We are going to explain to you what a CRM is and what exactly this type of program used in some professional fields such as online marketing or electronic commerce is for. If someone has ever told you about them but you have not fully understood exactly what is behind these acronyms, today we are going to try to solve it simply.
We will start the article by explaining simply what CRM means and what type of program it is in general terms. And then, we will go on to explain the main functions that they usually offer, trying to make it an understandable explanation without technicalities so that we can all understand it well.
What is a CRM
The acronym CRM means Customer Relationship Management, which translated into Spanish is something like Customer Relationship Management. We could say that the term refers to a series of business strategies, practices, and technological solutions that are focused on the relationship with a company’s customers.
As for CRM systems, they are those programs with which companies of any size will be able to keep their relationships with customers organized. They are usually programs that combine multiple tasks when dealing with customers, such as sales management, marketing, or customer service.
With these programs, a company can have a single database with customer information. And then, the CRM will keep a record of all your interactions with each of them, and thus have a centralized view of all customers and their statistics in a single tool.
CRMs can be in many ways. They can be local so that the database stays in the company, or the cloud so that the information is stored on an external network and can be accessed remotely by employees. Cloud-based CRMs can also be known as SaaS (software as a service or software as a service). They can also be open source so anyone can help develop, or proprietary where the program and its code only belong to one company.
The objective of CRM is to help improve the productivity of a company, by having centralized the data needed by many of its departments and the tools to communicate with customers. Instead of having several applications for everything, all the necessary functions for marketing or customer service are unified.
What is a CRM for?
A CRM is used for many things, and therein lies the greatest benefit of this type of program, in that with a single software companies can carry out different types of interactions with their customers. However, we are going to tell you some of the main functions that all of them usually have.
To begin with, these programs are usually focused on marketing and sales departments, as well as customer service. Therefore, CRMs allow you to make calls to customers for business or troubleshooting purposes, and then keep records of the call history or support interactions that have been made with each customer.
Many of these tools also allow you to manage and monitor conversations on social networks, whether they are mentions, private messages, or reviewing interactions with keywords. In this way, these programs can help companies to capture the opinions of customers in general towards them, or even develop marketing strategies based on the information they get from social networks.
Some CRM solutions also have applications for mobile phones and tablets, which allows any salesperson or company employee to consult customer data from outside the office. This helps a lot in cases where companies have employees who work remotely or who travel for work reasons.
In addition to this, CRMs are also capable of generating marketing campaigns, automating the sending of emails and other communications, and personalizing customer touchpoints. It also allows you to manage your team and team performance within a company.
With all this data, this type of software also provides companies with numerous graphs and data so that they can analyze the progress and growth of their campaigns. And since the interactions of each client are recorded, they can also perform personalized after-sales or customer service for each one.
Sharlene Meriel is an avid gamer with a knack for technology. He has been writing about the latest technologies for the past 5 years. His contribution in technology journalism has been noteworthy. He is also a day trader with interest in the Forex market.
