Almost thirty years have passed, and the application solution has lost value and is rapidly becoming the fulcrum of the entire business application system for financial report template.
From independent software, often snubbed by managers with little vision, today CRM is a primary service around which everything else revolves, from applications for administration to those for logistics management and in support of commercial and marketing strategies.
This is because today it is finally common opinion that it is the consumer, his behavior and the data he generates, to direct the business and not vice versa. A company that insists on imposing its product on the market without evaluating what the market really needs is a company doomed to fail. Just as a company that does not place listening to the consumer’s voice in front of every business strategy, risks being overtaken by the competition.
The “consumer first” a slogan that becomes a strategy
Of course, the “consumer first” is a slogan that we certainly do not discover today. But today the slogan is transformed into a real business strategy, thanks to digital and technology. The web has definitively disintermediated the relationship between companies and consumers, and technology has worked to provide the right tools capable of interpreting the traces that consumers leave on the Net: data.
Therefore, consumers, and customers in business contexts, but above all data, internal data collected by companies in interactions and those recoverable from “public events” such as social activities, are the pivot of modern CRM.
“Gartner has predicted that by 2021 CRM technology will be the largest expense item in terms of revenue for enterprise software.”
Today, a CRM platform like that of Salesforce, the world leader in the market, aims to deliver an excellent customer experience throughout the customer lifecycle, at every marketing, sales, e-commerce and customer service interaction.
This means making your CRM platform a qualitative leap, providing integrated support modules to the various company departments, with the aim of providing a single vision on the customer. A unified platform, a cloud-based software-as-a-service, which aggregates the data coming from the different modules or, if necessary, from the different applications already present in the company through integration APIs, and processes them by transforming the data into information of business, customized according to the company department to which they are intended.
The benefits of CRM for individual company departments
What are the benefits that individual business departments can gain from a CRM platform? The sales team, for example, can better monitor sales and campaign performance and more easily reach their goals. The marketing team, on the other hand, can optimize their initiatives thanks to a more in-depth analysis of the activities and the presence of their target in the digital world.
Furthermore, customer service can manage interactions from a single management console, regardless of the channel used by consumers, from phone to chat. Those who manage the supply chain can take advantage of the information coming from the CRM to review the production and distribution of products and services in real time and, finally, the administration has a more forward-looking view of the business relationship.
The CRM of the future is already here
If, then, we extend the concept of customer to that of corporate stakeholder, or anyone who relates to the company – employee, supplier, partner -, we understand what the CRM of the near future will be. Salesforce recently completed the acquisition of Slack, a very popular business collaboration platform in the world, with the intention of placing it at the center of its CRM offering.
If, in this way, Salesforce places itself in direct competition with the most popular platforms for collaboration, on the other hand it completely revolutionizes the model. By placing Slack at the center of the offering, Salesforce places it as the first productivity service the corporate employee will open in the morning. The other application components will orbit around Slack, with a substantial difference compared to the past in business productivity. Each component, in fact, is not designed to support individual operations but, rather, to condition it based on the information generated by the interaction with other company stakeholders.