CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, which is both a procedure and software that uses customer data to create the right strategies to optimize results, especially those regarding sales, revenue, and customer support.
Using CRM organizations can understand who their customers are, where to find them, how to contact the customers and identify their purchase power.
It is not only the software but also the correct analysis of the data and the execution of effective strategies what makes CRM valuable for businesses.
There has been much debate this year about more organizations, both SMB, and large enterprises, porting their CRM platforms into the ‘Cloud”.
The global market of CRM has been affected so strongly in the recent years that the world’s leading technology advisory firm Gartner, recently said that the Customer Relationship Management market will be worth $36 billion by 2018.
This prediction is built around Gartner’s analysis of new business scenarios what Gartner terms as the “Nexus-of-Forces”- social, mobile, and cloud.
CRM as a technology has already established its position as an essential element, which is capable of helping organizations of all size and bridge the gap between sales, marketing, and customer support teams.
However, through the end of the first decade, and up to the present day, the availability and rise of Cloud and SaaS CRM continued to gain popularity, due to lower initial cost and easy integration with mobile devices.
This availability and rise of Web CRM allowed companies to think about alternatives options to traditional on-site CRM software, as this modern technology helped firms to adopt CRM technology without creating any ‘physical’ infrastructure and network.
In other words, cloud-based CRM allowed all the business data of a company to be stored, accessed, modified, and saved via the Internet.
According to a study done by Poneman Institute for Thales e-Security, a leader in advanced data security solutions, it has been found that:
“More than 54 percent of the 4,025 business and IT managers polled were already sending sensitive data to the cloud, and 31% of those from within seven global countries expect to do so in the next two years.”
Although the cloud technology solution has been around for approximately nearly 6 years, in the modern times, it is going through a second looping, as by CompTIA’s Fourth Annual Trends In Cloud Computing, said:
“90 per cent of firms polled have some presence in the Cloud.”
Cost savings: Adopting SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) model can save your organization a lot of money on IT budgets.
Agility: Companies using Web CRM always gain a competitive edge by giving employees access to information, which in turn speeds up projects.
Resourcing: Cloud CRM provides increased business value, as it allows your staffs to complete their projects faster allowing your employees to skill themselves up in other areas of business within the organization.
Elasticity: Using SaaS, resources can be re-provisioned and deployed in real-time, according to appropriate workloads within the organization.
Access to new markets: The savings in IT infrastructure costs that companies make by using cloud CRM can be spent for strategically tapping and exploring new markets.
Other than this, using a single cloud-based CRM system, you can make your employees work without being tied to their office desks or your office server. Hence, your employees can contact their customers on-the-go and also mine real time data for providing fast customer support solutions or close more deals.
Cloud CRM also provides more frequent customer insights so that your employees can enhance productivity across all departments in your organization.
Conclusion
Hence, to conclude, the role of cloud CRM should be taken as a strategic business enabler and so businesses with an eye on the future must use Web CRM solutions or migrate to a cloud CRM if they are using an in-house CRM solution, and in doing so stimulate their competitive edge.
