In the past, when customers were only aware of a product’s name, the success or failure of customer relationship management was merely a 50/50 affair. However, in the present state, where customers are more informed than ever before, their experience ultimately determines if they would stick to a brand or not.
So, as a business practitioner, you need to evaluate various CRMs critically. Analyze their efficacy and price, before ultimately making up your mind on which to use.
Thankfully, this article helps you in that quest, as it comprehensively discusses the concept of affordable CRM. It also informs you on why you need it, as well as the benefits it can provide your business. Without further ado, let’s delve right into it!
What is CRM?
Customer relationship management (CRM), is a technology for managing your business’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. The goal of every simple and affordable CRM is to improve business relationships to grow your business. Also, CRM systems help businesses streamline processes, and improve profitability.
Additionally, CRM tools and apps can now be used to manage customer relationships across the entire customer lifecycle. It spans marketing, sales, digital commerce, and customer service interactions.
Having understood what CRM is, let’s discuss why you may need it.
Why Should You Consider an Affordable CRM in the First Place?
As you may know, Customer relationship management software helps businesses handle various operational challenges. But below are the two major reasons you should consider using a CRM.
- You Must Track Events and Tasks
A calendar is one of the most crucial things in a business environment. Your overall business strategy and efficacy greatly depend on how well you schedule and follow up on events.
With a stable and affordable CRM, you can be sure to achieve that goal, as it will grant insight into your tasks.
- Align and Organize Your Business
Although you may have already integrated task management or a calendar system, you may still miss the big picture regarding the business organization.Why? Because each of these systems works unassisted, and more often than not, they end up Misaligned.
A good CRM software integrates these functions into a system, for easy access, maintenance, and management.
This said, let’s examine the benefits of leveraging CRM into your business in the next session.
Top 4 Benefits of Affordable CRMs for Small Businesses
Considering the fact that it’s been proven to boost revenue and increase customer retention, CRM inarguably makes a huge difference between losing and keeping customers. Some of the benefits include:
- Connect Your Business Silos
56% of business leaders admit that organizational silos have a negative impact on customers’ and prospects’ experience quality.
Although information silos are a huge problem, a shared platform and process for managing customer relationships across functions can help.
With a shared and affordable CRM, employees are empowered with the right tools and data to manage customer relationships effectively across business lines.
Also, they have visibility into customer interactions from other departments. Furthermore, they can more effectively and efficiently work together to enable connected customer experiences.
- Increase Customer Lifetime Value
By defining and understanding your customers, cross-selling and upselling opportunities become clear. Thus, giving you the chance to win new business from existing customers.
Also, it helps you to develop a strong bond and more profitable relationships with your customers.
In addition, you’ll also be able to keep your customers happy with better service. As you may know, happy customers are likely to become repeat customers, and repeat customers spend more.
- Identify and Categorize Leads
An affordable CRM system helps you identify and add new leads easily, and categorize them accurately.
So by focusing on the right leads, sales can prioritize the opportunities, and marketing can identify leads that need more nurturing and prime them to become quality leads.
Additionally, with complete, accurate, and centrally held information about clients and prospects, sales and marketing can focus their attention on the right clients.
- Offer Better Customer Support
Today’s customers expect fast and personalized support, at any interval. With an effective CRM system, you can easily provide the high-quality service that customers want.
Also, your agents can quickly see what products customers have ordered and can get a record of every interaction, so they can give customers the answers they need, abruptly.
Top 4 Factors to Consider Before Selecting the Best Affordable CRMs
Below are some of the crucial factors to consider before selecting your affordable crms.
- Scalability
While we acknowledge the benefits of CRM in business, it’s easy to forget that it must also grow along with your enterprise. The best CRM for businesses, even if it’s a startup, must be able to address new goals and concerns as they develop.
After all, you wouldn’t want to spend resources and time implementing a CRM solution, only to upgrade once your business begins expanding.
- Multi-platform Support
Since the standard workplace heavily relies on desktop computers, CRM systems are optimized for PCs.
However, with the recent increase in tablet and smartphone use, it has become a necessity for both small and large businesses to adopt CRM software that supports multi-platforms.
- Usability
Already, there are various complex business applications out there. So, good CRM software must have a user-friendly interface that’s easy to understand, even by someone with basic computer skills.
- Cost
Although cost is undoubtedly an essential factor, it shouldn’t be evaluated separately.
Instead, assess costs according to the functionalities of a CRM system, and the subsequent predicted ROI.
Otherwise, you’ll end up with a crude solution that introduces new problems, instead of solving former ones.
Conclusion
The best way to determine the most suitable CRM is by reviewing all your business’s needs and matching them up with each of these systems.
Also, you can make full use of the free trial periods as well, just to ensure that you indeed found the right fit.
Hopefully this article has helped you clarify all you need to know about affordable CRM and what to look out for when selecting one.