The six most important business uses for CRM software

What CRM does for today's successful businesses is just like the role a fuel injector plays in selling cars. It's the sort of function people take for granted and rarely ask about, but it's an integral part of the vehicle's performance. After all, if the engine didn't run smoothly, would anybody care about the colour, styling or boot capacity?

CRM software is a similar under-the-bonnet component that businesses rarely make noise about, and it's easy to see why. On its own, it won't wow your shareholders, it won't make your product look sexier and it won't get you higher Google rankings. But it will help you to delight customers, give your staff extra hours in the week and let you take the pulse of sales. As such, used wisely it'll boost your balance sheet. 

Drawing on our experience supplying Microsoft Dynamics CRM in Bristol, here's how we'd sum up the six most important business uses for CRM software. Some of them are simple. Most of them are obvious. But all of them are vital.

1. Tracking and Sending E-mails

A cornerstone use for Dynamics CRM is to use it to send out e-mails. You can integrate it with your Outlook client and Exchange server, or with your external e-mail service provider. Either way, make your CRM the hub for customer e-mail communications. At a basic level it ties together all those strands of communication (the stray ones of which make coherent account management problem-strewn and time-consuming). At a more advanced level, it can be used to co-ordinate a program of e-mail marketing activity.

2. Capturing Sales Leads

You'd be shocked how many businesses miss sales opportunities altogether by having no dedicated mechanism for responding to sales enquiries. Instead of letting sales leads come in haphazardly and relying on staff to input details into a tracking system, why not integrate your sales enquiry channels (particularly enquiries from online forms) into your Dynamics CRM system to ensure they receive timely follow-up?

3. Identifying Sales Growth opportunities

Again, this is a basic use for Dynamics CRM but it's one of the most important functions - done thoroughly, this can pay for your CRM software investment several times over. It's based on the theory that your best growth opportunities come from an existing customer base. The practice is simple: identify what your current customers are buying, and look for patterns. Do they usually order every 6 weeks? Time your communications around that. Do they order only half the products another similar customer orders? Chances are they buy the others from a competitor; you can address that with a fact-find or tempt them with a tailored offer. Your CRM can dig up the opportunities, which gives you a range of options to respond. What clues are there to other customer itches you can scratch?

4. Providing Management Information

Break down that data from sales opportunity-spotting a bit further, and you can give senior management insight into the broader trends shaping the business - or that could shape it, with a push in the right direction. Want to know the optimal communication frequency that boosts sales growth? What's the average annual order value of a customer in year 1, 2 and beyond? What times of day customers tend to make complaints, or how many times someone will complain before ceasing to re-order? It's all chartable.

5. Running a Customer Loyalty Programme

If you really want to make CRM go far, use it to run a scheme to boost customer loyalty. You can combine it with customer incentives to track and reward those customers that stick with you, grow their volume of business or join in with your marketing promotions. More sophisticated yet, you could combine this with (2) to determine exactly the right time to run a loyalty-based incentive on a per-customer basis.

6. Co-ordinate a Mobile Sales Force

The time when CRM access required a desktop PC running Windows is long gone. Your outbound sales and service teams can access Dynamics CRM with little fuss using laptops, smartphones and other remote devices. Of course, there's also a fully online edition of Dynamics for businesses that would prefer to treat it as an operational cost rather than take on the capital cost of buying the IT infrastructure and software licenses to own the CRM installation.