What can CRM bring to an organisation?

A White Paper study of the benefits offered by CRM across all areas of the business
April 2011
Author: Computing Sponsored by Sage

Customer Relationship Management Systems (CRM) has always played a beneficial part in regards to sales and marketing for any organisation. It can be defined as a way to “unite the potential of relationship marketing strategies and IT to create profitable, long-term relationships with customers and other key stakeholders” (Payne and Frow, 2005 cited in Wang, Dugan, and Sojka, 2013)

However, this white paper has highlighted that CRM systems can be used to also deliver other benefits not just sales & Marketing such as communication and interdepartmental processes being improved, data and work duplication being reduced and a transparent workflow for easy trace-ability throughout. Also over the years, due to demand CRM has evolved as new version are now being deployed via cloud and even pushed through mobile phone which enable easy access to it whenever required thereby making Information to be centralized, leading to easier and more accurate business decision making.

Below are list of CRM systems benefits in percentage in terms of most beneficial based on survey conducted by Sage (2011) with organisation using CRM system:

• Better customer service and retention due to better information availability (53%)
• Better targeting of marketing activity (43%)
• Improved cross-selling opportunities (35%)
• Improved post-sales support (31%)
• Faster deal closing due to better information availability (29%)
• Less duplication and time wasting across the board (59%)
• Improved communication between teams such as sales and finance (45%)
• Improved order tracking and management (39%)
• Better pipeline tracking leading to better prediction of manufacturing and production requirements (31%)
• More efficient purchasing due to better forecasting (13%)
• Better quality of information available for strategic management decision making (67%)
• Better forecasting leading to better cash flow/business decisions (34%)

Although there are quite a lot of benefits in the implementation of CRM System, there are also barriers that can arise from its implementation. This is also highlighted by Sage (2011)  using percentage in terms of the most barrier experienced based on survey conducted with organisations already implementing CRM system as shown below:

• Customisation concerns (33%)
• Budget constraints (49%)
• Lack of time available for implementation (29%)
• No perceived need at board level (25%)
• Staff training issues (21%)
• Database issues (10%)
• Disaster recovery concerns (6%)

In conclusion CRM systems do provide vast benefits for organisations as elaborated above but in order to achieve this effectively, it all depends on the selection of the best CRM systems suited to an organisation specific business needs. As various CRM systems have their pros and cons in satisfying any company specific requirements. Also when using any external consulting firm in CRM systems implementation, selecting the right firm during the initial inception phase contributes highly to it successfully implementation.

References

Computing, Sage (2011) what can CRM bring to your business? White Paper 2011. [Online] A study of the benefits offered by CRM across all areas of the business. Available from: http://www.sage.co.uk/documents/whitepapers/white-paper-what-can-crm-bring-your-business.pdf [Accessed 05 March 2015].

Wang, X., Dugan, R. and Sojka, J. (2013). CRM Systems with Social Networking Capabilities: The Value of Incorporating a CRM 2.0 System in Sales/Marketing Education. Marketing Education Review, 23(3), pp.241-250.