CRM

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software solutions allow you to manage the relationships you have with your customers, using a combination of people, processes and technology. It helps your business attain and retain happy customers. CRM is an overall strategy to help you to learn more about your customers and their behaviour so you have the skills to develop stronger, lasting relationships which will benefit both you and your customers. It's impossible to manage a successful business without a strong focus on CRM. After all, your business is all about the customer.

Successful CRM involves many different parts of your company, starting with sales, but also involving various other customer-facing areas, like the marketing and customer service departments. Salesforce.com offers a CRM solution for all these areas of your business…and more. With Salesforce CRM software as a service and our Force.com cloud computing platform, you can monitor your customers and your budget concurrently (imperative in today's economic climate). Sign up for a Free 30-Day Trial today and you can be up and running.

CRM Solutions

CRM solutions help ensure that your sales, marketing, and support efforts are moving in the same direction, so you can take your business success to a whole new level.

Using CRM solutions from salesforce.com, you'll be able to rationalise and automate business processes, give your entire workforce a complete view of the customer, provide in-depth analysis and insight into critical sales and customer metrics, and keep everyone focused on sourcing new customers while keeping the ones you already have satisfied.

• CRM Solutions for Sales & Marketing. CRM helps you to generate a larger number of leads, effectively market through multiple channels, optimise lead management, and convert leads into clients, access all account-related information, tasks and activities, assist the productive work of the sales team, analyse your sales pipeline, and understand what marketing activities are providing your ROI. An effective CRM solution helps you maintain your focus on sales and marketing, on filling the sales pipeline and generating more revenue - instead of manually tracking sales leads.
• CRM Solutions for Activity Management. The CRM system permits you to view all customer transactions in one place, respond confidently to customer communications, capture significant information on customer interactions, and manage your workload, including follow-up activities.
• CRM Solutions for Service & Support. The CRM system helps you process customer support requests from all your channels, notify the appropriate agent or group of agents to support cases, deploy the best solutions to customer problems with confidence, escalate support cases when appropriate, help customers to find solutions to their queries and problems via your website, stick to the service-level agreements you have with your customers, and identify areas for service process improvements. All this leads to better service and much happier customers.

Salesforce.com's CRM solutions offer a wide range of features and functions including partner/channel management, online community management, etc. When it comes to award-winning interfaces, point-and-click customisation, and seamless integration capabilities, Salesforce CRM is a world leader.

CRM Software vs. Web CRM

Traditional CRM software has been overtaken in recent years by web CRM, also known as "online CRM", "hosted CRM", and "on-demand CRM". Now more companies than ever are turning to the Web and in particular to salesforce.com, for business applications such as CRM solutions.

Why is web CRM the popular choice? Because for your company to survive these turbulent times, it's more important than ever to be on top of every lead, every opportunity, and every customer interaction, without a big, up-front investment in software which is expensive to install and maintain. With salesforce.com's pay-as-you-go model, the price of success is dramatically lower.

• Web CRM Promises Rapid Time to Value. Abolishing the need for a large up-front capital investment offers an immediate shortcut to CRM success—and money stays in your pocket in the form of a much quicker ROI than most CRM software.
• Web-Based CRM Offers Quick Deployment. Hosted CRM solutions are usually implemented in a matter of weeks or months—compared to 12 months or longer with traditional client/server CRM software.
• Hosted CRM Solutions Makes Customisation Much Easier. With online CRM solutions like Salesforce CRM, basic customisations are effortless so even business users can make modifications in minutes via a point-and-click interface.
• On-Demand CRM Provides Unlimited Scalability. Salesforce.com uses a multitenant model, so you can scale your execution fast—without encountering high costs or waiting weeks or months.
• Web CRM Features Painless Upgrades. Because employment of new CRM features is almost instantaneous, your web CRM systems are always on the latest version— upgrades are trouble-free. Going through an upgrade of Salesforce CRM is just like when familiar sites upgrade, like Web-based email or networking sites - all of your data is still there and working as soon as the upgrade takes place.

To summarise:

• On-Premise CRM Software. The outdated, client/server model for on-premise CRM software means you need to invest in IT staff, hardware and software, including networks and servers, to run your CRM software. You also need to employ a team of IT professionals to install, deploy, and maintain the software as the vendor produces upgrades to features or functionality.
• Web CRM Solutions. Web CRM, hosted CRM, on-demand CRM, software-as-a-service (SaaS) CRM, or cloud computing CRM—all these terms describe the same thing: a new model for delivering CRM across the internet. With this popular CRM solution supplied by salesforce.com, there's no software or hardware to obtain, install, maintain, or upgrade.

Cloud Computing & CRM

Cloud computing is much-discussed in the IT world. But what exactly is Cloud computing… and what does it mean for CRM?

The upshot is that traditional client/server CRM software is a dying breed, especially for IT Departments which want to contribute to the bottom line of their organisations. The cloud computing approach to managing CRM software shifted the market from an ownership to a rental model, freeing businesses from the cost of software purchasing, deployment, and maintenance.

Cloud computing is a model of delivering business software over the internet. With Web CRM solutions, you can remove significant costs from your business because you only pay to use the service rather than licensing it. A multitenant platform with a single, common infrastructure and code base and which is centrally maintained makes this model possible.

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