Blog
5 ways CRM helps the small retailer
Arun Upadhyay, CEO of LionOBytes, offers five strategic ways customer relationship management can push your small retail business to the next level.
December 4, 2019
By Arun Upadhyay, CEO, LionOBytes
As a small business owner, you understand the importance of advantages when it comes to serving customers.
These days, we typically look to technology to get the help and leg-up we need. For small to mid-sized enterprises, a customer relationship management (CRM) system or software platform is one technology that offers an abundance of benefits that can not only make work-life simpler, but also transform the entire business.
Generally speaking, a CRM is database of customer interactions that businesses use to help their marketing and sales teams provide streamlined customer service. Many SMEs today still handle customer interactions and data using old-fashioned Excel spreadsheets or filing systems. These methods, while useful for a time, offer little long-term value on scalability, shareability, and customer insights.
A CRM, however, can help your business better understand the needs and concerns of its customers and be more precise and deliberate in nurturing those relationships. Managing customer data, tracking leads, and answering customer feedback requests are some basic functionalities of a CRM.
When looking under the hood of a CRM solution, you'll see that there are far more powerful features that can give your SME the edge it needs to compete and the push it needs to grow.
Improve customer service
How your business handles customer service is a big definer of your brand. Consumers today have come to expect personalized, one-on-one service when dealing with a company. This is especially true for SME customers who often know their proprietors personally. One way to improve customer service this is through a CRM helpdesk ticketing system, which allows internal teams to prioritize customers where managers can assign accounts to team members. It can also organize all tickets and cases to ensure customer issues are resolved promptly and with recorded notes.
Track team efficiency
Because SMEs operate with fewer employees, it's important to know how and if individuals and teams are working efficiently and effectively. Most CRM solutions have an integrated field service management feature. This enables you to know what customers your sales representatives have visited with real-time tracking and check-ins. Field representatives can also access the field service management on their mobile devices and input information about site and customer interactions, ensuring maximum productivity.
Manage inventory
One of the toughest challenges for any product-oriented business is managing inventory. SMEs that have inventory needs but lack internal resources can utilize a CRM to manage purchase orders, customer product orders, and even monitor all inventory in multiple warehouses. With real-time tracking, you can know where products are at all times, from sitting on a shelf in a warehouse to sitting on a truck waiting to be delivered. Additionally, all associated invoicing, billing, and accounting are contained in a single place and connected individual customer accounts. The ability to fulfill product requests is paramount to customer loyalty.
Make better decisions
In today's data-driven world, business dashboards have grabbed a lot of attention. SMEs, just like any other business, have many factors that impact the overall company performance. A business dashboard developed in a CRM presents these factors in easily understood data visualizations. They're designed to provide viewers with insights that have been extrapolated from data collected over time and displayed in charts, graphs, heatmaps and other forms that enable viewers to make informed decisions. Dashboards are also accessible and interactive on any mobile device.
See the whole company picture
While most CRM systems share the features mentioned here, not all are created equal. For example, few CRMs available today also include Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software built into the solution. ERP is a powerful CRM addition that integrates all departments and functions across a business into a single system, while still serving each departments' specific needs. This is important, because it can facilitate communication between teams, reduce redundancies, help predict ripple effects of departmental decisions, and offer a 360-degree view of the company.
While there are literally dozens of additional features and benefits of CRMs, their main overall purpose is to increase company revenue while decreasing costs related to sales.
When properly implemented, they can also be incredibly useful at increasing efficiencies and processes throughout every department. With the proper deployment guidance, a CRM might be the secret weapon your SME needs to move it to the next level.
