What is CRM and it’s types?

CRM stands for customer relationship management and is a technology for managing the company’s relationships and interactions with potential customers

CRM stands for customer relationship management and is a technology for managing the company’s relationships and interactions with potential customers. It is a combination of practices, strategies, and technologies which is used by a company to manage and analyze customer interaction and data throughout the customer life cycle.

Many benefits can be provided by using CRM technologies ranging from small business to large corporations:• Having customer information such as past purchases and interaction history easily available then help customer support representative to provide faster and better customer service.• Collection of and access to customer data can help businesses identify trends and insights about their customer through reporting and visualization features.• A business can follow conversations about its brand for real-time market data and feedback.

There are different types of CRM that are opted for by different types of companies to increase their customer base:

Social CRM: Social media CRM involves businesses engaging with customers directly through social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others. Nowadays this is mostly done by small business owners to determine their target audience and add value to social interaction on social media. Social CRM adds value for companies and customers through customer communities, where customers post reviews of products and can engage with other customers to troubleshoot issues or research products in real-time.

B2B CRM: A CRM system in a B2B environment helps monitor sales as they move through the sales funnel, enabling a business to address any issues that might come up during the process. CRM systems in the B2B market help create more visibility into leads and, therefore, increases efficiency throughout the sales process.

Brothers Maurice and Richard McDonald started the first McDonald’s restaurant in 1948 by converting their drive-through barbecue restaurant into a burger and milkshake joint. The original McDonald’s focused on its burgers, fries, and shakes, selling them for half the price and in half the time of competing restaurants. It did this by changing the way that a hamburger shop operated. Instead of relying on waiters and waitresses, the McDonald brothers installed a self-service counter. 

Mcdonald’s now is one of the largest revenue-earning quick-service restaurants serving around 69 million customers in 100 countries at more than 37 thousands restaurant worldwide. 

To manage its huge customer base it has successfully integrated CRM into its business model. To grow digitally they have installed digital self-order kiosks in their restaurant.

The CRM of Mcdonald’s offer effective data collection, immediate response, and resolving quick challenges to develop a consistent relationship with the customer throughout the world. 

PowerCenter is the CRM used by McDonald’s which is powered by Astute Solution. The software provides a huge and relevant database of customers of Mcdonald’s even if they have provided business for once. This further helps McDonald’s to check and analyze the data to approach them via customer-employee interactions, marketing, and services after getting feedback from them. This practice is a consistent approach to achieving a primary goal of retaining these customers and highlighting their potential in them to increase the sales force, avoid serious problems, and get desired results to remain in business.

The reason for the astute approach for Mcdonald’s CRM:▪ Primarily, McDonald’s wanted to look for software serving a core set of goals. They wanted to increase the data capacity to be taken from customers and could get multitasking software providing both McDonald’s corporate affairs and every single franchise having access to updated customer data. ▪ They wanted to integrate their current database into a result-driven CRM tool avoiding any system operating issues.▪  Also, they wanted software that is adaptable and usable to provide required assistance for their upcoming business requirements.

The strength of this CRM strategy is to know their loyal customers and can retain them by giving them special discounts on their birthdays or some other special occasions. 

The Weakness of the same strategy is at times this huge database turns out difficult to handle and can lead to many complications in the further handling of clients.

CRM software provides a stage where small and mid-size companies excel and big companies can be stable and consistent. Any business needs its customers to be loyal and retained back. To perform better along with such expectations, CRM is a game-changer for companies who want to maintain quality relations with their customers in a long-term plan.