June 2021
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a system that helps you manage your company’s relationship with its current customers and its potential customers. Let’s explore the advantages for your business if you have an efficient CRM established, and the different types of CRMs.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Advantages
- Managing company relationships with customers is key. Your customers are what will make or break the business. So managing these relationships is crucial to your business success. The most important element of your business is the relationship it has with its customers. In 2021, CRM enterprise software will be where the most revenue will get spent by new companies.
- Stay connected to customers. You need to keep the communication flowing between your business and its customers. Customer service is the center of a CRM’s function. It is vital to keep the lines of communication flowing with the customers, not only before the purchase, but after they have purchased, as well. If you offer outstanding customer service, it is the best way to retain customers and grow your business.
- Streamline your business processes. CRM systems make it possible for you to see everything all in one place. Often, the systems allow the users to create a dashboard that is customizable. This makes it simple to view every aspect of your customer’s history with your business, including the status of their orders, any customer service issues, and the entire previous history with the customer.
- Improve the business relationships with all involved. This includes suppliers, partners, colleagues, service users, as well as customers. These systems help everyone to work in tandem for the common goal-to increase customer satisfaction, retention, and sales.
The Three Types of Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Operational CRMs
An operational CRM helps you manage your business by streamlining all your processes through automation. A top operational CRM is Salesforce.
The types of operational CRM automation include:
- Service automation, where the system helps you support your customers through achieving satisfaction rates
- Contact management helps you manage all client contact data.This CRM automation type is also used to generate leads to convert them into customers, to record customer details, and to work with them through the entire process.
- Lead scoring is used to help determine which leads are worth the time and effort to nurture into converted customers.
Analytical CRMs
An analytical CRM is primarily about data management and analysis. This CRM will collect, organize, and analyze all data involved in the business processes. Analytical CRMs are able to become integrated with your invoice software so you can create detailed reports that can help you manage your cash flow. You can also use the CRM to generate reports that will enable management to make strategic business decisions. A top analytical CRM is Zoho Analytics.
The benefits of analytical CRM include:
- Customer acquisition and retention, where you can discover your customers’ behavior and purchasing patterns. This helps create a customer targeted approach. This increases the chances of your current leads getting converted into customers.
- Data extraction allows you to discover trends and relationships in your data through statistical analysis. All data is stored in a centralized location so it is easy to analyze.
- Profiling customer personas collects and systematically updates customer information as it becomes available. This enables you to have a complete view of all your customer’s behaviors including buying patterns. You can also segment these customer personas to help improve business growth. A reported 93 percent of companies exceeded their lead and revenue goals when segmenting their data by customer persona.
- Attribution will help you discover exactly what it was that converted a lead into a customer. This helps to retain these customers as well as acquire new ones.
- Employee Performance Tracking allows you to monitor your employees’ customer service performance. This will help you compile data when it comes time for annual employee performance evaluations.
Collaborative CRMs
A collaborative CRM system helps the business establish communication between all operations of customer service, including marketing, sales, vendors, suppliers, customer representatives, tech support, and even stakeholders. A top collaborative CRM is Bitrix24.
The benefits of collaborative CRMs include:
- Interaction management is a centralized access point that has all customer data and interaction history. This helps the customer service team get to know the customers better and serve them better.
- Channel management is monitoring the ways the customers communicate with the company. For instance, some customers prefer to call and speak to a living, breathing person, while others prefer to communicate via email. This CRM records the customer’s communication preference and enables customer service to use the same methods when replying to the customer.
- Document management systems are collaborative CRMs that allow all relevant members of the team to access all formal documents including proposals, contracts, and much more.
Effective customer relationship management can really help grow your business. Inner Works Pro can help you with each step in the building process. Schedule a business evaluation today to get started.