CRM software stands for Customer Relationship Management software. CRM software has become critical for small and large businesses. CRM is imminent for E-commerce businesses because it makes a huge difference in ROI and revenue generation. The Retail CRM software is a specialized CRM designed and developed for Retail Businesses to maximize customer experience and effective management of customer relationships.

Buying CRM software will take you halfway across. To complete the journey, you need to have a clear strategy, plans, and execution. A combination of CRM with business strategy will generate leads to convert into sales and give the best customer experience.

You will need a clear strategy to take the soft skills of the customer service teams to take it to the winner’s pedestal.

First, it is important to understand what CRM strategy is and what it means for your business.

What is CRM strategy?

A CRM strategy is a companywide plan for your business to grow overall, increase revenues and profit, reduce costs, and enhance customer relationships. Today, most businesses use CRM technology along with various marketing strategies and customer support models.

CRM strategy is to be aligned with business goals. It is about putting your customers first. It is effective management of customers’ relationship with the business and streamlines the customer interaction process for better customer customization and customer experience.

What CRM tool does for your business?

Businesses are implementing CRM systems, but that does not mean the business will become successful just because it has integrated CRM within its systems.

CRM is a business tool and not a hundred percent guarantee of success. A business becomes a success when the CRM tool is used and assimilated with the business strategy. Then it shall result in the growth of any business.

The CRM tool is helpful for businesses to organize the data that has been collected into simple and user-friendly. It provides a recognisable data face and helps communicate with customers, leading to growth in a scalable manner.

This includes many important functions that are way beyond storing contact information:

• Logging of representative touchpoints with the prospective leads via calls, in-person, emails, SMS, and voicemail interactions
• Tracking the stages of deals
• To help sales reps, marketing agents, and customer care agents to increase their productivity
• Lead generation: find new prospective customers to generate more business
• Provide insights to help representatives to support their work
• Helps to make data-driven decisions

The CRM tool is used to manage customer service relationships through the customer lifecycle. The CRM tool helps in spanning marketing, increasing sales, better customer service, and improving digital commerce interactions.

The CRM tool is a key to unlocking the potential of your business to seek an increase in profit by better customer relationship management.

Role of Retail CRM in Retail Business:

In the retail business, you have to deal with the customers directly. Therefore, it is imminent to manage customer approach and every detail so that you have more buyers and loyal customers.

Customer History:

CRM stores all the information regarding customers such as profile, business cards, last purchase, and so on. The profile and history of customers help you personalize the shopping experience; you know their needs better and offer a better customer experience.

Segmenting:

Retail CRM collected information helps to put customers into different categories. You can 

serve customers as per the categories of a segment of your markets. Examples are light purchase customers, long-term customers, new buyers, youngsters, family, etc. Segmentation helps marketers plan a better marketing strategy to suit the customers.

Tracking:

CRM software provides features to keep track of customers individually. It helps to know what stage the customer is in the customer lifecycle. You can provide better service and offer rewards to your loyal customers. This will ensure loyalty. Also, it gets more buyers indirectly.

Promotions:

Promotions help to target audiences who like good deals. You can provide better service, and when the buyer visits the website, you can offer promotions, discounts, and deals. Also, you can send newsletters with offers on products they look at on your website. It helps in cross-selling and upselling.

Purchase Tracking:

Purchase tracking allows individual purchase tracking to enable you to know interest and product and service they bought, had any issue or damage. It enables you to give better service to provide better customer satisfaction.

Loyalty:

Customer Loyalty means a lot to every business. A loyal customer will make repeat purchases but also will be one more channel to market your product: loyal customer reviews and testimonials, user-generated content, and mouth-to-mouth marketing-generated amazing sales. CRM helps businesses identify these loyal customers and ensure that sales reps, customer support staff, etc., can cater to these loyal customers with the best of products and services. Loyalty can be increased with bonuses, rewards, and points.

Cost-Effective:

CRM helps to manage customer relationships cost-effectively. It helps to send bulk SMS, newsletters, and emails through which you can share and update customers regularly about your products and services. Customers are taken care of at the individual level. It makes them feel important and valued. Implementation of CRM is cost-effective and simple, and it helps to increase ROI.

