A View of the Customer in the Cloud
By Andy Monshaw, General Manager, IBM Midmarket
Customer is king. Seems like a simple premise, but for most businesses, managing customer relationships is a means to an end – a way to reduce costs while increasing profitability. Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, allows businesses to solidify customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. Today’s challenge is how fast the right information can be put into the hands of those who need to know and know right now.
Today, cloud computing is creating new business opportunities in the world of CRM. In fact, AMI Partners forecasts that in the U.S. alone, the SMB Cloud CRM market is set to triple by 2015. Additionally, the global CRM applications market is expected to continue on this trajectory in 2011 with revenue approaching $18 billion on 7.6 percent year-over-year growth.
Through IBM SmartCloud, SugarCRM is making CRM on the cloud a reality for businesses of all sizes so clients can readily take advantage of these advanced capabilities in a matter of minutes and bring new efficiencies into their businesses.
True CRM brings together information from numerous data sources to give one, holistic view of customers. Also, methods for reaching customers are changing as social media channels are becoming more widely used by consumers. With the emergence of social business, consumers are empowered in more ways than ever before to access information that helps them make informed decisions on the products and services they choose to buy. As a result, organizations are rethinking the way they approach CRM and looking to the cloud to gain faster access to sales reports and data, as well as analytical tools to evaluate sales performance that would help deliver better consumer insight.
For any business looking to improve its customer relationship management, implementing a CRM system through the cloud is both efficient and cost effective. A CRM running in the cloud helps a company track data, such as orders, discounts, references, competitors and much more, without having to worry about any potential limitations of the underlying technology. The sky’s the limit!
Today’s small and medium-sized businesses are looking to the cloud to find answers about their customers. CRM running in the cloud makes it that much easier because at the end of the day, clients want innovative yet affordable technologies to make their business hum.