Porters Five Forces Analysis of the Airlines Industry in the United States
Five Forces Analysis Porter’s Five Forces analysis is a useful methodology and a tool to analyze the external environment in which any industry operates. The key aspect about using Porter’s Five Forces for the airline industry in the United States is that the airline industry has been buffeted by strong headwinds from a host of […]
The Power and Perils of Influencers in a Social Media Driven World
What Makes Influencers So Powerful in our Social Media Driven World? We live in a world where social media has become indispensable and where content goes viral within no time if it engages the readers. Indeed, our lives are so dominated by Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter that we just cannot imagine a day where we […]
Overfished Ocean Strategy: How to Drive Growth and Attain Profitability
To say that we are facing a resource crunch seems obvious to anyone who is remotely tuned into the present day global economy. However, instead of beating one’s hearts and lamenting the looming resource crunch does not solve any of our problems. Instead, the solution lies in innovating, moving beyond vertical integration and into non-linear […]
Getting Ready to Start Your MLM Business
Being young and with a growing family means having a ‘Wish List’ that is quite long. You have your dreams and the other’s in the family have theirs too. So when an opportunity to earn extra money besides your current income through your profession is certainly going look like a God sent opportunity. If you […]
Roles and Responsibilities of a Sales Manager
A sales manager plays a key role in the success and failure of an organization. He/She is the one who plays a pivotal role in achieving the sales targets and eventually generates revenue for the organization. A sales manager must be very clear about his role in the organization. He/She should know what is supposed […]
There are many benefits of CRM or Customer Relationship Management software. They include automation of the upstream and the downstream sales and marketing processes.
Further, by implementing a CRM solution, businesses can integrate their routine and administrative tasks associated with cold calling, customer management, and pre-sales as well as after sales follow up by ensuring that the CRM software takes care of these aspects.
In other words, businesses can benefit from the linking of sales and marketing activities, which would considerably reduce the amount of manual labor and manual processes needed otherwise. Moreover, businesses can invest in an ERP or Enterprise Resource Planning system which when integrated with the CRM software can lead to synergies and efficiencies from the various disparate organizational processes that are now linked together.
Apart from this, CRM solutions also add value by business intelligence and data mining of the customer database that is also known as data warehousing. All these are the usual benefits of implementing a CRM solution. There are some challenges with CRM implementations, as we shall discuss subsequently.
It would suffice to state here that by implementing a CRM solution, the integration and automation would definitely lead to better efficiencies, increased productivity, and synergies between the various processes.
The challenges associated with a CRM solution include the need to invest significant amount of money in the process. As the CRM solutions do not come cheap, businesses must make the required investments and be prepared to wait and let the benefits actualize instead of being impatient and demanding instant solutions.
The point here is that CRM implementations are usually long drawn affairs, which means that the commitment from the businesses must be deep and meaningful.
Further, there is the slip between the cup and the lip as far as CRM implementations are concerned. These relate to the lack of coordination between the businesses and the vendors that usually result in the requirements being not met because the vendors did not understand the requirements properly and the businesses were pressurizing the vendors for faster implementations and quicker results.
Apart from these challenges, the users need to be trained properly and this is an aspect that does not receive the attention it deserves. This is because of the fact that unless the users are trained in using the CRM software, there are likely to be mismatches between the user expectations and the reality of the implementation.
We have discussed the benefits and the challenges associated with CRM implementation. If we look at the future evolution of the CRM solutions and the future trends, we find that in the future, CRM would be web based and analytics driven.
In other words, this means that CRM would be used along with Data Analytics and the emerging trend of Big Data that are the future drivers for CRM.
Further, social media would need to be integrated with the CRM solutions so that users can have the benefit of web 2.0 being integrated into the CRM solutions.
Apart from this, the emerging trend of eCRM or the electronic commerce based CRM would mean that EDI or Electronic Data Interchange would be the transmission mechanism through which the CRM solutions will be implemented.
Moreover, the days of standalone CRM solutions are over and the future would belong to CRM solutions being an integral part of the overall organizational automation and process integration. This would mean that CRM would not be an isolated solution but would be part of the holistic approach towards integration of the entire organizational activities.
Finally, the benefits, challenges, and the future of CRM that were discussed in this article point to the fact that in the future, success in implementing CRM solutions would depend on the extent of top leadership vision and commitment as the realization of the requirements and the translation into actionable implementations would need the support of all stakeholders.
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