Your business has many contact points with customers. Customers can reach your business through the sales desk, phone lines, social media accounts, emails, chatbots, mailbox, and so many other channels.
Without technology, it isn’t easy to collect data on what each contact through each channel yielded. For that, you need customer relationship management software (CRM), a tool that helps your business collect information and connect with anyone who formerly had contact with you. You will come across either an operational CRM or analytical CRM.
Operational CRM creates efficiencies within the business processes of serving a customer. Its primary function is to provide services throughout the customer lifecycle by generating leads, converting them, and collecting information. Operational CRM achieves this through:
- Sales Automation– This uses modules like lead management, contact management, quote-to-order management, and sales forecasting to create an efficient sales process. It organizes information to help the business meet customers’ needs and increase sales to effectively and efficiently serve new and existing customers.
- Marketing Automation– Finds the best way to offer products and approach new customers. It uses a campaign management module to reach customers through the most effective channel such as phone, social media, email, or face-to-face.
- Service Automation– Uses call management, troubleshooting, and service label management to monitor the quality of service. It allows the business to leverage quality service to retain customers and build strong relationships.
Analytical CRM is a tool that gives top management, marketing, and sales personnel insights into improving customer service. It is a data analysis tool that uses various pools of information to improve decision making, campaign effectiveness, sales, support, and customer relationships.
The Main Types of CRM Systems
The most popular type of CRM is one that helps the business improve its selling efforts. Sales CRMs leverage tools to increase conversion and manage the sales cycle. It includes managing sales leads, processes, and teams. With it, the business can build a sales pipeline, track leads, and have better insights on all sales activities.
Your business will be able to reach customers from multiple channels (phone, email, social media, and others), build their profiles, and target them with the best sales message or package from a single platform. Sales-driven organizations with sales teams typically use this type of CRM to sell products like insurance policies, loans, office equipment, or cell phone plans.
A service CRM leverages customer service and support tools with marketing and sales to improve the customer experience. It will allow your business to unify its knowledge base from multiple departments to streamline customer data and collaboratively respond and resolve customer queries.
No matter the customer’s channel to contact the business, your staff member will have data and customer history at their fingertips. A service CRM will help resolve issues faster, reduce frustrations and reduce customer churns while improving conversions. Service CRMs are present in any service industry, such as banks, internet providers, call centers, or government services.
A marketing CRM enables your business to centralize tasks and data so that you can communicate better. A marketing CRM works with the sales function of your campaigns so that you can get more leads and close more deals. On the platform, you will be able to automate marketing campaigns on multiple channels and get insights like click-through rate, A/B testing, and whether a customer opened the email or not.
With the insights, you can further target your message according to how much time they spent on your website, what they clicked on and what information they shared. Marketing CRM is ideal for companies that draw customers using content such as hotels, business-to-business service providers, or media houses.
Choosing the Right CRM
The right CRM for your business depends on the industry, business process, and marketing goals. All CRMs come with integration capabilities so that you can add more capabilities; for example, if you plan on setting up e-commerce order fulfillment shipping, link it to your accounting software or any other business intelligence tools.
Although all CRMs can help you achieve general marketing objectives, their specialization can help you achieve more. For example:
- If attracting new customers to your business is crucial to its success, then the sales CRM makes more sense, while if you rely on maintaining established relationships, then the service CRM will work better.
- A service CRM is ideal for listening to your customers’ concerns and needs.
- A business that relies on selling vast quantities of products will be better served by a sales CRM, while a business that relies on low volume sales can use a marketing CRM.
Center Your Customer
Centering the customer in your business is a strategy that yields results. CRM software helps you to achieve this efficiently and effectively. It’s just a matter of choosing the one that works well for you and your industry needs.