New Buyers: 

CRM helps in the management of customers’ relationships, new and old. But CRM is much more than that. It helps you identify leads or potential buyers and convert them into customers. It guides the sales department from identification to what their wants are and deliver interest to them.

Auro CRM is cloud-based customer relationship management software that helps track customers and manage them individually. Auro CRM categorises leads based on interest level and helps your sales team to focus on them accordingly. The sales team, Marketing, and Customer support all collaborate well and get their updates on how to proceed with work in a day efficiently and effectively with Auro CRM. It is mobile-friendly.

Features of Auro CRM:

• Contact
• Lead Management
• Quotes
• Sales Team collaboration
• Email integration
• Reports and Dashboard
• Insights and Metrics
• Bulk SMS and Email
• Campaign Planning

Leverage CRM strategy 2021 to boost your business:

As you integrate CRM software with your system, it is important to form a CRM strategy. Read further to know how to create and run a CRM strategy for your business. Leverage CRM 2021 strategy to get the most out of CRM tool and ensure the success of implementation.

Run complete Audit:

The first step for CRM strategy is to do a complete audit of the business.

Auditing includes reviewing internal and external processes, studying the market, analyzing competition, and conducting the SWOT analysis- Strength, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats.

For CRM, it is important to conduct a checklist of whether you have all resources required for the implementation of the CRM system, training budget, team to test CRM, and staff to work with CRM.

You need to allow time to create action items, plan to carry out to improve your system, track progress, and communicate to the company.

Outline the Sale Process

Map the customer journey and start with the identification of different pipeline stages that prospective leads will pass through and define the responsibility of the marketing and the sales teams.

Sales pipeline helps to visualize the current business process from first customer interaction through customer acquisition. This process will help you understand how the

CRM software tool will help to optimize the sales funnel.

Define CRM Goals:

Once you know about existing processes and the data you have collected. It is time to know and understand your company’s goals and how you want the CRM system to achieve them.

Set goals ahead of time which is an important part of CRM strategy as it will keep you focus on features that will affect your bottom line and business.

Set SMART Goals:

The CRM team needs to set SMART goals.

• S: specific
• M: Measurable
• A: Achievable
• R: Relevant
• T: Time-bound

Examples of SMART goals are:

• Improve Email Marketing by 25% by the end of year
• Achieve customer satisfaction by 80% by May 1
• Ensure profits increase in the financial year

Use mapped out sales process with the previous strategy to get reasonable KPI’s and company goals.

Leverage Data for productivity improvement:

CRM tools and features help consolidate data of the customers collected from different departments of sales, marketing, and customer service. CRM lets teams of different departments get access to the consolidated data from a single dashboard.

The consolidated data and collaboration of teams will save employees time and increase productivity. The data-driven decisions lead to a production company.

Data availability from a single interface dashboard which is simple to use for all departments, leads to streamlined communication and ensures transparency in work. Because of the CRM system process sales team never double handles data, and customer service people don’t ask the same questions twice.

Personalized Customer Experiences:

CRM system ensures systematic and organized business processes like sales, IT, and marketing. It helps to recognize who your potential customers are and anticipate their needs.

CRM system helps deliver a personalized experience to the customer because of detailed access of customer data and lead data with an easy-to-use dashboard. Personalization improves the customer experience, and this drives revenue and increases customer loyalty.

Cost reduction and Automation:

CRM helps a lot with cost reduction and time-saving with automation. CRM system automated repetitive tasks such as administrative tasks like data entry in the pipeline. An example is the Lead capture form which automatically syncs with the pipeline.

Automating the sales process frees up additional time for the sales reps. As redundant tasks are being taken care of, sales reps can invest more time nurturing leads. More deals ate close and this cost reduction.

Tracking and Managing Campaign Performance

Is CRM successful for your company? How will you know that?

You will need to monitor company performance to ensure CRM solution is helping the team to achieve targets and meet larger goals that you have set with CRM strategy. CRM systems help with that as well. It offers reporting and analytics features built with CRM to track performance.

CRM dashboard has features that help analyze what is doing well and what is not. It further helps to identify opportunities and helps to experiment with new techniques.

Auro CRM improves customer experiences and optimizes the sales process. Auro CRM’s retail CRM enables to discover maximum utility and increase the selling power of the retail network. Using our retail CRM, you improve unit sales, capture better customer information, and deliver an enhanced customer experience.