SME and Enterprises. It is beneficial for sales, customer service, business development, recruiting, marketing, or any other line of business. A CRM tool allows you to collect customer’s contact information, identify sales opportunities, record service issues, and manage marketing campaigns. It adds a personal touch to existing relationships between the business and the customers. Thus, with personalization touch, it enhances customer service, builds trust and helps in customer retention. CRM systems provide businesses with numerous strategic advantages.
For example, in the eCommerce business, their employees can see how customers are communicated, what they’ve bought, when they last purchased, what they paid, and so much more.
CRM software
CRM software compiles customer information into a single CRM database so business users can easily access and manage it. This process includes collecting various customer interactions (over email, phone calls, chats, social media, or other channels) and automating several workflow processes, and giving managers the ability to track performance and productivity based on data stored within the system.
CRM software benefits for your business:
1-Easy access to customer data.
Customer relationship management systems include databases that allow users to access the client’s information. It allows to sync it to multiple devices, which results in the most up-to-date customer information from any access point.
2-Streamlined processes through automation.
CRM lets users regulate workflows and processes associated with sales, marketing, and customer support. This improves coordination between these teams and contributes actionable insights into business performance and customer behaviour.
3-Reduce Costs.
The technologies used in implementing a CRM system are cheap and smooth as compared to the traditional way of business. A cloud-based system doesn’t need special installation, no hardware to set up, keeping IT costs low and removing the difficulty of version control and update schedules. Additionally, there is very less need for paper and manual work which requires lesser staff to manage and lesser resources to deal with.
In today’s commercial world, efficiently dealing with all the customers and providing them with what they need boosts customer satisfaction. CRM is quick, easy to implement and very cost-effective in terms of capital outlay and is also extremely flexible, enabling you to scale up and add more people as your business grows. A good CRM platform provides you with powerful customer relationship management that lets you control marketing programs. With CRM, it’s easy to track and nurture leads. This increases the chance of getting more business which ultimately intensifies turnover and profit. Two best PHP frameworks used for CRM are- Laravel and CodeIgniter.
Laravel is one of the most used frameworks of PHP. Laravel has high-level features, top documentation, and Object Relational Mapper (ORM). It has a development path that includes high-level modules directly from the box. CodeIgniter is stagnant and can be used for small projects, but Laravel is the most effective and best choice for the CRM application.
