Building and maintaining customer relationships is crucial to running a successful business. In order to keep customers and clients satisfied and attract new customers to their offerings, many businesses turn to customer relationship management (CRM) consulting services and software.
What Are CRM Consulting Services?
CRM consulting services are used to retain and manage relationships with customers. Using data, sales representatives, marketing specialists, and other company personnel focus on building these relationships and growing sales.
CRM software is an integral part of the entire CRM process and services. The CRM system automates the process of maintaining customer relationships and allows employees to respond to customer queries, resolve issues, take and preserve notes, and more. The CRM system also generates and aggregates data in a digestible format for you to see trends and patterns and evaluate the overall picture to improve customer experiences and your business as a whole.
Benefits of CRM Software
CRM software can benefit your company in numerous ways.
Sound Data
CRM consulting software will give you accurate, actionable data. Since trustworthy data will allow you to make the best decisions regarding your business, this will enable you to inform your actions as a consulting firm.
Not only does a CRM platform cull data, but it also organizes, cleans, and analyzes the information to present reports you can use to improve your operations and relationships with customers. More specifically, this information will tell you how your efforts, such as response forms, advertising, social media, and more, are paying off. A CRM platform will tell you how a particular customer came to your business and how your relationship has evolved since then.
Automation
These tools take away a great deal of the manual labor involved in keeping customer relationships — and the entire business — organized. The CRM system automates tasks by combing through data on your behalf, delivering insights, and more. It can, for example, grade customers based on their interactions with your business or sales team. It can also respond to customer queries that don’t require human responses.
A CRM platform is an especially useful tool for drip marketing, which targets specific categories of customers with messaging geared toward them. Through an automated process, it can identify consumers with certain characteristics, such as the position or industry, group them together for a campaign, and automatically send them messages you’ve already written.
Custom CRM Development Solutions
At BairesDev, we’ll take into account your specific circumstances, employees, operations, industry, and many other factors to create a customized CRM platform to serve your needs, whether you’re creating an entirely new CRM platform or augmenting an existing one.
A CRM consultant can help you integrate the applications you need into one complete system, taking your specific goals and objectives into account to help you grow and improve your business. No matter your industry — whether you’re in real estate or banking — your CRM solutions will create custom solutions to help you see where you are and where you can go as an organization.
Collaboration
CRM solutions also improve collaboration — both in and out of your organization. Internally, the CRM platform makes data more visible to all the key players in your business and allows them to work together to develop plans and strategies based on the insights the data reveals. Marketing, sales processes, operations, and other departments will have access to the same information and enable you to function together as a team.
Of course, given that you’ll be able to glean better, more in-depth information about your current and target customers, you’ll also collaborate with your audience more effectively. You can learn what’s working and what’s not, as well as understand how you can meet their needs.
Focused Approach
With the business landscape continuously changing, it’s essential to hone your strategy to keep your core mission and objectives at the forefront of your efforts. CRM consultants provide services and software can help you focus your approach to business management and customer relationships by highlighting the data you need to know. These actionable insights will enable you to use information in a more deliberate way and better guide your efforts.
Scalability
Businesses evolve. Sometimes they grow. When changes occur, you need CRM platforms that will adjust accordingly.
A CRM adoption consulting partner like BairesDev will help you change and modify your software as needed, whether you want to pull different types of data, add more team members, or improve the capabilities of your existing platform. Our team of top 1% of tech talent will work with you to scale your CRM solutions so you can continue to deliver quality services and meet the needs and expectations of your customers through upgrades and updates.
Support
A CRM system requires upkeep, just as your relationships with your customers do. CRM consultants provide services like BairesDev will give you continual support for your software in case you need maintenance, additional coverage, or improvements. We’ll also help you and your staff learn how to use the software and leverage all of its capabilities to maximize its value in your organization.
Even after we’ve finished developing the software, we’ll continue to provide support to help you get the most out of your CRM solution.
Must-Have CRM Platform Features
With that out of the way, let’s take a look at the features you’ll want for your business.
Contact Management
This is probably the single most important feature for your CRM. However, don’t think of this as a simple contacts tool (like you might find on your mobile device or MS Outlook). CRM Contact management is so much more than just names, email addresses, phone numbers, and birthdays. CRM Contact Management is all about relationships. This means it can save a wider range of business data, which includes various interactions (such as those for B2B), activity tracking (to organize sales and marketing), and in-depth analytics and reporting on contacts. These types of multi-point interactions make it much easier for your sales and PR staff to track the interconnectedness of clients, customers, staff, and suppliers.
Content Management
Your business relies on content. This can be in the form of materials you send out to clients, internal documentation, web content, emails, whitepapers, and forms. You don’t want to have all of that content saved on various servers and desktops because that would be a logistical nightmare. Instead, you’re going to want a CRM that includes a built-in CMS feature, so you can manage that ever-growing trove of documents in one, convenient location.
Automation
You need automation and a good CRM tool will include features that make it possible to automate at least some of the workflow. With solid automation, your sales and PR people can be automatically updated as something changes in a relationship (such as a customer purchasing a product). Automation makes just about every facet of the CRM platform more efficient and reliable. Without automation, you’re going to have to depend on staff to constantly monitor every step in the pipeline. Given how busy your employees already are, that’s a big ask. Let automation handle much of this.
Dashboards
Observability is key. Your staff is going to need to have an at-a-glance, real-time dashboard so they can see where things stand. Even better, you’re going to want a CRM tool that makes it possible for your admins and your users to create customizable dashboards, so users only see what they need to see.
Sales Pipeline
A sales pipeline offers a snapshot of where prospects stand at any given point of the process. These pipelines keep you apprised of how many deals sales and PR staff should expect to close during a period (week, month, quarter, or year) and how close those staff members are to reaching sales quotas (if applicable). This is an important feature that allows those in control of the process to keep tabs on how everything is progressing (or not).
Reporting
Reporting is vastly important and should not be overlooked. With great reporting, you can know exactly what’s going on with your business, how the staff is performing, how sales are going, what areas have become problematic, and if your company will meet any given goal for a period. Reporting should be highly customizable and user-friendly. A good CRM tool makes it very easy for anyone to build a report on data either housed within the system or imported from another source.
Task Management
Finally, task management should be considered a must for any quality CRM. Your users need to be able to manage that deluge of tasks they’ve been handed. Some CRM tools include project management features, such as Kanban boards. Those are the types of CRMs you want to look for. Consider this: Task management might be fairly simple when you’re looking at a single user who only has to keep track of a few tasks a day. But when you’re looking at dozens or even hundreds of users with a growing mountain of tasks to manage, your CRM tool better is equipped to handle such serious demand. Without a high-quality task management feature, you might as well not even bother with a CRM, as all the other tools available to the platform will be rendered useless as your sales and PR teams become buried in the management of tasks.
Improve your Customer Relationships Today With the Right CRM Consulting Partner
CRM consulting services and software will help you improve customer relationships — and your business as a whole. They will give you insight into how you’re performing, what your customers want, and the ways in which you can manage and improve your performance.
