Customer relationship management (CRM) is all about managing the relationships you have with your customers. CRM combines business processes, people, and technology to achieve this single goal: getting and keeping customers. It's an overall strategy to help you learn more about their behavior so you can develop stronger, lasting relationships that will benefit both of you. It’s very hard to run a successful business without a strong focus on CRM, as well as adding elements of social media and making the transition to a social enterprise to connect with customers in new ways.
Successful CRM involves many different areas of your company, starting with sales and extending to other customer-facing areas like marketing and customer service. Salesforce.com offers a technology solution for all those areas… and more. With Salesforce and our Force.com cloud computing platform, you can mind your customers and your budget at the same time. Get up and running in 30 days with the world’s most proven CRM solution.
CRM solutions help ensure that your sales, marketing, and support efforts are all working toward a common goal, so you can take your business success to a whole new level. Streamline and automate business processes, give everyone in your company a complete view of the customer, provide deeper analysis and insight into critical sales and customer metrics, and keep everyone focused on getting new customers while keeping the ones you already have happy.
Cloud computing has the IT world abuzz. But what exactly is it? Traditional client/server CRM software is a dying breed. The CRM software market has shifted from an ownership to a rental model, freeing businesses from the hassle and expense of software purchasing, deployment, and maintenance.
Cloud computing is another way to describe the much more compelling model of delivering business software over the Internet. With the Web, you can cut costs because you only pay to use the software instead of purchasing it. A multitenant platform with a single, common infrastructure and code base that is centrally maintained makes this model possible.
The social enterprise takes cloud computing to the next level. While cloud computing brought CRM online, the social enterprise delivers CRM solutions to companies in a new way, and service to consumers in unique ways. It elevates communication internally among employees and externally between a company and its customers. How? It starts with a customer social profile, in which a company can learn about a customer’s likes and dislikes through online social interaction. It bridges the gap between customers who are social and companies that are not. It lets companies engage with customers and CRM solutions like never before.
The social enterprise provides a platform for companies to move away from email and have all employees interact through a private social network. Employees at every level can ask each other for help with projects and easily share information. The social enterprise also lets employees in customer service learn about customers’ issues and needs through new channels such as social sites including Twitter and Facebook. Companies can reach out to their customers to provide tailored service every time.