The core of most business models is to build and maintain strong customer relationships. However, it is pretty challenging to stay on top of the information about who your customers are and their relationship with your company. This stands true for all the companies, whether they have 100 or thousands of customers.
The best method to solve this problem is to have the right tool, such as a decent CRM. It stands for Customer Relationship Management. There are three types of CRM. You should know the different types of CRM before you decide to choose one for your company.
Different Types of CRM Systems
CRM includes a wide variety of marketing, CS, and sales tools. The various CRM products differ according to the focus and features and can easily be divided into three main types, as mentioned below.
Collaborative CRM systems
Collaborative CRM systems primarily focus on breaking down silos. Mostly, the customer support agents, the sales reps, and the marketing team find it challenging to communicate and feel disconnected from each other.
In the case of prominent corporations, each of these departments is further divided according to factors such as the channels they serve, the geographic locations, skill specialties, and the channels serve.
However, if they are keen on providing an excellent customer experience from the beginning to the end of the customer’s journey, you must have some methods to share data with your whole organization in real-time.
Collaborative CRM systems help in ensuring that all your teams can easily access the updated customer data irrespective of the channel or department they work in. The customer support agents should have updated data with the marketing and sales teams when they work with a potential client.
The call center agents should also have updated information about customer interactions through email. This integration of different channels and departments saves the clients from the tiring experience of having to explain themselves to everyone repeatedly. Every employee from other departments that they contact can easily pull the customer’s detailed and updated file and help them with their issues.
Operational CRM systems
Operational CRM systems help streamline a company’s processes to build strong customer relationships. They offer practical tools to quickly visualize and handle the customer’s journey efficiently, even with many touch points. This begins from the customer’s first interaction with the company’s official website, across the whole lead management process as they go through the sales pipeline, and this continues till they become a customer.
Operational CRM systems usually offer automation features in their tools. Service automation, marketing automation, and sales automation remove some extra workloads your employees would have to handle. This allows them to have more time and a fee schedule for the more personal and creative part of the job, the aspects that humans need to finish the job. This allows growing and small companies to provide top-rated customer service at a low price and low effort.
Analytical CRM systems
Analytical CRM systems mainly focus on analyzing the customer data that helps you collect crucial insights. Digital platforms and advanced tools have made collecting customer data increasingly easy as you can access a large amount of data.
However, data analysis, the next step needed to transform this data into something useful for your business, is incredibly challenging. Furthermore, some estimates indicate that over half of the customer data collected by enterprises is never used or analyzed.
However, it would be best if you did not let your customer data waste like this. It is too precious. You can use an analytical CRM system tool with valuable features that can assist you in using your data by helping you see crucial trends in your customers’ behavior.
With this essential data, you can understand what you need to do to increase the success of your sales, which leads to even more customer retention and can help you know the most common customer problems.
How does a CRM System or Software work?
At the most basic level, a CRM system enables salespeople and the marketing team to analyze and manage relationships with existing and potential customers.
It lets you track every customer interaction with the company and their crucial information. This way, when the customer interacts with someone from the marketing team, your employee can easily see the customer’s history and know who they are. This makes the customer trust the company more, become more loyal, makes the conversation personalized, and significantly increases the chances of conversion.
CRM software has certain functionalities that enable you to track the interactions between the customer and the company through various touch points such as emails, social media, phone calls, search engines, and contact forms.
CRM software, along with marketing automation, helps provide the marketing and the sales teams with a team of fools to manage the marketing and sales funnels, for opportunity management and lead qualification, deal closure, and forecasting.
A combination of CRM functionalities which is at the bottom of the funnel, and marketing automation which is at the top of the funnel, helps in the end-to-end management of the sales funnel.
There is a popular trend now that many top-rated CRM software either develop or acquire their marketing-automation systems to offer the functionality. However, some CRMs allow easy integration with other marketing automation systems.
Conclusion
Maintaining solid relationships with your customers is extremely important in making your business successful. However, previously, tracking and managing customer relationships for a business were time-consuming and highly fragmented.
Companies would have to store crucial customer data in spreadsheets and filing cabinets. This would involve manual work and waste the employees’ time. However, with the introduction of CRM systems, employees from different divisions can easily share and access crucial information and can help the customers solve their problems instantly.