Customer relationship management is a process in which a business or other organization administers its interactions with customers, typically using data analysis to study large amounts of information. CRM applications enable you to better manage that data, use it to analyse and forecast trends and customer behaviour, and embed it in your future business strategy. As a result, CRM offers you an overview of your customers and your business in relation to business goals, profitability, and sales.

CRM in the retail industry

1. Customer segmentation • By learning search patterns, social media pitches ads as per the customers interest and liking. These ads also often experience a raise in clicks and the rates of visiting the specific brands are increased. This could help in increasing the traffic and sales in the apparel industry.

2. Access to most relevant information • There are multiple people that visit an online store without buying or paying for the things they add to their cart. With a smart CRM system, you can get broad spectrum data to understand the consumers wants and needs better. This way your team can take better actions against this. For example, dropping a gentle reminder to people that have items waiting for them in their cart.

 3. Effective use of time • Enterprise workflows now need to be smarter and the best way to achieve that is to acquire CRM Consultancy. A CRM approach, can automate a series of self service processes that can save your agents or employees time for more important and efficient things like sales and designing rather than administration and problem solving.

 4. Centralised Social Media Interactions • A large part of apparel customer base now comes from social media. People use referrals and paid campaigns to bring traffic to their business, e-commerce and other shops. Social media, thanks to this quickly becomes the source of all customer queries and your queries is how your customer service and brand are judged by the consumers.

 5. Order management • More on the online end. If you are looking for a CRM for e[1]commerce, order management is one of the most important functionalities to look for. Order management includes steps from lead generation all the way through to revenue. You can view and act upon order placement, order processing, shipment tracking, delivery and customer feedback against each product

Example –  I’m a frequent buyer from Zara. But there are times that I add something to my cart for later on and sometimes I forget. A CRM strategy of Zara’s that I really appreciate is how they send me gentle reminders in forms of emails reminding me of the products that I left in my cart. Along with this, sometimes they even give me a discount of coupon code to use during checkout for the products in my cart.

Drawbacks of CRM

 1. Business Culture • A lack of commitment or resistance to cultural change from people within the company can cause major difficulties with the CRM implementation. Customer relationships may break down and result in loss of revenue.

2. CRM costs • One of the greatest challenges to CRM implementation is cost. There are dozens of software options available and many pricing plans that go with them. To work out the actual costs of CRM software, make sure that you consider the total cost of ownership. Other factors such as data migration and quality, and converting business operations may also affect the total costs of CRM implementation.

 3. Poor communication • To secure buy-in and make CRM work, all the relevant people in your business must know what information you need and how to use it. Make sure to communicate integration needs in advance if other teams need to cooperate on the implementation, eg payroll staff.

Example – CRM as mentioned above can be an expensive technique and learning. The cost of setting up a CRM system itself is pretty costly and once that cost is taken care of, there comes the cost of training the employees and partly the employers about the same to be as efficient and adaptive towards the system.

Aishwarya Says:

I have always been against Glorifying Over Work and therefore, in the year 2021, I have decided to launch this campaign “Balancing Life”and talk about this wrong practice, that we have been following since last few years. I will be talking to and interviewing around 1 lakh people in the coming 2021 and publish their interview regarding their opinion on glamourising Over Work.

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