Even if you are a small one-person company and have a very small budget for CRM, there’s no excuse for overlooking CRM entirely. Establishing good customer service is exactly what will turn your small company into a larger company. Happy customers simply mean more referrals, more business, and a larger profit. No business can afford to overlook CRM.
Luckily, you don’t have to spend a lot of money in order to develop a good CRM strategy for your business. Many CRM technologies can be expensive. And many companies underestimates the costs of CRM products and services by 40% to 75% according to the Gartner Group, leading to sticker shock. In many cases, implementing a CRM strategy requires labor, training, consulting costs, and technology through according to some studies, CRM costs can run $10,000 per user in a company. However, it does not have to be that expensive. There are several things you can do to bring down your CRM costs will still providing superlative customer service:
1) Organize your customer data. The most important part of any CRM plan is to understand who your customers are and be able to reach those customers easily. The easiest way to do this is by consolidating your databases, updating them, and ensuring that any missing links or any redundant files are corrected. There are many inexpensive solutions for doing this, including Relenta CRM, which offers a powerful way to not only organize your customer data but also link it to customer e-mails and company departments.
2) Have a simple way to add customer information. Customer data changes frequently, and sometimes one member of your staff will be privy to information about a customer that other staff members are not privy to. Make sure that your team members understand which information is important to collect from customers, and have a central way of adding new customer information as it comes up. Relenta CRM is a simple system for ensuring that information is added quickly and simply. Anyone who is part of a specific department can add contact information and can alter information related to a specific customer. Everyone then is privy to this new information, so that customers do not have a frustrating experience of having to change their phone number several times with various company representatives.
3) Don’t assume that personalized is better. A very flexible system that allows you to customize the system yourself is often not only more effective than a customized strategy, it is also far less expensive. Relenta CRM costs a fraction of the cost of most CRM systems purchased from vendors who wish to specialize your system to your company, but Relenta CRM is just as powerful as many of these top-notch programs. Relenta CRM allows you to combine five different software programs for one complete CRM solution, and allows you to customize the system so that it can really grow with your company.
