CRM (customer relationship management) is software made to enhance a business’s relationship with its customers and clients. It also automates many everyday repetitive monotonous tasks. This frees employees from the burden and stress of everyday workload. This way they can concentrate more on other productive activities required for the growth of an organization. Also, it saves costs as businesses don’t need to hire people for repetitive tasks.
This gives a boost to the company’s revenue. CRM helps a lot in lead generation, conversion to customers, and customer retention. It helps to nurture leads in every stage of their customer lifecycle. This results in increased customer satisfaction. It compiles customer data from various channels and points of contact between the customer and the company like the company’s website, telephone, live chat, email, marketing materials, and social media.
Benefits
- CRM as the name suggests will enhance your customer service. With customer information, such as past purchases and interaction history businesses can provide better and faster customer service.
- With having customer data stored in a centralized position businesses easily identify trends and insights about their customers through reporting and visualization features.
- It automates many everyday repetitive monotonous tasks freeing employees from burden and stress.
- It saves the time and money of businesses.
- It optimizes and streamlines the workflow of an organization.
Components of CRM
- Marketing automation
CRM automates many marketing tasks at every stage of the customer lifecycle. Examples include creating and automatically sending drip SMSs and emails, analysis of the marketing campaigns, etc.
- Sales automation
CRM automates many sales tasks also like tracking the leads activities, identifying the most qualified leads, segregating leads, and creating target lists, etc.
- Customer Service automation
CRM also automates many customer service tasks to improve user experiences. These include contact center tools, chatbots, prerecorded audios, etc. which help agents interact better with customers by understanding their specific needs.
- Geolocation technology
Some CRMs have technology that creates geographic marketing campaigns based on customers’ physical locations or it can integrate with GPS (Global Positioning System) apps. It is also used to find leads based on locations.
- Workflow automation
CRM systems optimize business processes by streamlining the workflow of an organization. This enables employees to focus more on high-level productive tasks.
- Lead management
CRM helps to track sales leads enabling sales teams to input, track, and analyze data for leads in a single place.
- Human resources (HR) management
CRM tracks employee information, such as contact information, performance reviews, and benefits within a company. This enables the HR department with their workflows.
- Analytics
CRM analyzes customer data for various purposes.
- Artificial intelligence (AI) integrated tools
CRM has many AI-integrated tools to do advanced analytics and give more intelligent solutions. It is extremely helpful in identifying customer-buying patterns and predicting future customer behaviors.
- Project management
CRM also has project management features like tracking client project details, such as objectives, strategic alignment, processes, risk management, and progress.
- Integration with other software applications and tools
CRMs can integrate with other software tools for added advantages.
Types of CRM
- Cloud-based CRM
There are many CRMs available in the market that are cloud-based. These CRMs are also known as software as a service and on-demand CRM. here the data is stored externally. Employees can access it anytime and anywhere. The system installation and maintenance are mostly looked after by third-party vendors. This is a cost-effective option as there is no proper setup, infrastructure, maintenance, and space required for it. Here you are charged on a subscription basis by the cloud vendors.
Some of the prominent cloud-based CRMs available in the market are HubSpot, Salesforce, Zendesk, and Zoho.
- On-premises CRM
This CRM is housed at a client’s location and managed by its own employees. It is also called on-site or licensed CRM. the installation of all hardware and software components, integrating the solution with existing systems, deploying it to end-users, and storing all related data are done by the IT professionals of the company. Also they perform the system administration, upgrades, and other routine maintenance by themselves only. The company has to purchase licenses upfront, instead of buying yearly subscriptions from a cloud CRM vendor. The software resides on the company’s servers. Some prominent examples of on premise CRM are Aptean and Salesforce.
- Open source CRM
This is the type of CRM which makes its source code publicly available. This enables its users to do customizations according to their requirements and preferences. Businesses dont have to depend on CRM vendors for the customization they want. They can easily create custom solution tailored to their requirements and preferences. Also with open source CRM, you can customize data links on social media channels, assisting companies looking to improve t5heir social media practices. Some prominent examples of open source CRM application are Bitrix24, OroCRM, SugarCRM, and SuiteCRM.
- Analytical CRM
This CRM helps you to gather data, insights, and information to take action for your business growth. It helps businesses to make data driven decisions. Mostly the people who use analytical CRM are data analysts, accountants, and business intelligence managers. Analytical CRM organizes large sets of data, simultaneously. It also helps in predicting the future of potential trends and opportunities. It collects and archives data from multiple systems.
It helps in identifying the patterns and relationships through data to solve a company’s problems. It helps to analyze your B2B campaigns and compare the number of B2B sales closed over a certain period of time. It also helps in understanding the type of customers your business closes the deals most with. It is also useful in customer service as it helps in gaining insights into how frequent your customer communication is at certain points in time. Some prominent examples of Analytical CRM are Zoho, Bitrix24, and Insightly.
- Operational CRM
This CRM is mainly designed to automate and streamline business processes to acquire new customers and increase customer retention. It is the best option for small businesses as it helps to minimize repetitive tasks through sales automation and marketing automation. It is mainly used by sales, marketing, and customer service teams. It automates sales tasks like meetings and follow-up emails. It helps in nurturing the leads at every stage of their lifecycle. With this, you can also easily send acknowledgment emails to customers. Some of the prominent examples of Operational CRM are HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive.
- Collaborative CRM
This CRM enhances internal communication within an organization. This removes the silos between sales, marketing, and customer service teams. This also ultimately enhances the external communication of a business also with its distributors, partners, and suppliers. It is best for customer-centric businesses. It is used to assign new leads to a specific marketing campaign based on input from sales meetings. It is used to assign the most qualified leads to sales representatives based on email campaigns. It also tags sales managers if any customer has contacted customer support. Some of the most prominent examples of collaborative CRM are Sage, Dynamics 365, and Copper.
Conclusion
Due to its immense benefits and convenience CRM will continue to be used more and more in the future. More and more advanced features will be incorporated into it. It will have ML and AI-integrated features in it for intelligent analytics and decisions. Also, more and more no-code features will be incorporated into it so that more non-technical people can handle it with ease.
