Client satisfaction should be at the core of every business regardless of its industry and size. The fierce competition on the market makes every company fight tooth and nail over each client by providing an impeccable customer journey. To win new clients and, more importantly, to retain the old ones, many companies use CRM development to create solutions that will help them manage client data, offer efficient support services, and have a complete overview of what’s going on within their business.
Based on a company’s needs, we can distinguish three types of customer relationship tools that will be discussed next.
- Operational CRM
Operational software helps firms optimize business processes and activities across departments. Thus, operational CRM systems can be further subdivided into three major categories that correspond to their purposes: sales, marketing, and service automation.
Sales Automation
This type of CRM is used for various sales activities. It guides a sales representative through all the stages of the buyer’s journey so that they know how and when to interact with a prospect. A robust sales automation tool includes lead management, opportunity management and helps salespeople schedule meetings and presentations, close deals, handle orders and invoices, conduct timely follow-ups, and figure out when the right time for cross-selling and upselling is.
Marketing Automation
CRM for marketing automation is a really big deal for marketing professionals. Such CRMs automate multiple marketing campaigns, making them segmented, excellently targeted, and personalized. The software distributes these campaigns at the right time through various channels such as email, different social media platforms, or even mobile messages.
With advanced analytics, companies can easily estimate the result of an automated marketing campaign by checking important metrics or even boosting the ROI of the campaign, making marketing communication more effective.
Service Automation
CRM for service automation is a tool that helps harmonize all the service business processes in the service department. It reduces manual work and allows service agents to provide excellent client service. Such a customer relationship management system can include a knowledge base, where a person can look for a resolution to their issue, a chatbot, or a customer can opt for a call with a real person.
The service automation tool also helps a service agent to successfully and quickly navigate through multiple calls simultaneously, forward them to various departments, create a customer profile of the calling person, keep track of all the issues, and provide timely responses and resolutions.
An operational CRM lets businesses optimize processes and integrate them across all departments.
- Analytical CRM
Analytical CRM does more than collect, organize, and store data from sales, marketing, and services activities within a company. An analytical customer relationship management system allows users to obtain considerable insights that will drive the business forward. Advanced analytics dashboards can be easily customized to generate reports on a single employee, department, and entire company.
To make the most out of an analytical CRM, it provides a few useful features such as data warehousing, data mining, and online analytical processing, also known as OLAP.
Data Warehousing
Businesses have long understood that data is a valuable source that guides companies’ strategies and impacts their decisions, big and small. However, data comes from versatile sources: website forms, social media posts, email correspondence, phone calls, messengers, etc. And to keep track of all of it, an analytical CRM system is a data warehousing, where information flows come to a single platform where a firm can safely preserve information.
Data Mining
To make the most out of storing information, such a tool allows one to thoughtfully analyze it to discover patterns, trends, and insights. Those, in turn, can be used for various marketing, sales, and service activities that will lead to enhanced client satisfaction, brand loyalty, and lucrative deals.
Online Analytical Processing
OLAP features in a CRM allow users to analyze data from different sources simultaneously, especially databases. In addition, online analytical processing can analyze information in various formats, be it spreadsheets or text. OLAP provides answers to many questions such as “what are the most popular products or services in our company,” “what is our monthly profit analysis,” etc.
- Collaborative CRM
As the name suggests, a collaborative CRM is a tool that helps employees closely collaborate with each other. It links all company’s departments together, creating complete unity and overcoming obstacles in communication.
Such a tool can act as a document management system, where people store, share and save documents, invoices, and various valuable files. It can also have its own social media features, where employees can chat with one another and work on multiple projects together.
However, the features of a collaborative CRM are more than that. This is the place where the communication with the client is conducted. Employees make calls, email, and write social media posts directly from the system to the customer. And their conversations are saved and kept in a collaborative CRM. This allows everyone in the company to keep an eye on the client at each step of the customer journey.
Knowing about the enormous benefits that CRM tools provide, a lot of companies are going to use the technology to boost their business. According to a US consulting firm Grand View Research, the CRM market will be growing even further. In 2020, its value was estimated at $ 43.7 billion, and by 2028 it’s planned to reach $ 96.5 billion. It means that more and more companies recognize the usefulness provided by CRM.
Operational, analytical, and collaborative CRM’s are valuable to firms as they remove silos between departments, obtain illuminating insights to boost sales, marketing, and service strategies based on various data, increase brand loyalty, and provide outstanding customer journeys to clients and prospects.