CRM Systems: How to Build One and Its Potential in Vietnam

Vũ Khôi

Author at Wotech Electronics Blog

CRM stands for "Customer Relationship Management" — the management of customer relationships. Simply put, it is how a business manages its interactions and communications with customers, forming a base of loyal customers for the company.

Why have CRM systems become a business priority?

CRM is a customer relationship management system — a business strategy companies use to minimize costs and increase profit by strengthening customer trust, satisfaction, and loyalty. The customer relationship management system gathers information from all data sources across an organization to give administrators an overview and a fresh, data-driven direction based on analytics.

Who uses a CRM system?

Although the organizational structure and operating processes of every agency and business are completely different, every department within them can benefit from what a CRM system offers. Many people believe CRM solutions are reserved exclusively for sales and marketing teams, but that is not true. Every part of the business — from staff to administrators — can benefit from implementing a CRM system.

System administrators

• Create the database, install the CRM

• Set parameters, configure the system

Managers

• Compile statistics on the company's business performance

• Build advertising campaigns

• View employee work reports and track each employee's working process

Employees

• Fully compile information on potential customers

• Build daily work plans

• Create and track sales opportunities simultaneously

• Manage email

• Create customer quotes when needed

• Manage purchase orders

Building a CRM customer relationship management system

Business strategy and customer strategy are the two most fundamental and important elements in a CRM system building strategy. Below is the CRM strategy matrix, showing the different levels a business can adopt over time.

Product-based selling

The company focuses on its strategic products and distribution channels while paying no attention to customers at all.

Adding services and customer support

The business focuses on supporting customers more and begins to differentiate how it treats different customers. The business may choose to build a customer care system, conduct telemarketing, build a simple customer management system, or implement automated sales and marketing.

Collecting more detailed, higher-quality customer information

The business can build and execute personalized marketing strategies focused on customers' real needs to build their loyalty to the product. The business can develop a system that manages customer information and behavior in greater detail to better understand them and their needs. Activities may include: assessing customer potential, assessing competitor reactions, managing customer loyalty, point scoring (membership cards), and managing potential risks.

To do this, the business must segment its customers in greater detail, deliver different benefits to different customers (the essence of a CRM system), and identify and manage methods for cross-selling and up-selling to increase profit.

>>>> See more: What Is Customer Information Management? How to Prevent Customer Data Leaks?

Personalization

This is the ultimate goal of implementing a CRM strategy in a business. Each different customer receives different attention, is treated differently, and gets different value from the business.

Activities that can be carried out at this stage: one-to-one marketing, integrated systems (email, phone, automated sales processes), and integrated multi-channel customer interaction management (Zalo, Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, etc.). From this, the business gets a panoramic view of its customers and their transaction history with the company, which in turn reflects the activities of each employee and each department and allows evaluation of the quality of those activities.

Each business, based on its industry specifics, company characteristics, and internal capabilities, will choose the CRM system development strategy that suits it best.

Opportunities and challenges for CRM systems in Vietnam

Opportunities for CRM systems in Vietnam

Strong digital transformation growth in Vietnam

Since the explosive COVID-19 pandemic, the digital transformation trend in Vietnam has been growing more strongly than ever. On the state policy side, the government has approved the National Digital Transformation Program to 2025, oriented to 2030, with the long-term vision of Vietnam becoming a digital nation — including development goals such as e-government, digital economy, digital society, and the formation of Vietnamese digital technology companies with the potential to go global.

Thanks to government support, and with the country in a period of integration and renewal, 2020 saw remarkable growth in digital businesses in Vietnam. According to statistics from the Ministry of Information & Communications, the country currently has around 60,000 active digital IT companies, generating more than 1 million jobs. In 2020 alone, more than 13,000 digital IT companies were founded.

Not only are they growing in number, Vietnamese IT companies are also creating trends in more effective business and customer management. They are gradually adopting the most advanced technologies available today — cloud computing, AI, 5G, ERP, and CRM, to name a few — to optimize business workflows and enhance the customer experience.

The rise of a customer-centric culture

The traditional product-centric approach has been adopted by many businesses in Vietnam. They believe that if they own superior products, customers will be satisfied and profit will be optimized. But is this mindset still appropriate today? A report by Brand&Company shows that 80% of surveyed companies are confident they deliver a "great experience" to customers, yet only about 8% of customers actually agree. The main reason is that businesses have focused too much on product development and forgotten that customers are the core value behind sustainable growth. Always putting customers first is extremely important — and that is precisely why the customer-centric mindset emerged.

When a business is customer-centric and combines this with a CRM platform, the organization can collect and manage customer data (data on buying behavior, preferences, engagement levels, etc.) while gaining an overall view of its users. From there, this information is applied to segmentation and to crafting appropriate strategies for each customer group.

So does this culture actually benefit businesses? According to research by Deloitte & Touche, companies with a customer-centric mindset are 60% more profitable than those not focused on customers. In addition, according to a 2020 Zendesk study analyzing feedback from 90,000 customers across 175 countries about their experiences with 300+ businesses, as many as 75% of customers would be willing to spend more or use services/products from a company that provides a good experience.

From this, we can see that to optimize the customer experience, businesses need to build a specific strategy and adopt a CRM technology platform to store important information — only then can they make the most appropriate strategic decisions.

Challenges in implementing a CRM system

With the benefits a customer-centric culture brings, Vietnamese businesses have gradually adopted CRM platforms to make customers more engaged with the company. However, they run into the following barriers when implementing the system:

• The CRM software doesn't fit the business's type of operations or processes: It doesn't match what the business actually needs, making implementation and use difficult.

• Hard to use, inflexible, and slow: Quite a few CRM systems in Vietnam have cluttered interfaces that confuse users, along with slow loading speeds, hurting the productivity of the company's staff.

• Old and outdated software: Using legacy systems that don't match current needs and trends.

• Poor integration with other software: The CRM system can't integrate with third-party software, making it difficult for businesses that want to connect systems.

Enhancing the customer experience with SimCRM

Building on the advances of CRM systems worldwide, SimCRM is a leading customer relationship management software in Vietnam with modules such as Employees, Projects, Email Marketing, and more, plus these outstanding advantages:

• A powerful platform: Ensuring usability for every type of business — from SMBs to multi-branch corporations.

• A clean, beautiful interface: Users control/assign tasks with simple drag-and-drop actions. The system also presents logical, minimalist dashboards, enabling staff to get up and running quickly and effectively without deep IT knowledge.

• Flexible customization: helping businesses tailor the applications to their company's needs.

In addition, the system's CRM module is favored by many businesses for these superior features:

• Real-time storage and updating of customer information: Beyond storing customer information, SimCRM also compiles statistics on the number of purchases, meetings, etc. This lets businesses accurately assess customers' buying potential and make appropriate decisions.

• Setting up and managing activities: Set up activities to stay on top of your opportunities. When a sales department employee receives an opportunity from their manager or finds a customer themselves, they create the opportunity and set the date, time, and activities on SimCRM to turn that potential opportunity into a successful one. Activities are also categorized with easily recognizable colors: Red (overdue), Yellow (due today), Green (due in the future).

• Evaluating and managing sales teams: Businesses can divide sales teams by geographic area or branch to evaluate each department's performance.

Conclusion

We hope this article has given you more ideas and solutions to make your company's customer management system more effective.

If you would like CONSULTATION and a FREE 30-DAY TRIAL of the SimCRM customer relationship management software, leave your registration information here!

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