What is CRM and why is it important?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is important to retail for several reasons:

  • Customer Retention: Retailers can use CRM to understand their customers better and provide personalized experiences to retain them. By keeping track of customers' preferences, purchase history, and behaviour, retailers can create targeted marketing campaigns and personalised promotions to keep customers coming back.
  • Customer Acquisition: CRM can help retailers acquire new customers by identifying potential customers, understanding their needs and preferences, and tailoring marketing messages accordingly. This can lead to increased customer acquisition and ultimately, sales.
  • Customer Service: CRM can also help retailers provide better customer service by giving them a 360-degree view of the customer. With all customer interactions and information in one place, retailers can quickly and easily respond to customer inquiries, complaints, and feedback.
  • Inventory Management: CRM can help retailers manage their inventory more effectively by providing insights into which products are selling well and which are not. This can help retailers make informed decisions about what to stock and when.
  • Sales Performance: CRM can help retailers monitor sales performance and identify areas for improvement. By tracking sales data, retailers can identify trends, measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, and make data-driven decisions to improve sales performance.

Overall, CRM is essential to retail because it helps retailers understand their customers better, provide personalised experiences, improve customer service, manage inventory more effectively, and improve sales performance. We are in a digital economy and there is an expectation that business are customer-centric while being efficient.

According to the research:

  • 76% of customer expect to engage with someone immediately.
  • 72% of consumers expect companies to have access to all of their relevant information.
  • 70% of consumers say they expect conversational experiences.

The general buying experience is more complex than it once was Customers want an experience that includes attention and a level of knowledge both personal and product wise.

What is CRM?

Customer relationship management (CRM) was born from growing customer expectations over the past 20yrs. It brings together an ecosystem of technologies tailored around the customer, technologies to support Rewards, Special pricing, history and other relevant data & functions to support the end-to-end customer journey.

If businesses today want to stay on top in an increasingly competitive market, they need to engage in more interactions with buyers that are comfortable, seamless, and rewarding.

Why should you consider CRM?

Connecting with buyers is a fundamental part of sales. Whether closing a new sale or upselling an existing customer, every interaction is a chance to build rapport or turn someone off. 

Sales is all about productivity and scale. Prospecting is the first and most tedious part of the sales process. If you are able to automate basic prospecting or discovery questions, staff are armed with information that allows a more personal approach. For example, being able to ask how the item is working for them on the last sale purchased.

Acquiring new customers is much more costly than keeping existing customers, and poor customer experiences lead to churn. According to research 61 percent of customers will defect to a competitor after just one bad experience. And that number jumps to 76 percent after two negative experiences. Because of this it’s critical for businesses to make sure every customer interaction is smooth and relaxed.

One way to do that is through emphasising personalise and expediency in communication. 

How Ramsys CRM can help

Implementing a CRM with Ramsys requires effort: With a little thought beforehand, your business can nurture (and automate) conversations and loyalty with customers and prospects without being caught up in the complexity of maintaining it.

Rewards

Ramsys is capable of tracking, accumulating and processing many kinds of rewards with a degree of accuracy and transparency otherwise impossible.

Schmoozing

ˈshmüz. schmoozed or shmoozed; schmoozing or shmoozing. :

 to converse informally : chat. also : to chat in a friendly and persuasive manner especially so as to gain favour, business, or connections.


Everybody wants to feel special. The main reason a customer will come to store over ecommerce is the customer contact. This puts pressure on staff to have a breadth of information at their fingertips. By weaving this information into the conversation, the customer feels valued and enjoys the sales process.

Ramsys upon entering a customer will display details of the customer including previous sales. This arms you with the information to start a customer centric conversation.