Customer Relationship Management is a strategy that is implemented widely for overseeing interactions between companies, consumers and foreseeing sales expectations. It involves the use of technology to coordinate, automate and tally business-related activities. This is then used for marketing purposes and providing services to customers with an aim of reducing costs. This software comes with various benefits to businesses. Employees are able to achieve full control of their work responsibilities and problems can be realized early. A Focus on creativity and thinking can also be achieved contrary to tiresome gathering information and processing (James, 2005). In addition to this, better results with respect to customer service can be achieved through the main parameters which include satisfaction, trustworthiness and maintenance.
Another benefit is the increase in employees’ productivity and exclusion of errors brought about by manual records. CRM software comes in various varieties depending on different companies available in the market. There are websites that sell CRM. Though these websites come with fantastic offers, their software is still criticized. CRM from these companies is expensive and outstanding. From the Caspian website, adaptability and implementation of its CRM software is not easy thus making it difficult for its end users to use comfortably. Software from the Netsuite website has a challenging architecture that makes it difficult to understand and costly in terms of training. While CRM from commence website remains costly, it has a clear reporting mechanism and architecture that makes it easily understood by its end users. These factors ensure that the most appropriate CRM software is selected (Greenberg, 2004). One of the main factors taken into consideration before purchasing is return on investments which takes us to the primary reason as to why we are investing in it. Getting quality software that has got short spans on return of investments is one of the main goals of very many businesses.
Another factor affecting choice is compatibility. It depends on whether the infrastructure that is in place is compatible with the CRM that is to be purchased. Issues related to usability and user requirements also play vital roles in deciding the right CRM software to purchase. This is because the software may be complex thus making it difficult for its users to operate together with failing to meet their demands. Data volume and the need for future expansion also play a critical role in deciding the type of application to be purchased. This normally affects the size of the business and the capability of its growth (Lior, 2005). Industries with exceptional CRM have the capability of handling their consumers’ issues with ease by using various measures available in the market. Online support is one of the measures used to assist consumers where they post issues and can speak directly to employees’ about issues surrounding them. Although CRM software has high capability and functionality, not all industries do well with it because of difficulty in reaching their consumers. Businesses that are stationary and not online have lots of difficulty reaching their customers. This decreases CRM’s growth and thereby resulting to poor relationships between the two parties. In conclusion, CRM has turned out to be powerful and can assist in business growth although it has to be implemented carefully for it to achieve its goals.