10 good reasons to choose a CRM
A collaborative CRM is a powerful lever for boosting your growth: here are 10 reasons to use one.
The business world is under constant pressure, and the current economic climate is not helping matters. More than ever, you need to stay competitive and, if possible, keep one step ahead. Process optimisation is a very useful lever for this, and for some years now businesses have been managed through so-called CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solutions, known in French as GRC (Gestion de la Relation Client).
Originally it was mostly a large directory in which sales teams recorded their contacts' details, but with the various modules offered by software publishers, the tool now lets you manage interactions with customers and improve the quality of those exchanges. It also helps you organise and optimise work internally.
1. Better management and centralisation of information within the company
Above all, a CRM centralises and shares information and makes it available to all your staff. Depending on the features offered by your CRM, you can for example follow the history of a prospect, customer or supplier once you have obtained their contact details.
This has several advantages, for example:
• An obvious time saving: no more hunting for a phone number,
• Finding the history of your exchanges in one click: emails, phone calls, quotes, etc.,
• Targeting or segmenting the data collected in this way to build your future actions,
• Getting to know your customer better, and all your contacts in general,
• Your data is stored and secured automatically, with no action on your part,
• Information collected is retained after a member of staff leaves.
• Archiving your contacts according to criteria that match your sales activity and filtering them to organise your sales activity.
CRMs are suited to almost every market and are not confined to particular sectors. Historically, banking, insurance and large retailers were big users of these solutions; today, tradespeople and very small businesses are concerned too.
2. An exceptional productivity gain
Having so much information in a single tool avoids constant re-keying and wasted time, and therefore money (…), but also and above all lets you automate certain tasks. The features on offer let you organise your sales staff's and technicians' days, manage your invoicing, track your stock (…) and provide automation of certain tasks to save you even more time. You can devote yourself to the more essential and strategic aspects of running your business.
3. Better customer loyalty and engagement
All the data concerning your customer is gathered on a single record: the equipment you have sold them, the expiry dates of their service contracts, the decision-maker's direct contact details, the dates of the latest sales visits, the dates of the latest technical jobs (…). Making this information available and using your CRM rationally lets you offer your customers a much more responsive service, more precise in the actions to be taken, more impactful and more professional.
This personalises the relationship with your customer and increases your responsiveness, your customer satisfaction and then your additional sales. And since retaining customers costs less (around 7 times less) than finding new ones, you save money.
With eKo CRM, the features that help you personalise the customer relationship are:
• click to call,
• automatic opening of the record on an incoming call,
• tracking of equipment sold and associated service contracts,
• tracking of technical jobs and automatic upload of job reports,
• invoicing history,
• your teams' smiles.
4. Optimal tracking of sales activity and the sales force
Salespeople and managers, your teams are in the driving seat! And thanks to the sales pipeline and the opportunity tracking it offers, you no longer miss any deals and you turn your leads into sales.
Managing your deals in real time lets salespeople and their managers follow the progress of sales step by step.
In eKo CRM, each deal in the pipeline is linked to the customer and the quote, but also to the family of products or services offered to the customer. This lets you track the progress of deals by salesperson, by signature date, by offer or by revenue…
5. Time saved through task automation
Task automation lets you complete repetitive, time-consuming work in record time. Qualifying prospect records and completing administrative details, sending reminder emails, turning a quote into a delivery note and then an invoice, calculating statistics, archiving a received email, offering electronic signature of your quote… in short, all these actions take just a few clicks in a CRM.
This automation lets you focus on value-adding tasks and lose as little time as possible on routine.
6. Stronger collaboration between your departments
A collaborative CRM supports internal communication within organisations by enabling smooth, instant information sharing and better productivity. This improved internal communication strengthens team cohesion, increases individual and collective performance and, let's say it, also reduces stress!
A prospect contacts your company and asks for a service. Between qualifying their record, booking a pricing appointment, drawing up the quote, scheduling the job, turning the quote into an invoice, recording the payment and transferring the entry to accounting, you will have entered their surname, first name and address only once! And this even though the receptionist, the salesperson, the technician, the administrative assistant and then the accountant will all have handled their file.
7. Controlled sharing of information
Trust does not rule out control, and each of your employees only has access to the data that concerns them. This is partly about keeping sensitive data confidential, day to day and when an employee leaves, but also about complying with the GDPR, the circulation of your contacts' personal data and employees' right to disconnect.
eKo CRM includes rights management that lets your team members work on the same file according to their level of expertise and their permissions, export only the data they are authorised to export, and do so within their normal daily working hours, outside of which any connection to the tool is blocked.
8. CRM and SaaS: a double advantage!
The CRM is a recent tool, so it is logical that it often relies on recent technology…
A CRM available as SaaS (Software as a Service) is software accessed solely via an internet connection. It therefore inherits all the native advantages of SaaS, including:
• 24/7 accessibility from any internet connection,
• Lightweight operational management with no installation, no equipment updates and no backups to manage,
• Unrivalled scalability,
• Secure data stored and backed up in the cloud.
Above all, SaaS meets today's needs for mobile working. The drive for ever bigger and ever faster means there is no more time to wait: the information your customers ask for must reach them as a matter of urgency.
There's no point resisting: you too have long been checking your bank accounts online and going to the counter less and less. That was the beginning of SaaS…
eKo CRM is accessible from any internet connection, any device (computer, tablet, smartphone) and any environment (PC, Mac, Linux, or a mix).
9. CRM: a competitive advantage
By optimising the processing of information within your departments as far as possible, a CRM makes you more efficient and more productive, which is a huge competitive advantage over competitors who are not yet equipped.
It is a cost advantage. Regardless of the price of the service, which is usually much lower than having several pieces of software to manage several tasks, the time it saves your business is measured in hours of work saved.
It is an advantage in terms of what you offer, because the services on offer are often highly innovative and lead towards digitalisation and less use of paper.
10. Increased revenue
Once all these advantages add up, a CRM will have freed up enough time and optimised your departments to such an extent that, to increase your revenue, you can consider expanding your customer base with complete peace of mind and work effectively on your existing customer portfolio to offer them new deals.
