CRM Operations

What is CRM?

CRM, customer relationship management, is the mechanism for managing and optimising the relationship with your customers.
It holds customer attributes, enquiry history, purchase history, email and meeting records in one place, and lets you use them to improve the customer experience. In recent years cloud tools such as HubSpot and Salesforce have become widespread, used across marketing, sales and customer support alike. But implementation alone often fails to deliver, and design grounded in strategy plus an ongoing operating structure are essential.

NowVillage's CRM management service covers not only implementing and configuring the tool but customising it to your business model and putting the data to work, end to end, so that your CRM delivers results.

The advantages and disadvantages of CRM

There are three main advantages to implementing and using a CRM.
Managing customer information in one place makes sharing across departments smooth and prevents work depending on individuals
Being able to approach customers at the right moment from their purchase and behaviour history can raise sales efficiency and lifetime value
Accumulating and analysing what customers say can improve services and sharpen new plans

The disadvantages, meanwhile:
Implementation and operation need specialist knowledge and time
Get the configuration or the data migration wrong and information can end up more scattered, with the risk that nobody uses it
Beyond the cost of the tool, you need people to put the operating structure in place

With NowVillage's CRM management service we keep those problems to a minimum, taking on everything from implementation design through embedding and improvement proposals, so the system delivers.

Points to watch in running a CRM

To make a CRM work, it is essential first to be clear about why you are implementing it. If the purpose is vague rather than something like making new business development more efficient or raising the lifetime value of existing customers, the tool becomes a mere database and goes unused.
Designing it to be easy to use on the ground also matters. Keeping the operating rules consistent across the company, and being clear about input formats and when things are updated, maintains data quality.
Once live, a regular cycle of improvement is needed. Without continuing to review the workflows from the analysis and optimise the dashboards, results can plateau.
NowVillage supports the whole of it, from defining the requirements at implementation through making the use of data systematic, training staff and proposing improvements. Not implement and finish, but stay alongside you until it delivers.