CRM or Customer Relations Management
Tuesday, October 19th, 2004It seems that everything on the internet today has some kind of fancy acronym or label. Take CRM for instance. If you were to ask someone on the street what CRM was, I am sure you would get a different answer from each person you asked. CRM stands for Customer Relations Management. In other words, customer service. Since customer service has become such big business in the past decade, I am sure someone decided that it needed a fancy new name. Whatever the case may be, CRM software can help your business succeed in a number of different ways.
- First, the right CRM solution can help your customers help themselves. For instance, Bill comes to your website looking for information on how your product can help him save money on his energy bill every month. He submits an email to you, but instead of your customer service rep emailing him back, the right CRM software can email him back a list of frequently asked questions about saving money on his energy bill and keep your customer service rep busy responding to people who have different questions. Maybe they can even work on selling your products directly instead.
- If your customers can help themselves to commonly asked questions, your staff is free to do other things. This also means you are free to do other things if you are the staff. You can re-assign them to do other, more important tasks like selling, marketing or even cut back on the number of people you need for your customer service operations.
