At the very beginning of this article, we will explain what exactly CRM means. It’s short for Customer Relationship Management and includes tools, approaches, and methods of analyzing the company’s behavior to the current and potential customers, including the previous results too. It can be a manual or automated process of using the data analysis of the previous and today’s experience, so the company can improve the relationship between them and the customers, no matter if they are new or loyal. But, when it comes to big industries with a lot of clients, manual data analysis is impossible, and that’s the moment when the CRM software jumps in and solves all the eventual problems business owners may have when creating the future sales strategy.
This software is using the customers’ data, by collecting the important information from the social media, websites, phones, emails, chats, and campaigns, so they can generate the results, and help you define your target more precisely. Also, at the same time you will be able to recognize what your client needs, and offer them the exact product, and of course, increasing the profit. But, not every company can afford to own this type of software, and sometimes they even avoid looking for cheaper options, because they think it wouldn’t be profitable for them. But, EngageBay CRM is one of the free options, and even though it has some limits, it can be very helpful at the beginning, before you consider buying a whole version of the software.
You may think you don’t need it, but you should believe us that even the start-ups need this kind of automated program that will generate all the needed information and help the business owners and their employees to increase the company’s sales immediately. These are a few industries that use CRM the most:
1. Banks
The banks have a lot of active clients with different needs and problems. Some of them are just owners of an account and use it for regular transactions. Others may have bigger or smaller loans. There are also those who are saving big. They are all different profiles of users, that are important for banking. CRM is used to tailor customized offers to them, when their card is close to expiring, to offer them better conditions for taking a loan, but also to have an insight into their spending habits, without using all the information illegally.
This also applies to the whole financial sector. When it comes to the money, people have different saving and spending habits, and this technology will always be here to target the right audience and reduce the advertisement cost, by placing the ad only to the users that may find it relevant for them.
2. Retail
When you sell goods or services, your goal is to attract more customers that will be interested in what you are offering and then even make them buy the product. But, how to keep track of their habits? You can’t expect that you will be able to remember all of them, but you can offer a membership deal, collect their basic data, and put it in your software. That will help you build trust, by sending them coupons for birthday and holidays, promoting some products, make something more affordable with the membership card, and so on. Later, all those data will help you recognize your clients’ and audience’s behavior and routines, and you will be able to create even better sales strategies for the next period.
We all visit stores, but after the coronavirus outbreak, many of us prefer shopping online. All of those data, even though it’s fully encrypted, is available for the software, so you can easily find the offer you need the next time you decide to use the same online store. It may sound scary, but knowing that our whole Internet activity leaves a digital print, the usage of CRM is normal and expected, especially when it’s used to improve the overall service.
3. Hotels
Using the CRM software, they are able to predict when will they have more guests, what would they need, send special offers to those who already visited them, and of course, creating advanced marketing strategies that are suitable for this type of accommodation. They can also track the positive and negative experience of the visitors, and use that to improve the service and work on their weaknesses. You can’t expect that you will be perfect in your work, but surely it’s pretty possible to improve it, so you can be close to that point.
4. Insurance
Every active user should be put in the “machine” so the CRM can analyze it, and keep it in the base of clients. But, the insurance companies should also pay attention to those who denied their service, and the reasons why did they do that. This software will help them understand the clients, and offer them something better if they are not satisfied with the current service. The whole thing is based on machine learning, which uses the basic data to predict some outcomes, but also to keep useful information about every insurance client.
5. Consulting services
The companies that offer consulting services have a lot of customers and clients and it can be pretty challenging to manage all of that. Since this field covers a wide range of services, it’s normal that they may have a lot of employees that work on different problems with different clients. Keeping a track of every active client, as we said, is almost impossible, and the computer programs are here to manage the whole work and improve the service, resulting in satisfied clients.
Customer Relationship Management is not a new thing in the industries. They were using it forever, but it looked pretty different in the past, with tons of paper around, and a real mess when it comes to finding the right documents. But, we are lucky enough to live in the time of advanced technologies, and use them to ease our lives from every aspect.