User Management & Engagement Can Boost Your Sales & Retention
What if you could know not only what your customers want, but how they feel about sticking with your brand? There is a constant battle of privacy versus understanding how to land a steady set of sales, but there are a few ways to harvest data with a customer's permission—and without a lot of creepy spying or information purchases. Here's an overview of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology and how it can give you all of the information you need, along with ways to act on that information.
What Does CRM Do?
A company that wants to remember its customers, contact its customers, and make good recommendations will record a few pieces of information such as:
- Name
- Account Number or ID
- Phone number
- Email address
- Purchases
- Negative experiences
- Miscellaneous notes
All of this information creates a document that represents your customer. It's good to have this information memorized for a one-on-one talk, but there are a lot of opportunities to research not just one customer, but multiple sets of interest groups, communities, and other patterns that you wouldn't easily see without putting the customers (and products) side by side.
CRM does more than just record the information. A good customer relation system will start building connections between different trends, such as figuring out if customers from a specific area are interested in a specific product.
Customization Is Key
You can even create your own custom fields to figure out other trends. Interested in age, gender, religion, brand loyalty, brand dislike, days with best or worst purchases, or employees who had some kind of impact on the customer? If you can record the information, you can plug it into a CRM system and start building relationships.
This is where CRM can get a bit technical and confusing. If you don't have experience with computer details, you've just read what usually shows up on spreadsheets, charts, and programming code-like databases; all of those ideas, but shortened into abbreviations and words.
When you've been in the tech industry for too long, you may start to forget about which slang and technical jargon happened to make it into your database. Rest easy that even if you happen to be speaking to a CRM professional who seems a bit too deep and technical with their terms, any requirements can be translated to a more down-to-earth language when facing people who don't care for tech--all while staying fast and organized for people who eat, breath, and dream tech.
The end result is more than just a sales team that can check a few notes. Your inventory people can figure out what to stock, your investors can consider which projects need funding for the best results, and your marketing team can figure out how to turn product losers into rebranded winners.
From giving an information edge to traditional sales teams to giving deep data geeks the toys they need for customer experiments with less costs, there are a lot of benefits to enjoy if you contact a Microsoft consulting service today.
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