What is a CRM platform? CRM system lets businesses to manage business relationships and the data/information that is associated with them.

With CRM, you can store customer contact information, leads, accounts, and sales opportunities in one location, making the information accessible by many, in real-time.

How Does CRM Work?

Any business starts with a foundation of excellent customer relationships.  As your company grows, business connections grow more complicated. It is not just a transaction between the buyer and the seller anymore. You start to manage lots of links, across time, within each company you transact with. You soon need to share information across various teams within your organization who are making contact with the same customers. CRM allows you to manage the many connections that occur in a growing business. How do you translate the bulk of data coming in from marketing, customer, sales, service, and social media monitoring into helpful business information?

A CRM  offers everyone across the business, including customer service, marketing, business development, and sales, a more effective way to manage customer relationships and interactions that lead to success. With visibility and easy access to customer data, such as contact information, sales opportunities, service issues, and marketing campaigns, a CRM system can give you a clear overview of your customers. With an easy-to-use, customizable dashboard, you can see a 360-degree view of the customer, all in one place.

How CRM Can Impact Your Growing Business

For small businesses, a CRM system may help you put your data in the cloud, making it accessible in real-time, in any device. But as you grow, a CRM can expand to include more features to help teams collaborate with customers and colleagues, send customized emails, gather insights from social media conversations, and get a holistic picture of your business health in real-time.

Today businesses manage customer connections and information in several ways. Some use obsolete note cards and Rolodex. Others store data on their mobile phone while on the go using mobile CRM app. Others use Google documents or Excel spreadsheets. While that may be helpful in the short term with a small team and when don’t plan to scale your business, but if you want to scale for fast growth, a  CRM system may be perfect for helping you store your precious business data in one place. You can make it accessible via the cloud; this way, you free up your time to focus on delighting customers rather than letting valuable insights and information fall through the cracks.

Though CRM systems have been traditionally used as tools for sales and marketing departments, customer service teams are seeing significant benefits from a CRM platform as well. Today’s customer has a wide variety of channels to choose from when seeking help with a customer service issue — they may start by sending a tweet, then switch to email or phone to resolve the issue in private. A CRM platform helps service teams manage customers’ requests coming in from all channels without missing a beat.