CRM(Customer Relationship Management)

Customer relationship management (CRM) is all about managing the relationships you have with your customers. CRM combines business processes, people, and technology to achieve this single goal: getting and keeping customers. It's an overall strategy to help you learn more about their behavior so you can develop stronger, lasting relationships that will benefit both of you. It’s very hard to run a successful business without a strong focus on CRM, as well as adding elements of social media and making the transition to a social enterprise to connect with customers in new ways.

Successful CRM involves many different areas of your company, starting with sales and extending to other customer-facing areas like marketing and customer service. Salesforce.com offers a technology solution for all those areas… and more. With Salesforce and our Force.com cloud computing platform, you can mind your customers and your budget at the same time. Get up and running in 30 days with the world’s most proven CRM solution.        

Why CRM Software?

Any well-developed business marketing class will teach you that businesses grow and succeed based on their relationship with their customers. Satisfied customers will be repeat customers and happy customers will refer new customers, so it's paramount for any thriving business to keep their customers happy. A key component of managing customer relationships is having the right Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. CRM software has been designed to help businesses benefit from their customer relationships.

Through CRM software you have the ability to track each customer with an individual file. The file documents any orders they have placed as well as interaction they have had with members of your team. As your employees quickly recall a client's orders or favorite products, they can produce an up-sell by offering additional products that fit the customer's shopping habits. Also, in each individual file the software will track emails, phone calls, face-to-face meetings, faxes and other forms of communication used by your company. Employees can take notes to highlight what the customer said and refer to those notes in the future. By helping customers know that you recognize them personally, you can maintain strong relationships and devoted customers. Through strengthening clientele that you already have the best customer relationship management software will help you discover new clients through referrals from your satisfied customers.

CRM Software: What to Look For

When selecting CRM software, you want to find the perfect fit for you and your company. CRM software comes with many features and tools as noted in our side by side comparison. For more in-depth information on each option we invite you to read the individual reviews on competitors such as Salesforce, Oncontact and Sage ACT! where we compare the best CRM software. Also, find additional articles on CRM software in our Learning Center.

Features
Under this criterion, we measure the software on its feature set, how well it integrates with other applications (like Outlook, Gmail, iCal, Salesforce, etc) and how accessible the information is. The feature set covers everything from calendar alerts and to-do lists to mobile access and remote synchronization capabilities.
While most of the leading CRM software products offer similar feature sets, you’ll find unique tools in each application, so take a deeper look into our comparison of the best CRM software to find the CRM software that meets your business’s needs.

Contact Information

In this category, we rank each software package on its ability to store specific information for each contact. In the fast-paced business world, you need to be able to access your customer’s information quickly. In addition to addresses and phone numbers, some CRM software choices will let you save maps, company websites, social media pages and relations to other contacts.

Sales & Marketing

The sales and marketing tools that CRM software provides are designed to help you maintain current clients and gain new ones. Some of the tools that we rank the applications on are automated email campaigns, real-time alerts, campaign tracking, reports and office integration with Excel and Word. Through the sales and marketing tools you can find out which of your campaigns have a positive ROI and which ones aren’t performing.

Ease of Use

Rankings for each product’s ease of use come from the design of the application. While we recognize that different designs appeal to a variety of users, we tried to rank the applications on our own experience as well as a body of user reviews. Clean, quick navigation and easy-to-locate icons were some of the top features we looked for when determining usability.

Help & Support

Rankings from the Help & Support section are based on the support that each CRM softwaremanufacturer provides for their products. We take into account the resources they provide for their users and the response time for their customer support team.