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5 ways Cloud is influencing CRM

By Charlotte Gramlick on Mon 14 August 2017 in Cloud

Cloud computing has become a common buzzword in technology…but what exactly is it?

Although you may consider the cloud to be something above our heads, the term actually refers to a warehouse with several servers and computers. Confused? Stay with me!

 

As a business, you’re in charge of ensuring your employees have the right equipment and software to do their job well. A computer is the bare minimum, but then comes the purchase of software licences and installation to their PC. With this, you have to keep a record of how many users are allowed on each licence, when you need to renew them, and account for the time it’ll take to install everything – nightmare. Cloud, on the other hand, saves you installing software on each employee’s computer as you only need to load one application. This application is accessed via a web browser instead, and remember those computers in the warehouse I mentioned earlier? They do all the work running the application and saving your data. This accessibility to your data online managed by remote servers rather than a local server or personal computer is cloud computing – simple, right?   

 

A customer relationship system (CRM) is a large application, great for managing your entire sales process. After all, it’s handling a lot of your business data. With the advent of cloud, CRM has evolved to better meet the needs of its users.  

 

Here are 5 ways in which the cloud is influencing CRM… 

 

  1. 1. Cost Savings:

  2.  With the cloud, there is no need to install or maintain any servers or digital storage on premise. These take up space in your offices (which is often an added cost) and you also need to pay someone to maintain them. Gone are the days of spending vast sums on computers with huge processing power…because the cloud manages it all for you!  

 

  1. 2. Mobility:

  2.  More people want access anytime, anywhere. So, you don't need access to a computer with the CRM installed on it, or even your company's internal network; all you need is access to the internet! This means that employees can be more productive by contacting customers and prospects on the go, whilst also looking at real-time data. 

 

  1. 3. Speed & Flexibility: 
    People can act more quickly and more flexibly, eliminating time spent performing backups and downloading latest versions of software. Plus, if you’re business is changing frequently in terms of staff members or usage, it’s easy to scale up or down your cloud capacity.  

 

  1. 4. Security: 
    Security levels in the cloud are much higher than that of on premise CRM solutions. After all, security is the cloud providers best interest to look after their customer’s data effectively. Therefore, cloud CRM offers automated back-up policies, as well as data recovery plans. Security updates are automatically rolled out by the provider so your data always has the highest level of protection without you having to implement it across all your computers manually – phew!  

 

  1. 5. Greater Visibility: 
    With a cloud-based CRM system, all employees can have access to the same information through a centralised database, allowing for better collaboration and increased transparency. Everything is stored in one place instead of in multiple spreadsheets, and you can finally provide your customers with that high level of customer service they deserve! 

 

So there you have it. Just some of the ways cloud is influencing CRM. Hopefully, you can now see why cloud CRM is such an important technology for SMEs to use to their advantage! 

 

If you want to learn more about CRM, but still feel a little new to it all, check out our New To CRM page on our website here.