Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

What is customer relationship management (CRM)?

Customer relationship management (CRM) refers to the strategies and technologies businesses employ to manage and analyze every step of the customer lifecycle. Customer relationship management solutions help businesses improve their customer service offerings while increasing customer relationship rates and sales.

While CRM software is often a component of an enterprise's business intelligence strategy, it can also include the collection of customer data to help client-facing employees improve their services and meet client needs. Beyond technology, customer relationship management may also include a business philosophy about how a business manages relationships or interacts with the outside world.

CRM solutions: Maintaining accurate customer data

In today’s globalized world, a prudent customer relationship management strategy includes the latest software and automation of core processes. Repetitive and simple tasks such as marketing can be automated to send prospective clients marketing material through email or social media. 

Sales automation tools track customer interactions to attract and create new customers throughout the business cycle. Contact center automation can streamline customer interaction while reducing labor costs through the introduction of AI via tools such as chatbots, virtual assistants, and speech recognition. 

Finally, geolocation services can reduce interaction friction by relaying customers to local solutions. Geolocation can also be used to create and manage marketing campaigns based on a customer group’s geographic location. 

Customer relationship management software requires proper data management to produce quality results. Without proper data quality, any such database can quickly be over-encumbered with duplicates and incomplete data points. Customer relationship management systems function best when businesses maintain high-quality online customer databases by regularly purging poor quality and by supplementing existing data with external sources. Front-end data quality solutions ensure only validated data enters your CRM system and provide optional enrichment to enhance your data.

Connecting and integrating various data points on customers can help business create a more accurate picture of customer habits and preferences, leading to an enhanced customer service experience while reducing resource costs overall. 

Precisely’s data quality tools for CRM -- data cleansing, deduplication and enrichment -- can help any business improve the quality of customer data. Contact Precisely today to learn more.