A customer relationship management solution helps you engage with your customers and provide a personalised service, says Analise Buttigieg.

Nowadays, customers want an amazing customer experience every time, all the time. Companies must adapt to the new customer journey, understanding buyers so they can match their needs to the appropriate product or service, engage them when the moment is right, and nurture a long-term, evolving relationship with them.

With the proliferation of social media and mobility, organisations must not only consider these principles as an alternative means of promotion, but more importantly embrace them within their processes and pro-actively use them in every customer engagement.

Since everyone is connected everywhere, all the time, customers today have a large number of touch-points. They are constantly browsing via their mobile device, present on social networks and actively researching to solve their problems – this means they have uninterrupted access to virtually any data to instantly compare and validate their choices. Suppliers need to understand what matters most to their customers and help them get what they are looking for.

Businesses should focus on providing people with a broad array of insights and actions across internal and external connections by taking advantage of the ever-growing number of channels to connect people with prospects, customers and partners anywhere, anytime utilising popular tools such as Twitter, Facebook or SMSs.

For today’s rapidly evolving buyer, traditional sales cycles are outdated – they are static and not able to cope with the new dynamics of business. A Customer Relationship Management solution that helps businesses match, nurture and engage with their customers provides massive potential for companies to excel and succeed, since it is in line with what today’s buyer expects.

The right CRM solution enables organisations to unify their marketing, sales and customer service teams and deliver on their customer experiences. Marketers use CRM to gain a better understanding of what their prospects are across digital and social channels, while also tracking their actions across traditional channels.

Sales teams want to identify social buying signals and engage the right person at the right time, establishing processes to increase win rates and deliver the right product at the right time. Customer care agents need to connect with customers and proactively resolve any issues – by listening to your customers, you are empowering them to be loyal advocates and are giving them something positive to say.

Through CRM, employees are empowered to deliver a personalised experience to customers, since they have relevant insights into real-time account data, news, social activity and connections. They can engage in social conversations within the context of their business, find experts to collaborate on deals with, generate referrals and introductions. Delivering a full view of customer interactions right at the employees’ fingertips, CRM features social tools that help employees foster productive internal and external communities by sharing information and best practice.

Acting as the company’s proactive business application, CRM can be deployed as an individual business scenario or as part of a fully integrated business suite that provides flexibility for future growth. This makes it an ideal solution for growing companies with changing business needs, serving as an extension to their core financial system while giving them the flexibility to deploy exactly what they need when they need it.

Companies can evolve their preferred CRM application in smaller chunks, enabling them to address one operational workload or application area at a time. Such an evolving approach enables organisations to benefit from a more rapid return on investment, hence a shorter time to value with each solution being rolled out faster.

Through CRM, employees are empowered to deliver a personalised experience to customers

Companies can first invest in the application areas with the biggest need, before rolling the solution across other areas. This gives them the ability to deploy as much or as little as needed to begin with, while still benefiting from the synergy of a suite.

Analise Buttigieg is marketing executive at Exigy, a company providing strategic software solutions across multiple industries. Over the past 11 year, Exigy has been entrusted with key Customer Relationship Management projects based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM.