Developing and maintaining excellent customer relationships is at the core of any good business model. But staying on top of your client’s relationship with your business is complicated at any given moment. And that is true whether you are a small business with few customers or a large enterprise with thousands of customers.
The best technique to address the challenge is with the right tool. Today, many businesses rely on CRM platforms to help their marketing, customer services, sales, and operations teams, manage their day-to-day activities, and offer remarkable customer experiences. That is precisely why having a clear image of the different types of CRM software and what they do is a must. This will help businesses identify the right product for their team, whether you are in the market for a CRM for the first time or you are searching for a different solution.
CRM is now the most significant software market internationally. Businesses use CRM to manage their interactions and relationships with prospects and clients. CRM software can help any company improve its customer experience and the buyer’s journey. In this blog, TechNinjaPro will cover what CRM is, three different types of CRM software and how to choose one for your business.
What is CRM?
Customer relationship management software is a tool you can use to manage and store data about your customers. CRM Software manages the contact information, logged service issues, open inquiries, purchase history, sales opportunities, and even marketing campaigns. Customer relationship management software benefits include better customer service, better insight into relations with prospects and clients, better lead management, and more closed deals. Most importantly, CRM comes in many forms. Depending on how large your company is and how much you are willing to invest, you can easily find the perfect tools for you.
Types of CRM software
There are three key types of CRM software. To help you navigate the landscape, TechNinjaPro will break down the three primary types of CRM software:
1. Operational CRM
Operational CRM helps streamlines and simplify an organization’s primary business processes. They offer tools to better visualize and handle the complete customer journey, even when it includes a high number of touchpoints. Operational CRM software can help businesses generate leads, convert those leads into contacts, and offer the necessary service infrastructure to delight and retain customers.
Operational CRM software typically offers automation features. Sales, marketing, and service automation offload some of the work your employees would otherwise have to hold. That opens up their program for the more personal and creative aspects of their tasks. And this makes it much easier for growing to continue to offer top-notch service to scale.
Features:
Marketing Automation
Operational CRM software streamlines and simplify time-consuming and manual tasks for marketers with the help of marketing automation. They automate tiresome responsibilities like coordinating email campaigns, distributing content offers, and reaching out to contacts at scale.
Some customer relationship management software can also deliver marketing analytics, track the ROI of online ads, and provides businesses personal insights into individual leads. Some CRMs can even help companies with more challenging, specialized marketing practices like blogging and SEO.
Sales Automation
Sales automation is intended to streamline a business’s sales process, enabling representatives to spend more time interacting with prospects and bringing customers on board. Firstly, an operational CRM software has tools that address the many aspects of the sales process. It can distribute leads to sales representatives and provide visibility into which leads are most worth pursuing via lead scoring.
Operational CRM software also handles the time-consuming jobs of creative records for each new contract, freeing sales representatives to spend time selling. Sales automation generally includes email scheduling for leads, tools that enable prospects to schedule meetings with representatives, and features to track sales calls.
Service Automation
Service automation helps you automate customer service. Its purpose is to help a business create an extraordinary experience for clients, keep them devoted and encourage them to promote the company image. Service automation always sets the framework for one-on-one correspondence between service representatives and customers.
This also includes setting up inboxes that aggregate customer emails, coordinating live chats, and setting up Chatbots. Service automation also offers ways to delegate service tasks to representatives via ticketing systems. Some extra features such as FAQ pages and a Knowledge base are also commonly associated with service automation.
Benefits
With operational CRM software, you can:
- Track important data
- gain insights to boost revenue and sales
- Manage a range of different marketing campaigns
- Automate recurring activities
2. Analytical CRM
Analytical CRM software relies on data analysis and gathering to help businesses better serve their clients. Analytical CRM software have the primary focus of helping you analyze the client data you have to gain crucial insights. Digital platforms now make it easy to collect big quantity of data. Some examples of this information are customer behaviors, preferences, and contact information.
