Specifically, what is trending with regards to Customer Relationship Management Solutions right now?
Many companies do not seem to recognize the need to maintain equally high standards of service across all channels. The quality of a company's service is only as high as the weakest link in their channel offer and the enterprise needs to uphold the same high standard of service and customer experience in all channels. If one of the channels does not function, the customer will be disappointed. Whether implementing a CRM for the first time or switching to another platform, you’ll need to know who will have access to the CRM and understand how the change may affect your team. Give them a voice in this process and they will be more likely to embrace the new technology. Before CRM systems became commonplace in the 1990s and 2000s, customer data was spread out over office productivity suite documents, email systems, mobile phone data, and even paper notecards and Rolodex entries. Today’s systems consolidate this data and store it in a single location that can be easily accessed, updated, and organized according to business needs. Similarly, the automation capabilities create a more impactful, streamlined customer and prospect experience while also saving time and money. Interactions with your customers can span email conversations, phone calls, and online chats. Your CRM should be able to capture and centralize all communications in one location so that you know the next action to take and never lose important details. The best CRMs make it simple to enter customer data, follow customer interactions across teams, and find the information you need quickly. Most organizations will need to shift towards more sophisticated forms of CRM. Some organizations have already successfully implemented ‘managed service and support’ or ‘customer-based’ marketing. A few, such as the most developed Internet stores, have already adopted advanced forms of individualized relationship marketing. However, many com- panies still need to develop from the position of product-based selling. All the data in the world is useless if you cannot access it. CRMs provide ready visualizations and reports about your customer information. The system lets you see sales and customer trends, provide insight into the sales pipeline, and gives information into the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Potential resource bottlenecks can be identified prior to becoming an issue. Multi-department reports can be easily generated without the need to manually sift through mounds of data.