What is a CRM?

CRM – Customer Relationship Management – is a very broad term, but in general any system in which customer data can be stored, with the purpose of improving the efficiency  and effectiveness of your relationships with your customers, would fall under this umbrella. So if you’re in business, you need one, and you’ve probably already got one. Whether a CRM adds value to your business, or just hoovers up time, is another matter (and is the reason we created SET For Business CRM). 

Why does it go wrong? 

A good CRM, well fit for your business, should give you insight into your customers’ needs and behaviours. It should help you diagnose past successes (and failures!), show you a snapshot of what’s happening right now and help you plan for the future. It should add pace to your activities and reduce error. Too often, however, CRM software feels laborious, designed solely for management analysis at the expense of user experience. What is gained in one area is lost in another – the CRM users who are supposed to put the information in complain that it’s slow, difficult, even pointless. And so the data held by the CRM is naturally incomplete. Trust in the data starts to falter, and eventually everyone starts asking themselves whether it’s worth the effort. 

How is this problem fixed? 

A simple solution is to address the needs of the people entering data. Can a CRM provide excellent management analysis, while also adding value to the regular users? In our case these tend to be sales staff – at its heart our system is a Sales CRM, with prospect and opportunity nurturing at the core. So we began from scratch, asking ourselves: how can we help the sales team hit their targets? How can we make their lives easier? If we can get that right, focussing on core user engagement, then the management analysis will follow. 

SET For Business CRM is built in and supported from the UK, only £20 p/m/u, lightning fast and packed full of features – all of which can be explored in a 30-day free trial over at setforbusiness.co.uk.