A good company keeps the doors open to its customers. More traditional companies need to be familiar with Customer Relationship Management (CRM), a term that covers both the strategies and technologies that a company uses to manage and analyse customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle. This includes pre-sale support, marketing, sales, and customer service. The goal is to improve all aspects of customer service relationships, help with customer retention and increase sales growth.

This article will provide you with the necessary insights into what CRM is, why it’s important to understand, and share some best practices for putting it into action.

• What is CRM?
• Benefits of CRM
• CRM Strategies
• CRM Technologies
• Implementing CRM
• How CRM Integrates with WordPress
• Headless CRM vs. Cloud CRM

What is CRM?

Generically speaking, CRM is a framework for controlling how a business handles interactions with existing and future customers. Starting off, it relies on data analytics: essentially, collecting and then aggregating large quantities of data. This can be done through a company’s website, and through the phone, via email, live chat, marketing materials and social media.

CRM has continued to expand in scope. Where once it was nothing more than a sophisticated way of keeping track of customer data, it is now increasingly being used to help businesses develop a sense of the customer’s needs, and anticipate those needs. A good CRM system can help organisations digest a bewildering array of data from emails, phone calls, chats, SMSs, website visits, even social media encounters, producing a detailed three-dimensional record of a customer’s history with the company, to better inform customer service and stimulate sales.

Benefits of CRM

Implementing a CRM system can bring numerous benefits to a business:

1. Enhanced Customer Service

In particular, a CRM system helps them maintain customer interaction, enabling them to always provide a better support to the customer by having a full expertise about him or her.

2. Improved Customer Retention

By learning about customers’ needs and preferences, businesses can modify their products/services and associated communications to better meet individual customers’ needs, and thus reduce customer-turnover.

3. Increased Sales

CRM systems facilitate lead generation and nurture by allowing these leads to be identified and guided through the purchasing funnel more easily. Sales data studies allow sales reps to tailor pitches to the specific need of an individual customer, ultimately increasing sales conversion.

4. Better Data Analysis

A CRM system gives a business a detailed picture of a customer’s behaviour and interests. This helps to make informed decisions about products and services, predict trends and fashion more targeted advertising campaigns.

5. Enhanced Collaboration

As part of a CRM system, many packages include features that enable easier communication and collaboration between those at different levels of the organisation. For example, teams can exchange information more readily and teams can cooperate more effectively.

CRM Strategies

In order to realise the full potential of CRM, however, a company must build up effective strategies. Here are some key strategies that can help:

1. Know Your Customers

The initial step in any CRM strategy is to assemble as much background data about your customers as you can: how they find and buy your products, their preferences, their feedback – all of it. Once you have this information (and ideally some kind of scoring mechanism to show which customers are most valuable) you can start building detailed customer profiles.

2. Personalize Customer Interactions

Use this information to personalise the experience of each customer, for instance by sending tailor-made messages, making product suggestions and offers, or providing personalised customer service.

3. Implement Customer Feedback

Go out of your way to listen to and use customer feedback. Not only will it make your product and service better, it lets customers know they’re valued.

4. Train Your Team

Make sure your team understands how to use the CRM system properly – entering data, accessing information and using the system to improve their interactions with customers.

5. Continuously Improve

Your CRM strategy must be dynamic: constantly analyse your CRM data for opportunities to improve and change your approach.

CRM Technologies

The technology behind CRM systems is also changing rapidly. Here are some of the latest trends:

1. Cloud-Based CRM

Because CRM software is cloud-based, it’s incredibly flexible and accessible. Any business can get online and access their CRM data from anywhere, at any time. This is particularly advantageous for companies with remote or mobile workforces.

2. Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI is becoming more and more commonplace in CRM. Through the analysis of large amounts of data in a short space of time, AI-powered CRM systems enable businesses to make more informed decisions. They also power automation of mundane jobs, freeing people up for more complex matters.

3. Mobile CRM

Along with the trend of mobile technology, the use of mobile CRM applications is increasing. Mobile employees in the sales team could make use of CRM data on the mobile devices, and improve the customer alliance in real time.

4. Social CRM

Social CRM is about enabling companies to interact with customers across social media channels, to gather insights through online social interactions and to deliver support through social channels.

