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With the spread of technology, the importance of understanding the customer’s needs and expectations and getting close to them makes brands progress. ECRM, or electronic customer relationship management, is an integrated online sales, marketing, and service strategy used to identify, attract, and retain an organization’s customers. This article will discuss all you need to know about the ECRM marketgate.
Businesses are now moving from product-centric to customer-centric marketing. In today’s competitive world, providing first-class and quality products and services doesn’t guarantee the success of businesses. But managing customer relations and providing services can enable you to achieve loyal customers and grow your business. To this end, you can use customer experience management tools and increase revenue.
Interested to learn more about what ECRM meaning is, what ECRM Stands for, and how it drives your business forward?!
Then, let’s dig deeper into the concept of e-CRM and the benefits it brings to your business!
What Is ECRM
Many businesses do not have correct information about their customers and this makes it difficult to communicate with them. ECRM, which stands for Electronic Customer Relationship Management, is a type of CRM.
With the help of this system, you can interact with customers through new e-commerce marketing tools, platforms, and online channels such as websites, email, SMS, etc. E-CRM software records the profile and history of the organization’s interactions with its customers and uses this information as an important tool to promote sales and marketing in various businesses.
By digitizing customer data and automating marketing, ECRM enables you to save more time and money while creating great UX. Additionally, it provides you with in-depth and invaluable insights into customer behavioral patterns to improve So, it allows you to choose products or services that can increase your customer loyalty and satisfaction and improve customer experience!
You may wonder:
ECRM vs. CRM: What Is the Difference
Before the formation of ECRM marketgates, businesses used CRM to interact with customers, which was more focused on traditional methods of identifying, communicating, and influencing customers.
You may ask: What does CRM stand for?!
Well, this concept hides a double meaning including:
- Customer relationship management,
- Customer relationship management software (CRM software).
The focus of this system is on the customers, their needs, interests, and expectations. Therefore, you can get a more accurate understanding of your customers, based on the facts and away from any prejudice, and take a step towards the development of your business.
But, what is the difference between CRM and ECRM? Let’s see!
1. Communication Channels: Key Difference Between CRM and ECRM
ECRM is a subcategory of CRM that relies on multi-channel marketing methods such as phone, fax, and distribution channels. While ECRM focuses on just web channels to interact with customers like the internet, email, website, and all the latest online technologies.
2. Collaboration
Unlike CRM, The integrated information for ECRM focuses on intra-organizational collaboration and communication with final customers. Besides, CRM focuses on the relationship between colleagues and managers.
3. Cost
The cost of implementing, maintaining, and using electronic communication with customers is less than conventional CRM systems. Therefore, most companies and organizations of all sizes have started using ECRM.
In fact, it can be said that ECRM is an evolved version of customer interactions, which was created by combining CRM with web features.
What Are the Benefits of ECRM
Now, let’s talk about the benefits of using this method. This type of communication strengthens the organizations’ customer-centric marketing by using effective and efficient strategies. ECRM can:
- Increase your customer retention rate,
- make it easier to focus on specific customers by focusing on their needs and expectations,
- Increase customer loyalty and satisfaction (One of the tools that you can use to increase customer loyalty is personalization. Keeping a loyal customer, in the long run, is more profitable than attracting new customers),
- Reduce the time spent between production and sale of the product,
- Boost your revenue and your company’s profitability (because there is a direct relationship between customer satisfaction and revenue),
- Prompt your company’s brand awareness.
What Are ECRM Features
Among the features of ECRM software, the following can be mentioned:
1. Customer Management
ECRM software allows access to all customer information. With the help of detailed information, you can have a more accurate plan for customer relationships.
2. Account Management
With the help of e-CRM software, your business sales, and customer service teams will perform better by accessing customer records and information. In fact, they will have better account management.
3. Administrative Management
ECRM software stores customer information and creates an integrated and centralized database to share and manage information.
4. Data Analysis & Reporting
With the help of ECRM software, you can analyze customer information and behaviors obtained from different channels in order to understand the preferences, expectations, and needs of each customer. Then, it creates reports on customer behaviors.
5. Back-end Integration
ECRM software easily integrates with other business software, including accounting and inventory, billing, and logistics systems through websites and call centers.
How to Implement ECRM Effectively
In this section, we provide the key factors that you must consider in order to put into practice electronic customer relationship management effectively. Ready?! Let’s go.
