Companies need to increase customer loyalty and boost profitability. However, customers are more informed, more demanding, and less willing to release their cash.

The businesses of customer relationship management and marketing have historically based decisions on what the manager thinks the customer or market is going to do or what the company management feels will happen. They are slow to embrace the new technological methods of actually assessing trends and competing based on intelligence and analytics.

The time has come to change, to understand and be responsive to customers’ needs and market forces. The CRM solutions are readily available to help organizations improve their understanding of customers and realize the full revenue potential of their leads.

Three key obstacles stand in the way of turning leads into customers: (1) the lack of real-time data and analytics that capture insights from multiple customer touch points, (2) information that is selectively gathered, inaccurate, or incomplete, and (3) date being siloed and its use restricted across the organization. As a result, critical business decisions are made based on conjecture and partial data rather than on empirical data and intelligence.

Managers need to see their company from the eyes of their potential and current customers. That means thinking like a customer seeking information. They (and perhaps a friend who is not in the same type of business so he has fresh eyes and mind) need to become customers. Start with a question and navigate the company web site to see how much has to be done to answer the question – or if the answer even exists there. E-mail the support department with a request or question. Make a purchase to see how well that process works and how aggravating or simple it is. If you have stores, walk into one or more and ask questions a customer would ask. Request a demonstration. Purchase something. Return your purchase to see how that process works. Take notes on all the processes. Where are the glitches, the frustrations, and the hang-ups? What is going well?

When you pose the question to customer support, it is very important to note the follow-up. This is an area where many companies lose their customers’ future purchases and recommendations. Get together with key players from marketing, customer service, and sales and brainstorm ways to improve the various ways in which a customer can access and interact with the organization.

Select a CRM system that enables an organization to run campaigns that align with its customers’ preferences, tightly integrate marketing across all inbound and outbound channels, increase sales productivity by providing customer insight, manage marketing and sales resources more efficiently, and turn contact centers into profit centers.

Have you ever considered that help desk calls have the potential to become sales opportunities? By having a CRM software that includes a real-time data miner, call center agents can get a recommendation of a customer-appropriate prequalified sales offer while on every call.

The use of support tickets that are tracked can increase retention rates by as much as 40 percent. Good customer follow-up using CRM software can improve service renewals by over 100 percent in the first 18 months.

Customer promotional campaigns can be executed within hours instead of days. And 100 percent of the campaign offers will be followed up. Did you know it takes at least five contacts with a customer to actually engage the customer in talking about a sale? How many of your sales reps stay engages with potential customers through five or more contacts?

Implementing the right CRM solution makes the business of customer relationship management easier and provides economic value and a competitive edge to the company. It turns your sales reps into trusted advisers who can make appropriate, targeted offers to customers. It enables support personnel to shorten call times, resolve issues quickly, and engage in seamless conversations. The right solution delivers personalized, customer-focused interactions which result in more frequent revenue opportunities and satisfied customers.