Implementing CRM

A CRM system can be a tricky and complex thing to implement, but if you follow these steps, you can be assured that you are doing it right:

1. Define Your Goals

First, state the goal for which you want the CRM to be a vessel. It could be: provide excellent customer service, handle sales more efficiently, understand customer behaviour better.

2. Choose the Right CRM Software

Choose a CRM software solution that suits your business objectives. Some things you might want to consider are how easy it is to use, how scalable it is, and which features are included.

3. Train Your Staff

Be sure to train all employees that will be using the CRM system, including how to enter data, as well as how to extract it. Train them how to study customer interactions, and how they can use the CRM software to increase the effectiveness of future interactions.

4. Integrate with Existing Systems

Ensure it can integrate with your current systems, such as your email marketing platform, your e-commerce site, and your customer support tools. This will create a smooth information flow among them.

5. Monitor and Adjust

And once you have that CRM in place, track the output and adjust it accordingly. Draw on the analytics and interpretations of your data through the CRM to further your understanding of your customers and improve relationships with them.

In conclusion, a properly implemented CRM system can really help a company manage its relationships with its customers better, leading to increased satisfaction of customers, sales growth and ultimately, business growth. If it is mastered, CRM can provide business with an edge over their competitors helping them develop strong relationships with their customers.

How CRM Integrates with WordPress

Implementing a CRM system on top of WordPress allows you to get the best of both worlds by deepening your customer management processes while improving the functionality of your site. Here’s how it happens:

1. Plugins and Extensions

There are several WordPress CRM plugins and extensions, for example HubSpot, Salesforce and Zoho CRM, which integrate CRM functions directly within your WordPress site.

2. Data Synchronization

For example, integration automatically synchronises all your customer data between your WordPress site and your CRM system — so customer information such as name, address, phone number, and history of purchases will stay up to date at all times. All that you need to do is query your CRM and the data will be there.

3. Form Integration

With CRM integration, you can automatically populate leads with the information they have given you, while WordPress forms automatically populate your CRM. You thus avoid a whole lot of effort and can build a lead generation and management empire.

4. Enhanced Customer Interaction

By integrating CRM, we enable better interaction with your customers because you can track their behaviour on your WordPress site and tailor the marketing to reach people who are interested in what you have to offer, giving them content that is relevant to their interests, based on what we have learnt from their behaviour.

5. Automated Workflows

You can set up automated workflows in CRM on top of WordPress to send an email follow-up when a contact submits a contact form, or when someone makes a purchase.

To sum it up, using CRM alongside WordPress can boost your ability to deal with your customer relationships, marketing and all the related business operations, which leads to pleasure full customers and sales.

Headless CRM vs. Cloud CRM

Headless CRM

An example of backend-only CMS technology is a Headless CRM, which is a backend-only content management system where the data can be displayed using any frontend technology you wish. The backend CMS provides data storage, management and API integrations but does not specify how the data must be displayed to the end-user. This gives you a greater level of customisation and flexibility, enabling you to match the user experience to your own business needs and easily embed CRM functionality into different applications and user platforms. Headless CRM is suitable for businesses that require a high level of customisation, and have the technical and design resources to manage the frontend development in-house.

Cloud CRM

On the other hand, a Cloud CRM is a CRM system hosted on the web and accessible through a web browser. Cloud CRM systems are hosted and maintained by the service provider. For businesses, this means they do not have to invest in extensive IT infrastructure or maintenance when implementing a CRM system. Since these systems are already deployed by the service provider and always accessible via the web, they are ideal for any size business. Cloud CRM systems typically have a large number of built-in features and integrations. The main benefit of Cloud CRM is simply ease of access – teams can view customer data from anywhere and anytime which can also be of great benefit for completely remote or distributed teams.

Key Differences

The main difference between them is the architecture and the way they are deployed. Headless CRM is flexible and customisable as the backend is completely separated from the frontend. Cloud CRM is also flexible and easy to use, since it is hosted and managed from the internet, which makes it accessible from anywhere at any time. The main factor that you have to take into account when choosing one of these two is your business needs and technical capabilities. If your business is looking for a system that you can customise as you want and are ready to spend time and money on backend development, then Headless CRM is your way to go. If you don’t want to spend any additional time and effort on maintenance, and would rather have your system hosted and managed from the internet, then Cloud CRM is your turn.