Customer Relationship Management, CRM, is a broad range of software packages developed years ago primarily as B2B applications designed to organize and track customer information for such industries as call centers and e-commerce, sales, marketing and service organizations. And ‘front office’ CRM applications have performed well for these businesses.
But a new era of CRM has arrived and the applications now focus not just on customers, but on relationship management, i.e. any relationship that is important to your business. In fact, some in the industry have used the term XRM where the X no longer stands for just “customer”, but for any aspect of a business for which it is valuable to track a relationship and manage information; X = anything.
This shift from CRM to XRM opens unlimited possibilities for the software to be made applicable and useful to the specifics of your organization. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 in particular is built on a powerful platform that allows you to direct the information and relationships most useful for you in conducting your business from day to day and also for reporting on the state of your “relationships” in order to see the forward progress of your organization and make predictions for your future course. Yes, you can track customers in the traditional way, but you can also use your CRM system to track other entities that are important to your specific business.
For example:
- An Insurance agency brokering employee benefit solutions would need to manage the relationships between clients, quotes, policies, carriers, policy rates, producers and commissions.
- A Christmas tree broker would need to manage the relationships between farms, trees, truck distributors, retail locations and orders.
- A Wealth Management firm will need to manage relationships between clients, portfolio accounts, legal instruments and family relationships.
- And more
The possibilities of the new CRM are endless and this means that your company’s investment in your CRM system will continue to deliver benefits in myriad different ways, both now and as your business continues to grow.
Microsoft is one of the few CRM software providers that will emerge as a market leader in this new era of relationship management because of its feature rich functionality for Sales, Marketing, Service and Analytics
This next generation of CRM is highly flexible, affordable, and familiar and we feel that Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 will position itself at the head of its class.
To learn more about Microsoft Dynamics CRM, contact AbleBridge.
Related Article: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: The Evolution of CRM to XRM
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