What is CRM?

What is CRM?
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. That sounds quite self-explanatory but what does it really mean in practice?

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It can be described as a business strategy focused on improving relationships with customers throughout their entire life cycle. From first contact and acquisition to developing customer loyalty, problem solving and business relationship termination. The goal of CRM is clear - to build a happy relationship with current customers and to gain new customers efficiently. 

If somebody asks you "How do you do CRM in your company?", you can understand it simply as "What do you do to make your customers happy and loyal?"

CRM is crucial for all companies which put customers first. Satisfied customers have a close relationship with your products and services and they won't leave for your competition. Through elaborate methods, CRM strategy seeks to maintain satisfaction in all stages of the company - customer relationship, for instance through:

  • what impression the brand makes on potential customers,
  • how salesmen address potential customers,
  • how companies care for their customers after they have made their first purchase,
  • how companies keep customer loyalty during further purchases,
  • and last but not least, how companies part ways with their customers.

The CRM area is connected with technologies which help to put CRM strategies into practice - these technologies are called CRM systems or CRM software. So, if we change the original question and you get asked "What CRM do you use?" this time around, they almost certainly mean "What CRM system/software do you use?"

Now that you know what CRM is, it is time to find out what CRM systems can help with.

What is a CRM system good for?

CRM systems are tools which help to cumulate all customer data in one place. Users can work with this data efficiently, use it to do business more successfully and to increase customer satisfaction.

Individual CRM systems can have various aims depending on their specific functions. However, there are three basic purposes that all CRM systems have in common:

1. Providing information

CRM systems provide the maximum amount of useful information to everyone who gets in touch with customers at any stage of a sale. For example, the following information: 

  • history of everything you have undertaken with a particular client, 
  • what problems you have dealt with and with what result 
  • sales volume history for a particular client.

This information can be used, for instance, in:

  • sales departments when meeting and gaining new clients and contacts,
  • customer support to help current clients swiftly,
  • marketing departments to focus campaigns on current clients.

2. Simplifying customer data register

If companies keep a register of customer data, they often keep it scattered in various formats and in various places. For instance, as Excel charts in computers,  various company discs or even printed document files. CRM eliminates the necessity for other options of data storage and makes it possible for companies to keep all data in one place

In CRM, you can find the client database, business activity planner but also tools for business deal management

3. Making work more efficient

CRM can automate and simplify activities of multiple company departments, especially the sales department. It relieves them of the administrative load such as rewriting data or reports, paperwork or manually searching for information so that they can focus on what should be their main workload – doing business. 

At the same time, CRM also makes work easier for managers, the customer support team and the marketing department. 

Now you know what miracles are possible with CRM systems! We will share with you how it all works specifically in RAYNET CRM.

What is RAYNET CRM

RAYNET is very popular CRM system with over six thousand active users. When designing and improving it, we mainly focus on making things simple and intuitive so that it saves time for those working in sales. How does RAYNET manage all of that?

The core of RAYNET revolves around three essential functions – Address book, Business deals and Activities

1. Address book – keep your contacts neat and tidy

The Address book function helps salesmen keep all important information about clients in one place. It creates a powerful contact database, which helps salesmen swiftly search for any contact and add a new record immediately - all this even when they are out of the office via the RAYNET CRM mobile application

For every client, salesmen can view the entire history of everything they have done with that client – meetings, documents, e-mails, complaints or their own notes. Salesmen can just open the address book of a particular client before a meeting and they are up to date. 

2. Business deals – have a perfect overview of your business

In Business deals, salesmen or their managers can see what sales are currently in progress and how successful sales are. Salesmen can study sales results in detail and make estimations of what to expect. They can evaluate what business opportunities they should spend time on and what the chances of success are. 

They can also quickly prepare all documents necessary for customers in RAYNET - offers, orders and calculations can be prepared by a few clicks without any unnecessary paperwork. 

3. Activities – be sure your salesmen don't forget a thing

Activities serve as a smart calendar thanks to which salesmen can keep their head free of too many details. They can enter new business meetings and tasks in it just by dragging data from the Address book or Business deals. It is also possible to connect Activities with the calendar on their mobile phones and share calendars with colleagues

If you are interested in RAYNET CRM, you can find a detailed description of everything it can do here, or you can start a 30-day free trial version (free of any commitments and without needing to enter your credit card information).