There are a lot of acronyms dominating business technology today — HRIS, ERP, BI, AI and so many more. Another acronym that you may be hearing more and more in the business technology world is CRM — or Customer Relationship Management.

Forming and maintaining customer relationships is one of the most important aspects of any business.  Not being able to maintain positive relationships can severely jeopardize your success.  The solution to this problem may lie in implementing the right Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System to communicate more effectively which can provide you with the necessary tools to ensure positive customer relationships.

It is often the case that we find our customers making the same mistakes when it comes to their CRM system – especially during implementations.  Implementations are big projects, however many organizations go into the project with a “lets get this over with” frame of mind. In our experience, this doesn’t usually go over well. With this mind set.

If you’ve ever taken a computer science course, you have probably heard the old computer programmer’s saying “Garbage in = garbage out.’’ Meaning that if your CRM is populated with outdated information, chances are this will affect the output efficiency.

It’s that time of year when many companies clean their files, organize their data, and clean out the old in preparation for the new. The last fiscal quarter (if your company is on a calendar year) closes out the books in many companies and places a reference point in the year for year-to-year comparisons. This is a great time to add one simple task to your system: a CRM checkup, cleanup, and tune up.

There’s a new term creeping into the CRM lexicon: social CRM. Social CRM refers to using your CRM system to engage with customers through their favorite social media channels. It’s integrating CRM into both traditional sales and marketing communications, such as email marketing, as well as social media platforms.

It’s the dream of many sales and marketing managers: a seamless multi-channel customer experience so that no matter where a customer chooses to contact your company, or how they choose to interact, they receive the same care and attention as they would via another channel.

Social media provides a gateway for both B2B and B2C companies to connect with their customers. Tracking both connections and communications used to be separate from CRM systems, but newly developed integration allows users to take information from both sources and generate useful analytics.