Mobile CRM: What Does It Mean for Your Business?

Mobile CRM is the latest technology for companies that require information to reach employees and customers in real time.  For many businesses, Mobile CRM the best way to reach both new and existing customers.  With the continued proliferation of high-speed wireless devices, more and more corporations of all sizes are putting mobility at the forefront of their CRM software initiatives.  Whether it makes sense for a business depends on the markets it serves, the way it delivers services, and several other factors.

Mobile CRM solutions can deliver the right information at the right time for employees and customers.  The benefits of a mobile CRM solution include improvement of sales productivity and service quality.  The right mobile CRM improves the visibility into the company’s accounts and its field operations, which leads to increased sales.  All of these benefits create more effective customer service and suggest that a significant return on investment can be earned by mobile CRM.

For businesses in the travel industry, mobile CRM is a must-have.  Smart phone users love the ability to reserve plane tickets, hotel rooms, and shop from their phones.  With the use of smart phones growing rapidly,  people have realized the power of toting a phone and laptop in one compact device, and the rise in smart phone use is likely to continue as phones evolve with new and more powerful features.

So what does all this really mean for businesses?  If you’re a small business owner, at the very least you’ll want to make sure your website is optimized so that it can be viewed on the display of these smaller devices.  With a large number of web browsers in use for laptops, smart phones, and the new Apple iPad, the way a web page displays can vary greatly between them.  A web page that displays poorly is one of the very worst advertisements a company can make.  Someone on the staff will need to be assigned to research and implement a solution, and that review process repeated any time changes are made to the company web page.

For larger corporations that have people in the field using mobile CRM devices for customer information, sales, and other tasks, the stakes are much higher.  Older mobile CRM systems required that the field devices be synced with a flash drive or other portable storage device on a daily or weekly basis to keep mobile devices in sync with the company server.  If a company is still using that older technology, it is time to invest in a powerful web-based solution that enables mobile devices to sync with a web server at any time and enables database administrators to push updates intelligently, so that only changes to existing records and new records are downloaded.  Otherwise, updates to large company databases could take hours and eat up network resources.     Empowering personnel in the field with accurate information increases productivity and morale.

Mobile CRM is gaining momentum as the top CRM vendors of 2010 serve companies in many different markets.  Ensuring that data is accurate and timely is an almost universal need in today’s hyper-competitive markets and means that mobile CRM providers will continue to add customers for the foreseeable future.