CRM software is nothing more than a database filled with reams of information from all over your business. An analytical CRM software is the key by which you can unlock the vast amount of information you have collected.
Features
Businesses can then leverage your collected information for better sales efforts, targeted marketing campaigns, and personalized customer support. The most important components of analytical CRM software are data warehousing, data mining, and OLAP tools.
Data Warehousing
Data housing is a type of database incorporated into many analytical CRM software. Analytical CRM software provides one of the most efficient systems analysts can use to collect, integrate and prepare customer data for analysis. A data warehouse stores current and historical information in a single place, and processes like data extraction and analysis are easier than in more conventional databases.
Data Mining
Data mining comes into action once you have a collection of data you need to analyze. CRM software use data mining techniques to track data and data trends relevant to customer interests. This allows them to provide a better picture of a business’s customer lifecycle. Data mining has several techniques such as association, classification, and detection to find patterns and assign meaning to the data.
Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)
Online Analytical Processing is a category of tools used to evaluate data stored in databases. These tools are used to analyze multidimensional data from multiple perspectives. OLAP is a robust technology for data discovery, including capabilities for unlimited report viewing, complex analytical calculations, and predictive scenario planning.
OLAP forms the foundation of business intelligence tools that allows you to slice and dice data sets, so you have the knowledge required to take action. Online Analytical Processing has forecasting abilities. The ability to run diverse scenarios and predict future needs has a ripple effect across your business. Instead of relying on prediction, you can make data-driven decisions.
Benefits
If you use analytical CRM software, it will provide you with data insights.
- It helps you to improve customer satisfaction.
- Analytical CRM helps you know the best times and customers to cross-sell or upsell.
- Boost those customer retention rates.
- It also helps you target prospects, leads, and customers with relevant content.
- Analytical CRM software lets you grow revenue by analyzing what sells and what does not.
3. Collaborative CRM
Collaborative CRM software brings together a business’s marketing, sales, and service data to enhance synchronicity within the company and provide each department a better understanding of their client’s needs, wants, and interests. It covers marketing, sales, customer service, and the technical support team. Often the sales representatives, marketing team, and customer support agents are all in different departments that feel disconnected.
For big enterprises, each department is further separated based on factors like geographic locations, products they focus on, or skill specialties. To provide a flawless customer experience throughout the customer’s journey, you need to share data across the whole business in real-time. Collaborative CRM software makes sure that all teams have access to the same up-to-date customer data.
Features
A collaborative CRM software has two definitive components such as interaction management and channel management. Let’s have a look at what they do.
Interaction Management
Interaction management is a practice that tracks every interaction between a business and its clients, whether through social media, email, face-to-face interactions, or other communication channels. It allows a business to keep a log of these correspondence and team notes about them. Different business units can then share this data across the company.
With interaction management, there are tools that allow you to group contacts based on various criteria, map behaviors to enhance interactions, filter results for more detailed views, and more.
Channel Management
Channel management takes a step further. It is the process of using the data gathered and analyzed during interaction management to identify and pursue the communication channels that best suit customer preferences.
Should your business’s customer service unit communicate primarily via chat or email? These are some questions that channel management is designed to answer. Collaborative CRM software makes it easy for your business to track and communicate with your clients via their preferred channels. It records how your clients get in touch with your and allows you to respond to them using the same channel
Benefits
Collaborative CRM software leads to benefits such as:
- Enhances cross-team communication.
- Consistent support for clients across their channels of choice.
- Integrated data for a complete view of your clients
- Data-driven interactions with clients
- Messaging based on real pain points
4. Strategic CRM
Businesses ready to improve sales, profits, and customer satisfaction need to deploy CRM strategically. Most CRMs available today fall short of offering their users a real strategic view of their customer’s experience. Strategic CRM focuses on maintaining long-term customer relationships, and it is typically included as part of collaborative CRMs. Basically, forming data from strategic CRMs is to improve users’ expectations and experience. At the same time, it considers employees’ roles in getting expected results. In other words, TechNinjaPro finds what matters to consumers and what top problems consumers face.
