How Can Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Programs Help a Small Business

In today s highly competitive world, medium and small business groups struggle for survival. As usually established with small capital investments, these organizations usually will not have enough money to tackle the massive advertisement campaigns by their large counterparts. The only solution they got to keep their customers and attract new clients is to enhance customer satisfaction through better customer service. The mouth publicity by the satisfied customers is the best advertising tool that these companies got. Offering some great benefits to good customers and creating new plans for infrequent customers can boost, or at least can maintain, the company turnover.
Today, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has become the most effective tool for all business organizations to enhance their customer satisfaction. Now, there are so many CRM providers and CRM vendors who offer different customized customer relationship management solutions for all business needs. With CRM, you can purchase a standard pre-customized CRM solution, can purchase an open source CRM solution or can hire a hosted or on demand CRM solution. All leads to one destination, more attractive services to reliable customers.
As told earlier, customer relationship management programs enhance the customer-friendly services of a company or organization. These programs do so by automating all proceedings and procedures. All CRM solutions are primarily large customer databases. These systems store all customer information such as customer s name, address, customer contacting method, customer taste, ability to spend money on products, money spending per visit etc. The specific applications built in these systems integrate the stored data on demand to identify good customers and help to create better service plans for them.
CRM software systems are capable of automating each and every thing involved in a small business. The main features of a CRM solution include sales force automation, data tracking, data integration, data migration, account management, contact management, customer service training, opportunity management, product management, custom reporting, lead assignment, lead routing, calendaring, territory management, task management, quota management, sales forecasting, partner tracing, sales analytics, customization analytics, trouble shooting, etc.
With respect to medium and small sized companies, there are two main CRM options as open source CRM and hosted / on-demand CRM. Open source CRM as the name implies are customizable CRM programs. These programs are available in standard formats, which can be customized according to the company needs. But the problem with this CRM solution is your company must have enough technical knowledge to customize the program. Also there are some pre-customized CRM versions available, but they may be costly or may cause problems in some critical situations.
Hosted CRM or on demand CRM is a web-based application provided by an ASP (Application Service Provider), is an example of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service). In this type of CRM solution, all your CRM needs are satisfied by a distant CRM provider. The CRM provider or host will automate all proceedings including data tracking, data migration and data integration. The host will provide the solutions for situations on your demand and will charge a monthly fee for that. Advantages of on demand CRM include reduction in the initial cost essential for installing a CRM system and accessibility from any part of the world at any time. But before signing a contract with any on demand CRM provider, make sure that he uses special data encryption techniques for securing your data. One another thing to be considered is the data integration capacity of the provider.
Today one another alternative, namely open source hosted CRM, which combines the merits of both open source and hosted CRM is becoming rapidly popular. This CRM solution is proven effective in tackling specific situations. For all CRM types, most providers now offer 30 days free trail, making use of these offers can help you to find a good CRM solution for your company.
About the Author
This article has been published by eSalesTrack.com, a US based providers of on-demand CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and other application software such as Sales Force Automation. To learn more about CRM visit CRM Articles.



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