The benefits of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) suite go beyond being able to serve customers better and increase customer delight. A CRM is a powerful catalyst that can actually transform the organization. It is an organizational development (OD) tool in the sense that it helps people reduce their stress levels considerably, makes available more time for people to undertake more meaningful tasks, and also improve interpersonal relationships. Don’t believe us? Read on!
Reduces Stress Levels:
People scurrying around for information are typical of any organization. Very often, the time-pressure to meet deadlines, people staying back late to complete the task, or people taking work home can all be traced to a single source – inability to access or source the required information. A CRM would collate all information in a centralized source and deliver automated custom reports, as and when required. A report for next day’s presentation before the board – which would normally have taken up a night’s work of collating information from various POS units, and the e-commerce portals, and preparing an Excel Sheet, would now be available at a single click of the button, in under a minute, and in the required format.
When a customer comes calling, most executives tense up, trying to remember when the customer came last and what were the commitments made to him. With a CRM at his fingertips, the executive can relax, and calmly press a button to recollect everything related to the customer – his interactions, his last visit, previous purchases, outstanding issues, and even whether he prefers coffee or tea!
Needless to say, the CRM engine makes woks considerably easy, allows people to have better control of their time and lives, to stick to their working hours, and have a better work life balance.
Frees Up Time:
A CRM automates much of the routine tasks, such as scheduling and dispatching standard emails, welcome messages, and reminder emails. Its ability to generate custom reports in different formats, with various permutations and combinations saves hassles. It is also a powerful time manager, offering timely reminders to scheduled tasks, meetings and tasks automatically, making communications easy. All these frees up the executive’s valuable time from petty tasks, allowing them to focus on their core competence – what really matters.
Improves Interpersonal Relationships:
A CRM indirectly helps in fostering a positive climate in the workplace. Imagine a situation where the marketing executive is constantly breathing down a front line manager’s neck for information? Or waiting for a colleague to come back from vacation to access the information he has? A C RM engine makes available the required information automatically, doing away with situations that can bring rancor.
It need not even come to that. If the benefits of the CRM implementation, in terms of better time management by offering short-cuts to otherwise tedious tasks, better customer relationships leading to better sales and by extension better bonus, are properly communicated to the rank and file, implementation of the CRM can itself become a boost to productivity and morale in the team.
When positioned the right way, CRM goes much beyond a customer relationship management tool. Want to know more?
Image Credit: Guilherme Oliveira on Flickr
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