Our guide to CRM

by EngageRM

08 July 2022

If we asked what device holds all of your contacts and important information, without a doubt the answer would be our phone. It keeps us connected with the various people in our lives and helps maintain those relationships through a quick call or message.

For organisations, a CRM – which stands for Customer Relationship Management – is the company wide phone. It is a tool that manages contact information and relationships with both current and prospective customers. The right CRM will house and organise thousands of customers and data points and work behind the scenes to find you specific contacts and group them based on your metrics.

Most CRMs on the market fall into one or more of the 4 types of platforms, operational, collaborative, analytical and marketing. The EngageRM platform combines all 4 types into one vertical, allowing for a seamless platform for all aspects of your organisation.

But what are the main benefits of a CRM? And what can the right platform achieve? That depends on your overall CRM strategy, which effectively means how are you planning on employing the platform in your organisation. Regardless of how you plan to implement a CRM, there are some general benefits across the board.

Create an exceptional customer experience

Imagine having the ability to understand how your customer interacts with your organisation. For sports teams this could be looking at which games they attended in person, what merchandise they’ve purchased and whether this points towards a favourite player or emails and marketing campaigns they’ve interacted with. Together, this paints a complete picture of your customer and what aspects of your team or organisation interests them.

With this data, organisations can create personalised messaging from the beginning of the customer journey without wasting time on data entry. This will only help organisations bring in new fans and fill their venues once more.

Higher Productivity

Long gone are the days where you have to send out multiple individual emails to contacts to keep them on a specific journey. With powerful automations including Customer Journey, organisations can now create detailed paths for customers to automatically follow based on a range of metrics including sentiments and time spent between certain communications.

Time is a valuable commodity, the time spent entering details or identifying potential leads manually is time spent away from building relationships and securing new business. The same goes for your marketing team, identifying and creating target groups for campaigns is time spent away from planning and building new marketing campaigns. Automating these processes will allow your departments to be proactive with their time.

Increased Collaboration

If we asked you to picture a middle-aged person, there’s no doubt everyone would imagine a different person. Some would picture a brown-haired man, others a red-headed female, there is the same effect when different departments operate on siloed CRM platforms.

EngageRM’s omnichannel approach ensures all departments operate with the same data, allowing increased collaboration between departments and contributing to a stronger picture of customers as a result. With your marketing, sales and customer support teams all working on the same platform, with the same customers, creates an in depth single view of them.

Greater Insights

CRMs can create both high-level and on the ground insights and reports at the click of a button, instantly offering an insight into how departments are operating. There is also the ability to easily access historical data and build in depth profiles of individual customers including their purchase history, match attendance, website signups and more.

Getting the most out of your CRM

It’s easy to fall into the habit of utilising your CRM platform as a contact book, but to get the most out of your platform, it should be seen rather as a productivity tool. Although it may take a little more time than you’d like to wrap your head around the different applications and processes, taking the time now will save you plenty in the long run.

The main point is that your CRM shouldn’t give you a place to manage your leads, it should manage them for you.