Forum

What is it ?

Textbook answer: "Customer relationship management (CRM) is a system for managing a company’s interactions with current and future customers. It involves using technology to organise, automate and synchronise sales, marketing, customer service, and technical support."

It was originally acheived by manual means (ie customer files, rola-dexes, post it notes, note books, scraps of paper or even your brain)

And now ?  many functions are embedded in software we all use daily; such as Outlook, Accounts software (like Quickbooks etc), Operations software (like Jobber, Qxpress, LawnAid, RealGreen etc)

However, specialist solutions exists as standalone or integrated into other packages. Benefits of an integrated solution is a single customer database (bit like having everything in one notebook).

Why is it useful? In certain situations it organises your ability to look at customers, keep their details 100%, see who is doing well, who buys what services/products, sales expectations (pipelines), who is waiting on you to do x,y & z, etc etc. So, you can see there is overlap with software solutions you may already use.

I would suggest if you are selling/promoting a mass market product or service (ie one-off services, lawn care, gritting etc) and do leaflet, mail, email or social media tweets then a CRM (of whatever compleixty) is worth considering. If you have trouble managing your 'contacts' (or interactions) then it may well be a solution to look at, but don't run out a buy, rent or committ to an expensive software solution.

Why ? As mentioned above, I would suugest that anyone who has any modern software in use for email, billing, invoicing etc will have the rudiments of CRM already there...

If not ? then go look at simple, free products until you know it is fit for YOUR purpose.

I can put up a few links later (and to be clear I have no connection or afflitaion to any of them)