The channels businesses use to communicate with customers have changed over time. Early business practices relied on face-to-face interactions and written communications. Modern businesses enclose added electronic communications to the mix, including telephone, email, live chat, and social media.
As the number of contact points has increased, the challenge of aggregating and organizing that data has also increased. The details and purchase history of a single customer may now be spread among numerous channels and multiple employees. While the challenge of managing that data has grown, the importance of maintaining access to it has remained constant.
While the term CRM didn’t become an industry standard until the 1990s, the concept of a CRM is as old as business itself. The up-to-the-minute CRM is a digital version of a Rolodex a technological leap over the pen-and-paper customer records of decades past.
A CRM has benefits for multiple business sectors. It has a significant role in lead management and sales, which makes it valuable for selling teams and sales staff. Both can use the CRM data to keep track of clients and potential clients, learning when and how to deliver messages to each.
However, CRM support for customer service has a primary role because customer service blends marketing, sales, support, and retention pains. In particular, CRMs have proven themselves to be highly valuable in addressing five key issues many customer service centers face:
For businesses in which customer support services are vital, a CRM can push and pull data from multiple areas of the business to reorganize communication within an organization and make client interactions more effective.
A CRM can also lead to more data, better quality data, and increased access to data by relevant team members. Customer service managers monitoring and reviewing metrics from a CRM can exercise those figures to implement data-driven solutions that improve the performance of customer service departments.