Companies using CRM successfully are rising in numbers. It is well known that CRM systems allow organizations to safeguard all information about clients and maintain engagement with them. Doing this helps organizations to effectively and timely identify, assess, and address clients’ needs and demands. CRM lets organizations attain a distinctive advantage and provide value to users and clients of their products or services.
CRMs are mostly used by businesses involving tangible products, such as supermarkets and retail joints. Similarly, CRMs are traditionally used by businesses who have a sales team, use any form of marketing, create quotes and invoices, and who directly interact with customers.
Recently, there has been a surge of CRM usage in more untraditional type of organizations. The benefits of CRM are being realized by many sectors, business or not. These structures are using CRM in innovative ways though they don’t typically always involve a physical product, marketing teams, or even, customers.
Here are some non-traditional structures that have gradually begun to use CRM successfully:
Schools & Universities
CRM programs let schools, colleges, and universities build and maintain long-lasting relationships with students. With the growth of a competitive environment, educational institutes are struggling to get and retain students. In a complex, multi-faceted environment, schools and universities need to make display of how they can empower students in the long term.
CRM allows schools to create value by centralizing and automating communication on all fronts. With CRM, educational institutes can keep track of all student communications. Also, store as leads potential candidates who can later be attracted to targeted marketing campaigns.
It also allows them to better communication efforts with existing students, monitor and measure department and student performance, and analyze marketing initiatives. Schools can also gather information about various operations, like food and transportation.
For example, schools and universities can use CRMs to send information to parents about programs, events, and student achievements. Information pertaining to departments and faculties can be shared when needed. With integrations, like email marketing channels and social media, CRM also makes it easy to collaborate with other channels. Measure and store students’ performance reports in their profiles.
Forum for International Trade Training (FITT) is an educational institution providing international business training and professional certifications that have been successfully using CRM to efficiently manage students and clients
Graphic Designers
Graphic and web designing is another unconventional field that has started to use CRM to improve client relationships, get organized, and manage multiple deals. Since it’s a service-based field and involves many freelancers, a solution like CRM can seem unfamiliar and too far-fetched. But that’s not how it is.
For designers working in both agencies and as freelancers, CRM systems provide designers with an easy way to manage sales clients, contacts, and opportunities. A competitive CRM would provide an intuitive UI design that designers crave, which is easy to set up, and customizable so designers can focus more on what matters.
CRM systems can automate the entire sales process so designers get to prioritize the right clients at the right time. Closing deals become easier with pipeline visualization which shows how service agents are progressing and which clients need to be followed up.
With the amount of workload and clients that designers deal with, CRMs can be a real blessing as they aid to resolve customer concerns faster. The detailed contact information of every client makes the process of addressing customers efficient and in turn increases customer satisfaction.
The value of CRMs for designers goes beyond the service process. It also helps to increase productivity and cut down on redundancy.
Edge One Media is a marketing and design agency using CRM to communicate with hundreds of clients, staying on top of tasks, and to keep track of workflow
Consultants
Consultancy is a domain that is very skill-focused. But the success of a consulting firm depends not only on the skills and experience of advisors. It also depends on how much consultants take care of their customer relationships. CRMs let consultants keep track of client communication, increase new business and win more projects with existing customers. Like Designers, Consultants can stay keep up to date notes on prospective clients to increase the likelihood of closing deals. It helps to improve an advisor’s efficiency by organizing the client handling process.
With CRMs, you get a secured application with pre-built functions which you can always tweak to match your business processes, workflows, and industry requirements. Critical business insights are at fingertips with reports and trends. Consultants can view contacts, manage them, identify opportunities, and execute marketing campaigns, such as, by sending newsletters.
MedSys Group is a healthcare IT services firm using CRM solution to proactively deliver consulting services and results to academic medical centers, integrated delivery networks, specialty hospitals, and physician practices.
NGOs
Who would have thought that even Not-For-Profits benefit from CRMs? CRM programs vastly reduce IT dependencies of the NGO sector on outdated systems which are super inefficient. Since CRM combines many functions together, it also reduces costs of NGOs.
There are enough free CRMs, both cloud and self-hosted, that auto manages data for an organization. With CRMs, not-for-profits can prevent the hassles of license fees, losing data, and having to deploy many agents to handle clients. CRMs automate many operations, so that it reduces depending on too many manual labor, and thereby, costs as well.
With CRM programs, NGOs can arrange fundraising events and communicate with donors. Communication is more streamlined with CRMs because representatives can contact directly through the CRM. What’s more: like individual contacts, any donor companies along with their representatives can also be stored and managed. In addition, data mining options, automatic reports, email integrations, make it easy to act timely and executive crucial business decisions.
Many CRMs today come with portability features. This is a very handy feature for NGOs who are always on the out. You can access all data from mobile devices without hassle.
Little Kids Rock is a U.S. based charity organization that uses CRM to efficiently serve music education and instruments to underprivileged school children at no cost. It uses CRM for fundraising, managing relationships, arranging events, reporting, marketing & engagement.
Salons
Salons, too, have not traditionally been known to use CRMs. But this is an awesome business communication system for hairdressers, parlors, and spas.
With CRMs, salons can schedule appointments, manage clients, and send reminders to clients. CRM can be used to create an online booking system. And the data will be received seamlessly on CRM which will create a workflow. You will be able to change the status of bookings as confirmed, pending, cancelled, and more.
With detailed appointments history, contact profiles, and knowledge of client preferences, it gets much easier to manage clients. You can also prevent no-shows with reminders and quickly inform clients of any changes. CRMs also shows an overview of daily activities on what’s upcoming, done or pending.
The icing on the cake being with CRMs, salons can create point-of-sale systems. Also create invoices, receipts and take care of taxes. No more switching between applications. The entire sales transaction can be managed from a single location.
Boston Color Group is an American hair salon specializing in hair coloring, cutting & styling and uses CRM application to manage all client appointments, emails, and customer information.
Looking Forward
We now see a trend that various structures are using CRMs to fit their own needs and create value. CRMs are also evolving into specialized versions that cater towards particular types of businesses or small sized companies. And not all CRMs are same or meant for everyone.
But there are 2 things that apply to all CRMs – a) they are meant for anyone trying to show their users or customers that they are a priority, and, b) they are meant for anyone who want to increase in efficiency.
CRMs when used rightfully reduce time consumption, cut down on costs, and maximize opportunities for growth by increasing leads and users.
