What Is Customer Management Software, and How Can it Benefit You?

Every business has important data to organize and manage in order to provide the best customer service experience possible. This is where a reliable customer service app or customer relationship management (CRM) software can help you to do business better. The Quickbase no-code platform can be used to build your own customer communication management system, regardless of the type of customer data your company needs to collect and track. Some of the data a custom app can manage includes each customer name, phone number, and address, services purchased, interest level, the company they work for, and more.

Before you start building your own customer management solution, it is important to consider all of your options. Customer management software can be applied to most businesses, but what works best for you will depend on your customer management strategy, the nature of your business, and the functionality of the solution.

Types of Customer Management Software

Choosing a customer management program may feel daunting; there are so many options available. But with all of these options comes the power to make your software work for you, especially when you’re able to customize that technology to meet your needs. Customer management systems come in a variety of types and can be used in different ways.

1. Conversation: Emailing can be a disorganized and confusing process. Use conversation software to organize your team’s inboxes. Messy inboxes can be transformed into one organized system that keeps conversations fresh in your mind, limiting lost information and confusion.
2. Leads and Deals: For many professionals, transforming a lead into a sale is what drives their business forward. To increase the number of sales, it’s important to be acutely aware of the status of customer interest and keep leads on the minds of your sales team. Software can help you track potential customers with the ability to add more information as they move through the sales process. Tracking the interactions between sales staff and leads is a critical part of sales team success, so that everyone knows who’s been contacted and where the deal stands in real time.
3. Contact: Sometimes, it’s the human connection and small details that help a lasting business relationship to thrive. Contact-centric CRM software allows you to add whatever notes you wish to include. You’ll be able to keep track of interactions you’ve had along with personal information like birthdays, positions in the company, and preferred locations for lunch meetings, so you can refresh your memory on these personal touches before meeting with contacts.
4. Marketing: This type of software is similar to lead and contact software but will likely have some other tools attached to it, such as workflow software that will help you automatically send emails, set tasks, and enhance communication with your team.

Customer management software can help you maintain close, personal relationships with clients that allow for increased sales, greater customer satisfaction, and more chances for your business to grow.

How Customer Relationship Management Is Helpful for Business

The benefits of having strong relationships with clients and customers are boundless. Customer journey management is an important part of maintaining those relationships with organization and well-managed data. These are just a few of the ways that CRM software can benefit your business:

• Better Customer Relations: Using CRM software has proven to improve customer communication by organizing correspondence. By increasing your understanding of issues and having a systematic way to log details about each customer and lead, you can decrease confusion and customer agitation to deliver better, faster service. You can even use CRM software to receive continuous feedback from clients.
• Increased Customer Revenue: The data you collect can help you improve marketing campaigns and increase revenue by ensuring that each product reaches a new set of customers. You’ll be able to track leads and make sure no one is missed, so you won’t contact the same person twice.
• Maximized Upselling and Cross-Selling: Upselling means that customers are offered premium products that fall in the category of their purchase. Cross-selling is the practice of offering complementary products to customers based on previous purchases. By interacting with customers and having an idea of their needs and purchase patterns, you can optimize upselling and cross-selling when you have a system to organize this data in a meaningful way. When all information is stored in a cloud-based system, team members can access it any time to spot an upselling or cross-selling opportunity.
• Better Internal Communication: Using a customer management system will keep your team connect and improve communication. Sharing customer data between departments can unite the sales team with other areas of the organization. Working together always yields stronger results than working as isolated groups or individuals.
• Optimize Marketing: A customer management program can help you understand customer needs and behaviors so you can choose the best time to market your product to particular individuals or groups. You’ll have data about the most profitable customer groups that you can use to target similar prospective groups.

What to Look for in a Customer Management System

Once it’s clear that your company can benefit from a reliable CRM system, the decisions aren’t over yet. It’s time to choose the one that will provide the greatest benefits for your company. So what should you look for in a CRM system? It depends on your goals, but there are some basic attributes to be aware of while shopping for your new system.

The first thing to consider is whether you need a desktop system, where the program will run on a single server, or a whether a cloud-based database is needed. There are a few aspects to consider when choosing between a cloud and server.

Server

• Cost: This will include the price of the server and the installation time.
• Security and Maintenance: You will be responsible for IT and security or finding a supplier for these services.
• Competitiveness: Adding new features and functions to customize the application requires extensive expertise that will need to be applied by a member of your team.
• Mobility: Mobile use is mostly limited to laptops that have the software installed on them.
• Disaster Recovery: You will be responsible for backing up customer data in case of data loss and must have a recovery plan in place.

Cloud

• Cost: There is minimal investment except for a monthly fee.
• Security and Maintenance: The supplier of the CRM maintains servers and updates security. This service is included in the monthly fee.
• Competitiveness: It’s easy to switch new functions on and off or personalize an app to your needs using simple point-and-click technology. The changes will be immediately available to all users.
• Mobility: You’ll have secure access to the system on any device connected to the Internet, so it can be used at home, at the office, and while traveling.
• Disaster Recovery: Disaster data recovery is included as part of the monthly service fee.

As demonstrated, for most purposes, it’s simpler and more convenient to use cloud-based technology.

Use Our Cloud-Based App-Building Platform to Create Effective CRM Technology For Your Business

Quickbase offers a versatile, customizable cloud-based platform that can be used to build the CRM technology your business needs in order to work more efficiently. Build your own system from scratch with simple point-and-click functionality.

CRM apps built using Quickbase eliminate the need for spreadsheets, so you can manage sales, leads, and contacts exactly your way. Assemble your sales app to meet your needs and manage data on the go with our unique, low-code platform. You’ll be able to develop optimal solutions without coding so you can meet customer needs quicker and more efficiently.

CRM software built through Quickbase can improve productivity and accountability, providing you with dynamic software that will connect and motivate your team. You’ll be able to see tasks, reminders, alerts, and changing data all in real time. Design your customer management app to automate workflows to your specifications and trigger updates and other actions. You’ll have total control over your data, leading to more informed decision-making. The cloud syncs data with just a few clicks, and from here, data can be sorted with filters and grouped to maximize efficiency. Our app-building platform will work with your business rather than your business processes adapting to fit an off-the-shelf system.

Start a free trial today and start building better business applications, so you can see for yourself how powerful, custom CRM software can change the way you do business. Start exploring the possibilities now with Quickbase.