We are living in a pro-customer era, where maintaining cordial relationships with consumers is the cornerstone of every fruitful business.
However, in recent decades, the process of tracking customer expectations and managing their relationships has become quite complex.
The customer data management not only involved tedious manual work, but it was also complicated as customer information wasn’t adequately distributed across the business (between marketing and sales departments), which often lead to unexploited business opportunities.
With the introduction of the Digitalization and Internet, we witness the wave of innovative marketing-technology platforms, that can help organizations to develop, track, and manage customer relationships effectively, and these platforms are known as CRM (customer relationship manager.
What is CRM?
CRM is software that acts as a single storehouse to bring your marketing, sales, lead generation, and customer support functions together, and streamlines the business processes, people, and policies in a unified platform.
As more organizations are opting for a hybrid business model, they must have an effective “CRM” that not only their remote sales team productive but also offer important CRM tools to cooperate with their co-workers and effectively engage their consumers.
In this blog, we will give you a glimpse of the CRM system, its functionality, and features, and what it can do to transform your business.
What Does a CRM Do?
At the basic level, CRM software enables sales professionals and marketers to analyze and manage relationships with an organization’s existing and potential customers.
It allows an organization to track every user interaction and collects their information effectively.
This enables a marketer to gain in-depth insight into customer history and preferences while interacting with them.
This makes the customer interaction more personalized, enhances the conversion ratio, and boosts customer loyalty and trust.
CRM platform includes various functionalities that allow an organization to track customer/organization interactions via several available touchpoints, such as :
- Search engines
- Emails
- Social media
- Contact forms
- Phone calls
How Does a CRM Software Work?
A CRM software takes care of multiple processes of an organization, it also automates various repetitive tasks, sets reminders for critical events, and raises alerts if something needs immediate attention.
CRMs also provide analytics capabilities that allow your business to track the performance and efficiency of your marketing initiatives to generate conversions and leads.
It helps you to manage the marketing and sales funnels, from lead stipulation to opportunity management, prediction, and deal closing.
- It integrates with other important business functions –CRM software acts as a sales pipeline that fetches and categorizes the customer information and business transactions, it coordinates with other applications, such as ERP, marketing automation tools, helpdesk, and e-commerce platforms.
- It raises alerts for critical business tasks – Whenever something important task needed to be done, the CRM software raises an alert about it, based on the settings and configuration done by the administrators.
It allows you to perform pre-scheduled tasks such as initiating a phone call or sending emails to your customers. CRM records all activities, which gives you enough time to execute your business activities effectively.
- It enhances your Sales Workflow – Workflow management is the core of any CRM software. Its functions are separated into two primary functionalities, post-sales, and pre-sales.
Every transaction starts with a lead from any existing or potential customer, then CRM software funnels it through your sales process while connecting the lead with appropriate records on documents, calls, messages, and reminders.
- It enhances marketing, sales, and customer support results –CRM software uses innovative and effective methods to drive prevailing results for any organization.
It increases sales, marketing, and customer service outcomes. It allows sales and marketing teams to define a robust strategy and follow it to bring promising results.
- It Produces Unprecedented Opportunities – A CRM software not only helps you close the deals but also offers unimaginable post-sales prospects.
It can track the issues reported by the customers and then engage the integrated support desk to offer immediate support.
It can also utilize business insights to offer a personalized experience to improve cross-sell and upsell. It funnels back the customer to the lead pipeline, which helps an organization to fetch more revenues.
Functionalities of CRM software, that can transform your Business :
Here are a few functionalities offered by CRM software, that can transform your business :
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Marketing automation:
CRMs offer state-of-the-art marketing-automation capabilities to automate monotonous tasks in the funnel.
The software can automatically send marketing emails to customers according to a schedule to offer them a personalized experience.
The objective of marketing automation is to ensure sales leads are effectively engaged and transform them into active customers.
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Lead management:
A CRM software tracks an organization’s leads enable marketing teams to register new leads into the system (manually or automatically) and track them until they are fulfilled.
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Sales automation:
CRM software not only tracks customer interactions but also automates business functions (sales and marketing) to increase leads and attract prospects while retaining existing customers.
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Workflow automation:
It helps businesses to optimize their workflows and processes by streamlining routine workloads, which empowers employees to focus on high-level and creative tasks.
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Analytics:
CRM software offers several built-in analytics CRM tools that provide deep insights that assist organizations to boost sales and customer satisfaction rates.
CRM analytics also helps an organization track attribution and improve customer experience quality. A marketer can use analytics tools to observe patterns and develop targeted marketing campaigns.
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Artificial Intelligence:
CRM software such as Salesforce and Salesforce development companies provides innovative AI capabilities that can help marketers to identify the patterns leading to effective sales, which enables them to craft efficient and accurate marketing strategies to improve sales and customer satisfaction.
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Personalized Customer experiences:
CRM can be used to offer consistent and highly personalized experiences for your existing and potential customers across multiple marketing channels, which improves conversions and enhances brand visibility.
- Social media integration
- Payment tracking and Payment Management
- Inventory management
Off-the-Shelf CRM Solutions in the Market
We have numerous software organizations offering ready-made and commercial CRM solutions. These platforms come in different sizes and shapes, usually offered as a SaaS solution that provides marketers a brilliant blend of marketing, sales, lead management, and customer-service functionalities.
Here we have a few examples of some exceptionally popular CRM solutions:
- Salesforce
- HubSpot
- Microsoft Dynamics CRM
- Oracle
- SugarCRM
Conclusion
CRM software enables businesses to use worthwhile connections to engage with their customers and offer them exceptional experiences. CRM offers organizations to embrace robust strategic methods to outclass their competitors.
However, it is important to understand the nitty-gritty of CRM before implementing it, CRM is indeed a business strategy that is developed as a platform using technology and CRM tools, not vice-versa.
You must identify the business functions that can be transformed using CRM, and then proceed further accordingly.
If you are ready to discover the different CRM solutions out there. Go check out some popular CRM solutions to start the transformational journey of your business.
Author Bio
Saurabh Sharma is a Digital Marketing Executive at Arka Softwares, a leading mobile app & web development company. He has 2 years of experience in the Information Technology industry. He spends his time reading about new trends in Digital Marketing and the latest app development technologies.