According to a customer experience survey, convenience and efficiency are business qualities buyer values the most. Strategic CRMs not only provide you feedback immediately, but they also enhance knowledge and communication with the client. This arrangement is valuable if you are in a business centered on long-term connections instead of brief campaigns and fast deals. You can create a customized approach to managing unique business processes using strategic CRM.
Features
Project Management:
The next impactful step in the plan of CRM strategies is creating a valuable and motivated project team after an organizational commitment has been settled. Each member of this project has to be a skilled professional since these participants will be the key decision-makers in the process.
Business Analysis:
CRM strategies must fixate on and concentrate on exact business requirements. This business analysis feature includes questionnaires of top-level sales, a set of surveys, marketing, and financial executives to collect the actual perceptions of the strategies to be adopted and the outcomes of the policy to be applied at the final point. The 360-degree project management feature addresses the 360-degree view of all aspects of a strategy, including technical, financial, sales, management, and marketing.
Cross-departmental collaboration:
Every department should be susceptible to all development projects and execution of the operations. There is always a keen focus on constructive solutions and the effects of the techniques. Strategic CRM ensures the implementation and awareness of all cross-departmental efforts.
Benefits
- Coordinates insightful customer analytics.
- Elevates customer experience through efficient sales and marketing.
- Offers a picture of how your clients interact with you by telling you what they get from you and when, how they purchase from you, how they solve issues with you.
- Offers best-in-class tools to remedy customer problems on time.
- Addresses every aspect of client interaction such as sales, marketing, trends, service, motivators, and behavior.
Key Factors In a CRM Software
Before discovering which types of CRM software to consider, it is essential to figure out your client relationship strategy. Some of the most significant factors to consider in your search for a perfect CRM software include:
1. How to set up and learn
Some CRM software are difficult to install and configure. Some would need you to hire someone to manage them on an ongoing basis. For a small company, investing in something your team never has the time to learn would not be worth the cost. Even big corporations will be better served to find something they can get up and running fast.
2. Integration with products
For CRM software to offer the benefits discussed, they need information. To get the most information from a CRM software, you need one integrated with all the other relevant products you use and pre-integrated with your top products, so you do not waste time determining how to connect them manually.
3. How it connects separate departments
When long-term relationships are the primary goal, a collaboration between marketing, sales, and customer services is an essential part of the equation. If you need all customer-facing employees to access updated customer data each time they interact with a client, you need CRM software that connects everyone through one platform.
4. Payment model
CRM software that uses a subscription model for payment are the most common option. You can also find some on-premise CRMs that you can pay once for a specific number of users and then download to your devices.
5. Security features
Customer information is sensitive. While it has value for you, it can quickly become a liability if it gets into the wrong hands. Any CRM software you consider needs to promise the highest level of security, so you can keep your information safe and keep your client’s trust intact.
How to choose a CRM for your business?
As you can see, some of the types of CRM software can be found in tools like Salesforce, Hubspot, or Zoho. These examples provide specific plans for any purpose. It is worth knowing what types of CRM you want to make the perfect decision.
If you struggle with choosing a CRM software, specify your organization goals:
- Are you searching for tools to analyze your clients?
- Do you need to automate your sales or marketing?
- Do you focus on long-term relationships with your clients?
Based on these concerns, you can determine what features your CRM software should have. Another choice is to invest in custom CRM software. It is your own CRM software, entirely based on your business objectives and needs.
Conclusion
If you need to offer your customer a great customer experience, good intentions are not enough. You need a way to organize and efficiently use all the customer data you have. The right CRM software empowers your team to deliver personalized customer service. No matter which types of CRM software are most important for your business, you can be sure of one thing. Implementing the right CRM software will help you better convert, attract, retain and serve your clients.