Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
CRM systems manage the interaction between an organisation and its customers. Organisations use CRM to automate the process of sales & marketing and after-sales services.
Sales & Marketing Teams use CRM to increase customer satisfaction and revenue by creating a central repository of customer data that can be used by all departments.
An organisation can perform the following tasks with CRM:
- Creating a marketing campaign to gain more prospective customers.
- Tracking the campaign and creating lists of prospective customers.
- Following the customers to generate leads.
- Assigning the right salesperson to convert the sale.
- Providing after-sales services for better customer experience.
- Developing the sales forecast.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
ERP systems are used to automate all business process such as finance, sales & marketing, production, customer service, human resource, etc, whereas CRM focuses more on customer interaction and relationship.
ERP systems are integrated into the business to streamline complex processes and centralise information. This data is accessible in real-time by all the key affected parts of the organisation.
ERP helps organisations to perform the following tasks:
- Manage all business processes.
- Providing real-time information across all the departments.
- Create alerts of problems in almost any area.
- Centralised information is used for planning resources.
- Proper planning improves the performance of organisations.
Difference between CRM and ERP:
- CRM focuses mainly on customer interaction, whereas ERP is about the overall organisation.
- CRM data is used mainly by Sales & Marketing; ERP interacts with all major departments such as finance, customer service, supply chain, production, etc.
- CRM automates customer service; ERP automates almost all other business processes.
- CRM creates automatic campaigns for marketing; ERP creates alerts for any issues
- CRM focuses on increasing the revenue while ERP focuses on reducing the cost. Both help in increasing the overall profit of an organisation.