1. Determine Customer-Centric Mindset
The purpose of this stage is not to try to create a customer to achieve the company’s goals, but to listen to the customer and try to create beneficial opportunities for each. It is important to give customers what they want and anticipate what they will want in the future. To sum up, you must be sure that all the touchpoints with the customer put their needs first.
Only then you can start to implement ECRM successfully to optimize customer service and maintain long-term commitment.
2. Choose a Detailed Plan and Good Software
In order to reap all benefits of ECRM, it’s not enough to buy an eCRM solution. You must have a detailed plan to determine how to use the specific solution to succeed. Then, you should find a CRM solution that meets your needs. Therefore, you must select a suitable plan and the right eCRM software to achieve the goal!
3. Analyze Customer Information
By analyzing your customers’ information, you can identify trends and get insights into their needs which help you improve services. Asking good questions will help you find customers’ problems and help them to solve them. To clarify, you must answer the following questions to understand your customers:
What are their needs? What are their problems and issues? What do they actually want? What service or product do they prefer?
4. Select a Good Project Manager
This stage is very essential to the success of any ECRM implementation. Project managers are responsible to execute all your steps on time and ensure you achieve desired results. Without a good manager, your business is at risk of failure.
5. Define Usage Guidelines and Training
This stage will ensure that all your employees know how to use the system efficiently. In addition, a guideline will help you keep the data accurate. You can also hire an agency to offer eCRM training to get targeted results.
Let’s see what the recommended ECRM tool is to access all your customer information and report on their interactions.
ECRM Tools & Technologies
First and foremost, you need a behavioral analytics tool to reach your customers’ information. What type of customer are you trying to reach? What are your customers’ needs and expectations? what do they prefer? To answer all these questions, you need a website visitor tracking tool to get in-depth insights into their behaviors and interactions and recognize their expectations and preferences.
On the other hand, Some of the most popular tools for customer relationship management include live chat software, CRM, and sales force automation (SFA) platforms. Let’s introduce the best analytics tool that provides both customers’ behavior data and visual live chat software!
WatchThemLive: Recommended ECRM Tool
WatchThemLive is a behavioral analytics tool that grants access to all your customer behaviors and information, containing their behavioral patterns, interactions, their locations, and languages through its impressive features like session replays and heatmaps. Moreover, this website visitor tracking platform creates reports on their behaviors to make you aware of their needs and expectations.
WatchThemLive tracks and analyzes your customers’ activity on your website in real-time. Besides, you can access detailed reports on their information like locations, browsers, types of devices, etc. through its analytics dashboard.
Additionally, both your customers and support team will enjoy its live chat features. What makes it different? Well, your support team will get a real-time view of the user’s session after s/he left a message on the chatbox. So, it will help you manage your customer relationships and provide great UX.
Why are you waiting then?! Sign up now and figure out customers’ needs and preferences to provide great relationships!
FAQs on ECRM Meaning
By now, we’ve explained all you need to know about ECRM. Now, it’s time to answer some frequently asked questions regarding this matter.
1. What Are the Purposes of ECRM?
Here are the main aims of using ECRM:
- Increase profit and sales revenue,
- Increase satisfaction and success in communication with customers,
- Provide correct and standard products and services based on customer needs,
- Manage your time and provide services and products in the shortest time,
- Manage administrative and marketing costs.
By applying and complying with all the cases, You can build trust and keeps customers, and creates successful marketing.
2. What Is CRM and ECRM Meaning?
A large number of organizations working in the field of information technology have defined CRM as “a set of services or software that helps marketing.” Of course, there is another definition, which is related to maintaining and developing relationships with customers, and this type of relationship may not be used with today’s technologies.
e-CRM is a subcategory of customer relationship management with the letter ‘e’ meaning electronic. In fact, e-CRM cannot be separated from CRM and It is related to customer relationship management electronically and implements all CRM elements through the Internet environment.
3. How Long Does It Take to Implement ECRM?
The timeline for ECRM implementation varies from business to business. For example, small businesses can expect to take about 1-3 months to implement it in their system.
In addition to the size of the business, the duration of ECRM implementation in a business depends on other various factors. For example, what method do you choose to transfer data? What is the size of your business? How long are your training programs? And things like these.
To Wrap Things Up
The changes in the business environment and the rapid development of technology have made the old methods no longer meet your needs. That’s why the CRM software is almost outdated and everyone is moving towards ECRM. With the help of Electronic Customer Relationship Management, you can access all the features that a business needs to improve customer experience, attract customers, and also improve its revenue.
