How to Select Best Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software[Review]

Ritesh Warke

CRM stands for Customer Ralationship Management, it deals with helping an enterprise in managing customer relationships in a well organized way. It is something like an enterprise that builds a database about all the entities related to their firm describing clear relationships among them. This sounds a messy task to implement but can be easily implemented by using any of the customer relationship management software available over the web. 

                             

             

Importance of Customer Relationship Management in an Enterprise:

1. CRM Helps the marketing department of an enterprise to get best targeted customer, effectively manage marketing campaigns and convert some quality leads for the sales department. 
2. It facilitates an enterprise to improve the performance of sales department by sharing information among different entities of an enterprise and improving the existing sales process (for example, creating mobile application to get order through mobile phones). 
3. It provides one to one relationship between individual customers and support team thus improves customer satisfaction and helps in maximizing net profit. Using CRM facilitates an enterprise to manage vast amount of customers without compromising with customer support service. 
4. CRM provides the employees of an enterprise a complete set of information regarding each and every customer; this helps employees to identify and understand customer needs and provide best services to them. 
5. CRM allows an enterprise to build strong relationships between the company, its customer base, and various distribution partners. 

Things to remember while selecting a CRM System:

Here I have compiled some important aspects on which you should focus while selecting a CRM system.

CRM ROI

Implementing CRM for your enterprise is a complex and costly venture as it completely depends upon the type of implementation and the size of organization.

Thus a CRM system you select must have following features:

• It should provide measurable and tangible ROI. 
• It should be able to calculate the real business benefits. 
• It should be able to manage budget effectively and should be able to get work done with minimum availability of resources. 

Ease of Use

• A CRM system should be able to simplify customer relationship and various business processes. 
• It should provide a user-friendly interface. 
• It should allow CRM navigation without making any major changes in system. 

Simplified Workflow

A good CRM system should be able to perform various tasks smoothly with a crystal clear and simplified workflow

• It should be easy to adapt for users. 
• It should provide simplified workflow logic. 

Eazy Customization

                      

Easy customization is the key feature of any CRM system.

• CRM system we select must be flexible and should allow to change its default setup. 
• It should completely get integrated with the existing business processes of an organization. 
• It should always allow to rollback any changes done in the system in past. Also it should be able to rollback the system to the default CRM setup without compromising the quality of service. 

Easy Integration

The CRM system you select should be easy to implement with your business process.

• It should provide fast implementation even for custom integration.
• It should provide a crystal clear well-defined integration architecture.
• It should allow enabling the cross-application business process. 

Last but not least – Support

The CRM system you select must have support system (or documentation) to help you in your implementation process and even to deal with the consequences that may arise after implementation. 

•  It should have complete reference documentation for amateur users. 
• It should have online and telephone support. 
• The CRM system you select must have regularly updated official blog to share news, notes and tutorials regarding it.

I hope these tips will help you to select the best Customer relationship management system for your enterprise.Good Luck :)

Here is a great review of Zoho CRM system, have a look.