Managing Your Relationships With Customers
Customer relationship management software helps businesses to manage their customer’s data, as well as analysing customer interactions so that a business can improve its service. Looking at a wide array of data from multiple sources ensures that it will be accurate and helpful to a company’s research.
In this article, we will cover what CRM software can do, what type of data it collects, and some examples of CRMs that are perfect for small businesses. With more of a focus on customer service, your business will begin to see an increase in repeat customers, and you could even attract an influx of new ones.

What can CRM data help with?
Using CRM software, a business can use its previous interactions with customers to improve its future communications, providing a more valuable and efficient service to its customers. A CRM is important to build relationships, streamline processes, increase sales and even profitability. Keap offers a free trial of their CRM, which also organises the data in an easy-to-read and intuitive way.
It will collect all the data from sales leads and customers in one place – similar to a spreadsheet. However, they offer many additional options, such as the ability to organise leads by whether they’re ‘hot’ (more likely to make a purchasing decision) or ‘cold’ (looking for more information or simply browsing). This way, more effective actions can be taken – such as taking the ‘hot’ lead to an eCommerce page, or providing the ‘cold’ lead more information by sending them to the company’s blog page.

Where does a CRM get its data?
Any point of contact between a customer and the company can be used as data for a CRM. Click-through rate on a company’s website can indicate the sort of thing a customer is looking for, and data collected from a form can tell you a visitor’s age, name, email and other important information. Monday offers lead capture and management, making the process much more simple.
Information from the company’s telephone calls, live chat, direct mail, marketing materials and social networks are all helpful indications of how to best serve customers. This can be shared with customer-facing staff, as it is useful for them to know the customer’s personal information, purchase history, buying preferences, and issues or concerns they are facing in order to best provide solutions.

What additional tasks can a CRM perform?
Although initially just a basic consolidation of collected information into a database, many more sophisticated CRM systems have additional functions. These may include marketing automations, which can send email marketing content to sales prospects as they come into the system.
Also, sales force automation can handle anything from following up on leads, obtaining new customers and building upon existing customers’ loyalty. This could include sending discount codes to previous customers, or even sending a follow-up email about an abandoned eCommerce order.
In rare cases, CRM technology can create geographic marketing campaigns based on a customer’s location. These would track searches for ‘digital technology in Lincoln’ or ‘where to buy lawnmowers near me’, and send related marketing material to these people.

Get support in implementing a CRM
Using a CRM can help to keep track of customer interactions, which can then advise a business on the best action to take to convert them from a prospect into a customer. Pipedrive, Salesforce and Xero are examples of some CRM software that could benefit your business.
Get in touch with us to apply for grants of up to £50k for your business. We also provide the opportunity to get in contact with a member of the University of Lincoln’s computer science staff for academic support. Schedule a meeting with us to learn more!