Why You Need CRM Software For Retail Industries

Foundation of any business is an idea that can solve a problem, identify a latent demand / need that can generate wealth for the problem solver. However, that’s not all. No business can run for long if you just focus on the revenue aspect and ignore the source of that revenue, which is the customer. Your customers judge the product / service, weigh it against the other similar products/services offered by the competitors. Customer Relationship Management plays a very crucial role if a business is focussing on building its brand by leaving a lasting impression on the customer’s mind. A Customer Relationship Management software tool can be a great help for managing the ever increasing number of clients/customers.

How CRM makes retailing business smooth and hassle-free

Attracting buyer and make them buy from you again and again is not an easy task, especially when the competition as well distractions are ample. The technique of Spray-and-Pray just doesn’t work anymore. Business grows and so does its woes if these are not addressed in a planned manner. Only tools like software for Customer Relationship Management for Retail Industry can let you plan every important aspect of business making it as customer-centric as possible.

Various features and functionalities are needed to achieve that, requirement of which can vary from business to business. So buying CRM tools with the features you need is of prime concern else you might end up paying for the features you are never going to use.

Features of CRM tools:

Lead management: Collecting data of prospects that have potential to generate long-term business is an important aspect of any marketing, branding and sales. Follow-up calls, reminder emails and newsletters to keep the high quality leads from forgetting your brand.

Process automation: Several types of automation within the CRM address different issues, each one of them equally important. From marketing activities to data collection and analysis, from Campaign management to workflow optimization and several other repetitive tasks could be automated through such tools. Manually, that can take considerable time and efforts.

Cloud-based: Ability to work from any location and any device makes it easy for the owners to manage things with any second thought. Everything that they might need is often right in their pocket / hand. Working was never so convenient with a well-designed CRM software tool. Developing retail CRM for mobile platforms is an important aspect of this feature though. Only then, the benefit of being on cloud can truly be enjoyed.

Communication: Interaction between two people is of great relevance if you are looking towards building a relationship; this gets even more crucial and interesting to a certain degree when the person on the other side is your present or potential customer. Your CRM works hard to find ways and methods to lure your audience to your business, keep the connection alive and urge you to maintain a relevant dialogue that’s useful to your customer. Email Marketing, Social Media Integration, Chat Integration, Email Client Integration, Reporting and many others are some of the ways to ace the communication.

File sync, storage and sharing: When a sales opportunity presents itself, many files are about to be created, managed, shared, worked on, edited, curate and what not. It is obvious to expect the CRM tools to makes it easy for the users to perform tasks on the files such as mentioned above. After all converting a lead into a sales and then getting repeat sales from the client is not a small feat, a feat that required many files in between.

Sales Forecast and performance: Depending on the existing data of customers and clients collected over the years, a CRM must be able to come up with sales projections in the coming weeks, months and years. Often the projections are realistic, urging you to do better when rest of the variables remain the same, also giving your sales team a much needed push in the next financial year.

What CRM software can do for such a business

Marketers can hope to achieve great tasks provided that the tool is in expert hands. What exactly they can expect from the tool to deliver:

• Alignment of Sales and marketing efforts: Unlike before, sales and marketing efforts today cannot be segregated and both function exceptionally when in sync with the other. Various data collection and analytics tools, dashboard, lead scoring, and other CRM features are used simultaneously by both the departments. Working closely on all the aspect of lead generation to post-service sales, the company can leverage the benefits of this alignment.

• Better customer service: Well, when the competition in the retail industry is so great, one cannot afford to lose a hard-earned client. But things can go out of hand spiralling if you do not control every aspect of customer service. A single incident of bad service, ignoring customer feedback or message can the business its clients which can also take form of bad word-of-mouth. CRM for retail industry centralises the functions, and a dedicated employee can take care of all the communication on that front. Customer Service Automation does the trick.

• Building brand loyalty: Reward points are just one of the many aspects of building a long-term relationship with the customers. Many efforts are needed to be taken to ensure that once earned, the client becomes very possessive of the brand and eats, sleeps and drinks only your brand when it comes to product / service manufactured / delivered by you.

• Big data analytics: Any tool is worth its value in gold for the data collection, analysis and projection. A CRM tool should be able to do this effortlessly.

Advantages of having customised CRM for online retailing

• Customer segmentation: Who doesn’t like some splash of personalised data? Learning about your target audience (what they like, dislike and uninterested in) and then providing the personalised solution wherever possible is like a dream come true for any customer, a dream rarely achieved. However, Customer relationship management software tool can assist the businesses in making dreams a fulfilled reality. This single step can be change the course of marketing and sales, thus revenue in online mode of business.

• Access to most relevant information: All kinds of data get collected but we need only those that can polish the sales performance of the company. For example, a CRM tool allows sending soft reminders to the people who abandoned their cart or some reason. The revenue thus does take a soft nudge-up, without really adding any extra efforts.

• Effective use of time: Many times employees wonder if they could free up some more time by delegating comparatively less important task and using that time to do that needs extra attention. The CRM tool can assist you with just that. You can spend more time in active selling rather than performing task that could be automated through CRM tool.

• Centralised social media interactions: Retailing especially that which is online in nature can benefit immensely with the social media interactions. However, it could be tiresome to login every social media platform separately and then post. A CRM for retail industry lets you login in all the social media platforms from one place and post simultaneously, saving a lot of time and efforts from your end.

• Payment data: Apart from just billing and invoicing, you can do more with the data collected from the payment trends. You can make a note of repeat customers with their favoured mode of payment. You can also integrate your CRM with the payment gateway if you like. You could get even finer data this way which could be used to customise your services even more.

• Order management: From receiving an order to its completion, the process is multi-tiered. A slack at any step can ruin the whole process and its timely delivery, which necessitates tracking. Tracking allows uninterrupted order movement, step-by-step which actually began from lead generation. It also opens up scope to implement certain changes to expedite the process. Taking customer feedback can help improve the process by including valuable nuggets of advices that have the power to convert them into brand ambassadors and brand loyalists.

We hope to have conveyed every valuable aspect with respect to the need of developing mobile CRM for retail business. Feel free to contact us, if you need to build and create CRM to manage your clients, customers and employees for efficiently, effectively and also improve business experience.