Customer Relationship Management Software

‘Customer is god’ according to MK Gandhi. From this, we can understand the importance of customer to a business. Repeating of customers leads the business to sustain in the  long run. Customer relationship management (CRM) software provides enables business  to build customer loyalty. If the software is not properly used, it will be a huge waste of money.

Now we will discuss advantages of the CRM Software.

Advantages:

• Better customer service: Customer relationship management software provides the information about the customer. With that the organization can serve better to that customer.

• Customer loyalty: With better service, customer loyalty will increase. Customer loyalty can lead to referrals to new customers.

• Cross sell: Customer information will help to cross sell the products or services. Cross sell means selling product or service to the already existing customer.

• Huge customer database: Can maintain a huge customer database with the required information to further service and contacts.

• It is a useful resource for the sales team.

• Increase revenue earning.

• Easy to make cold calling with the customer information and previous history.

• Call centers can manage very effectively.

• It provides the facility to reduce the time to get new customers. The time can spend for other developmental activities.

• Be a first source to research the customer satisfaction and any of customer based researches.

Disadvantages:
The following are the disadvantages of the customer relationship management software

• Customer relationship software cannot integrate well with the other modules.

• CRM is costly to the company and uses up a lot of resources.

• Because of improper integration, data transfer has to be done manually into the other modules. It will consume more time.

• In fact, the customer relationship management software is mostly helpful to the sales department. Any other department neglects it.

• Employees may resent the software. It is difficult to convince them to change from old to new technologies or changes.

• Adopting new technology or updating needs training employees. The employees may get the fear of unfamiliarity of the new software. And the productivity is decreased.

• Additional work to input all the customer data is essential. It may get irritate to both employee and the customer.

• It is difficult to integrate customer relationship management software with management information systems.

Thus, there are both advantages and disadvantages of customer relationship management software. If it fails, it may not affect business process, but is a wastage of time and money. If it works properly, it can become a plus to the organization with a large size of customer database.