CRM means different things to different people

(Part 1 of 2)

As you might know if you've been following our articles, CRM stands for "customer relationship management". Does it follow that everyone who uses CRM software is using it to manage relationships with their customers?

Not necessarily. As Microsoft CRM experts in Bristol, we see companies who are using the software lots of different ways.

For some, it could be called just "Customer management"…

To some Microsoft CRM users, their software is used simply to keep a record of interactions with individual customers. In this application, CRM is used as a kind of diary attached to the sales ledger. For many smaller and traditional business with a straightforward customer base, that's all that seems to be required.

And for the software, it's not too stretching a requirement. The basic functions are to access and update customer records with each contact, and to be able to create a new record for each new customer acquired.

Even some larger companies that have installed CRM in their IT infrastructure at considerable expense confine themselves to relatively simple functions such as these. They make additional use of functions such as integrating CRM functions with Microsoft Outlook, and backing up their CRM databases, but without doing much more than keeping a log of who's speaking to which customer and what the customer mentions by e-mail, phone or instant messaging.

And for them, it's all about the custom.

Keeping track of sales and logging customer contact is the core reason for using CRM in these instances, as opposed to more complex relationship management as deployed by those organisations with less commercial goals.

There's another tier of what CRM software can do for companies such as these, and the more profit-driven the enterprise, the more keen it might be to explore the possibilities.

A good example is using CRM to identify sales opportunities. Since you'll be aggregating a lot of customer data, the considerable analytical power of Microsoft Dynamics CRM can be used for sales forecasting and trend analysis. Combine this with the capability of scheduling and prompting marketing activity and dedicated contact with the customer, and you have a dynamic means of identifying opportunities for customer growth. 

But for other CRM users, it's not necessarily about the custom at all. Read part 2…