More than half century ago, before the advent of online marketing, supermarkets or malls, people banked/depended on their neighborhood stores to purchase products. Business owners recognized customers by name and knew preferences and wants based on their past purchase behavior. In turn, customers remained loyal and made repeated purchases because of the relationship they had with the merchant.
After years, when the nation grew, and the population moved to urban areas, consumers became mobile. The relationship between the customer and marketer became faceless and nameless. Resulting which, customers started making choices and choose a supplier who delivered product at the lowest cost and with maximum features.
This gave birth to the CRM, which is evolving out for a variety of businesses and across various industries. The Modern CRM industry has undergone sea leap of changes and shakeup’s and has added electronic communications to the mix, including live chat, email, telephone, and social media.
SAP CRM is one of the largest CRM industry in the world with over
350,000+ customers, supporting over 30 different industries in over 40 different languages, spread across 180 countries.
This article covers how SAP CRM implementation can nurture customer service for your business.
Before which, let’s learn what is CRM and why it is important?
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It is a medium, tool or software that is used to interact with your customers. In short, it brings in a host of capabilities together and stores data of prospects or customers, adds notes, make calls, schedule appointments, create reports, send emails even without stepping out of the system. CRM ensures that every step of interaction between the marketer and consumer goes efficiently which further helps increase the overall profits.
CRM plays a vital role in managing interactions with current & potential customers. It helps build a business relationship and grows productivity with customers that in turn generate royalty and revenue in contact and sales management.
SAP CRM offers customer engagement solutions as:
CRM for Sales: SAP with the help of CRM enables organizations to shorten sales cycles, increases revenue, maximizes team’s productivity and ensures customer loyalty.
CRM for Marketing: SAP CRM marketing adapts marketing plans, budgets, and costs by reviewing the current market research.
CRM for eCommerce: SAP eCommerce CRM allows users to manage, store data to provide personalized digital experience via mobile, social and others.
CRM for Service or integration systems: SAP Service CRM enables businesses to capture and handle service contracts or agreements, warranty, claim management.
As we know, every business is unique, and one size doesn’t fit all. SAP offers unique installations for different organizations based on the client's requirements. It provides 80% of its solutions to small and medium enterprises across industries like E-commerce, utility, healthcare, banking, real estate, Agriculture, Education, Financial Services, Manufacturing and more.
The modern SAP CRM helps businesses from various industries to
- Centralize data on one single platform:
One of the
best features using CRM software is that it helps access information at any time and from any location. SAP CRM helps marketers and salespeople to keep data synchronized and well managed, allowing them to save time and avoid exporting data from one platform to another. It also provides a central documentation location for employees to save data and to grant access to employees across the departments to access the same information. The contact information section will enable users to look up for customer email address, phone numbers, websites, and social media accounts. Communication history tracks through phone calls, email conversations, online chat, and support tickets. Customer history references the purchase history, customer relationships, and the customer experience.
- Sell faster and better:
A database which isn’t accurate or that contains undeliverable records may inevitably hurt the sender reputation. Instead, a clean database will get an excellent inbox placement and eventually leads to faster sales and better revenue. CRM automates and builds a standardized sales process giving the team a step by step roadmap for closing deals and reducing the length of sales cycles. CRM sales process helps improve on sales methodologies, makes training sales reps faster and provides better customer experience.
- Increase business revenue:
SAP’s CRM software popularizes marketing campaign and product promotions in a more effective way. While it increases the income of the company, it ensures product promotions reach new potential prospects and increases customer’s revenue.
Whatever is the size of the business, it’s not a bad thing to focus on new customers, but the fact remains quite expensive as well as time-consuming. On the other hand, existing CRM users who are already enjoying your current service will trust your products on the plate.
- Promote upselling and cross-selling:
While we are aware that Cross Selling and Up Selling is a win-win situation, customers’ needs are met, and profits are increased only if the selling strategies are set right. At times, cross-sold products have more margin than the main sold products, and that is when the CRM comes in. CRM helps to understand the needs of the customers at the specific time and offer opportunities. Upselling is a sales technique, where products are additionally added to the existing or original purchase. For example, Mark, who is buying a cell phone is prompted to buy a cellphone case along with it. Cross-selling is a technique where the salesperson suggests the product or service based on the buyer's history and their preferences.
- Nurture the lead generation process:
Lead Nurturing is a process of tracking leads and successfully converting them into sales-qualified leads. SAP CRM application is one of the essential tools to simplify management business of every size letting you get more deals and sales. An efficient CRM can make a significant impact on any business, and it helps build better and longer relationships with prospects even before they interact with the actual sales team.
- Integrate CRM with ERP, third-party software’s:
While CRM and ERP are similar in many ways, they are entirely different software’s integrated together. CRM is primarily responsible for Front-end systems while being responsible for Marketing, upselling, social media management, community engagement, customer service, and call center. SAP’s ERP, on the other hand, is designed to handle financial data, account information purchase orders, Human resources, procurement, manufacturing, project management, and customer relationship management. SAP CRM also allows 3rd party software’s and other in-house applications to integrate within the CRM software.
Wrap up:
An efficient CRM can undoubtedly make or break a business. With over hundreds of CRM solutions ranging from free to thousands of dollars, SAP CRM goes beyond the functionality. Companies that use SAP CRM are more likely to run an effective marketing campaign, help increase awareness, provide customer insights, and tracks leads & sales.