CRM Business Process

Most of us know what CRM, its Customer Relationship Management is, in layman language CRM is the model used by most of the organizations to manage their interactions with customers, and sales prospects. The main goals of CRM are:

1. To gain new clients
2. Retaining the current clients

Definition of CRM in business language: Customer Relationship Management is a comprehensive strategy and process of acquiring, retaining, and partnering with selective customers to create superior value for the company and the customer. It involves the integration of marketing, sales, customer service, and the supply-chain functions of the organization to achieve greater efficiencies and effectiveness in delivering customer value.

In this article let’s talk about the CRM business process from where the process starts and ends.

There are some important Roles, Groups in the CRM system, who will interact with leads, potentials, customers and perform few activities on them like scheduling meetings, follow up calls etc.

The CRM business process starts with a Lead.

CRM Business Process

Lead: Lead is the one who is the initial contact for a company. Leads can be generated from multiple resources, to list a few list building, e-newsletter list acquisition, email/web advertising which are paid sources, search engines results, web form (the visitor fill the form in the website, the same information will be created as a Lead in CRM system) referrals from existing customers etc. The major sources of lead generation are

• Search engines
• Ads
• Web Form

Few companies start with the concept called Pre-Leads. Pre- leads are not the bulk contacts which would be ranging 10,000 – 20, 000 number. In few companies, the call center people will call all the 20, 000 contacts and it they are interested in a particular product/service, then the pre-lead is converted into a Lead.

When Lead is created in the CRM system, a Sales Man will be assigned to the Lead, it means he is the responsible person for the Lead. When Lead is created, CRM system will send auto responders to the Lead it means; once he is registered in the crm system one email will be send. After two/three days another email will be sent to him regarding the company products/services information. Like this few emails will be sent to the Lead, the time in days can be configured in the system with how many days difference the email to be sent to Lead.

The Sales man will call the Lead and explain about his company products, and perform few common activities like

• Schedule follow ups calls
• Schedule meetings,
• Takes notes on the Follow up calls/Meetings
• Schedule Events for Leads etc.

Potential: If Sales man feels, that the Lead will be interested to purchase product/service, then the sales man will convert the Lead into Potential with entering important information into the CRM system. The information like

• Probability of the Lead – 100% (it means How much probability is there to convert that lead into customer based on his interest)
• Estimated Amount (it means How much amount; the lead is willing to spend on the product or service.)
• Phase: The potentials are sorted by different phases like Prospecting, Closed Won, Closed Lost, Priorities and criteria which depends on the organization.

The same activities which are performed to the Lead will be carried out for the Potential. When the Lead is converted into Potential, the data will not be available in the Lead; all the Lead history like scheduled calls, scheduled meetings, events etc will be moved/transferred to the Potential for reference purpose. The potential might be assigned to another Sales man.

Customer: If the Potential purchases the product/service, he will be converted into Customer. As soon as the Potential is converted into Customer, an Account also will be created on his name which tracks all the revenue generated by the Customer and User name and password will be sent to the customer where he can login and raise the tickets, upload information, upload documents etc.

Latest Promotions will be sent to the entire customer in the CRM system weekly/monthly with respective their products/services

Customer service: If there are any issues/defects with the Products/Service, the customer will login into his portal and raise a ticket with the ticket title and description about the issue. As soon as the ticket is raised it will be assigned to a support agent automatically/manually based on the CRM system. In few CRM systems SLA – Service Level Agreements will be implemented. The Support Agent will work on the ticket and update the status to the customer till the issues are resolved. Customer can also check the status of the ticket from the customer portal.

To simplify the CRM Process Lead is converted into Potential and Potential is converted into Customer.

The above CRM process is the basic industry standard, it might change based on the Organization, industry verticals like Telecom, Real Estate, Manufacturing etc.