How Extended CRM Solutions Help Businesses

Managing multiple customer relationships is a complex task. A business requires proper structure to skillfully oversee all interactions with customers. It is important to have a method to customer communications— from sending a series of emails to running an integrated360-degree sales and marketing campaign. It takes time, money, effort, and superior organizational processes to do a good job of managing these interactions.

CRM or Customer Relationship Management is essentially a framework to manage all interactions from and to current and future customers of an organization. It helps analyze historical data from customer interactions in the past to provide better customer service. It also aids in customer retention. The final objective of CRM is to achieve sales growth by developing synergies in communication between a company and its customers.

A CRM system provides details and analysis of how an organization interacts with its customers. It provides scope for greater integration and cooperation between the customer services, marketing, and sales teams of an organization leading to cost savings. It helps in attracting and winning over new customers and better managing the customer pipeline. Different stages of customer acquisition and customer lifecycle can be effectively mapped through CRM software.

Extended CRM (xRM) is an extension of the concept of customer relationship management to cover all internal and external stakeholders – employees, suppliers, customers, partners, and collaborators. It is a versatile application to envelop all partners in building a unified system. It extends the functionality of the CRM framework to cover different industries with different business models, connecting stakeholders and assets beyond the limitations of a packaged software. xRM is an extension of relationship management and goes well past just customer relationship management.

How your organization can benefit from xRM

An xRM solution presents several advantages to businesses. The important ones are outlined below.

• Superior automation: An xRM solution automates several monotonous manual tasks that would otherwise take employees considerable time to finish. It automates many critical processes thereby streamlining operations
• Quicker deployment: xRM is a solution built on existing CRM software. It is quick to deploy as no new software is required for the deployment
• Security: xRM can assign different security privileges to user classes based on their security access, allowing for protection of sensitive information. Users with proper security clearance will be able to view and edit data. Others may just have the ability to view information. In addition to this, it provides other security features like the use of SSL connection for data transfers
• Stability: xRM provides stability of a conventional CRM solution. Developers can easily build customized line-of-business (LOB) applications on the existing CRM framework
• Scalability: An xRM solution can easily be scaled up to meet the requirements of organizations of any scale. It can even be scaled down to cut costs or save resources
• Integration: It integrates all internal units of an organization better with the existing CRM software
• Enhanced usability: The xRM solution enhances the usability of CRM by providing different modules based on specific requirements. Users do not have to learn anything new as they are already familiar with the interface of the existing CRM software