What is CRM software?
CRM software is a system that enables you to nurture relationships with customers and prospects to drive sales or sustain long-term profitability. It also aggregates streams of customer data to surface insights that help you make better business decisions.
As more customers look for products and services that understand their needs and responsive to their situations, businesses find it necessary to personalize customer interactions to stay competitive. Indeed, a Forrester study revealed that 72% of customers believe “time is the most important thing that a company can do to provide them with good service.”
Why use a CRM software?
You’ve learned what is CRM software, but what are its uses? There are plenty of benefits of a CRM software. It can be set up for insights, automation, integration, visibility, accessibility, and collaboration—the result is increased productivity and more efficiency to your business. Here are the key advantages of CRM software:
- Streamline customer profiling. Get a 360-degree visibility over your customers with details of their demographics, contact information, transaction history, and support interactions, among others. Organizing this customer information in a single, centralized location makes it easy to sort, store, and retrieve as needed.
- Boost sales opportunities. Having access to crucial information gives empowers you to enhance your strategies. It streamlines qualifying leads and converting promising prospects to make sure you are spending time on valuable leads. Make the right approach at the right time when up selling or cross-selling. If you have dormant customers, you can re-engage them by reaching out proactively.
- Leverage data-driven decisions. The tool gives you deep insights about your customers and the market behavior by gathering disparate data together. It looks through trends, patterns, and insights to empower your strategies. You also get visibility on the sentiments of your customers towards your brand by translating the data streams coming from sources such as sales data, support interactions, and social media content.
- Forecast sales efficiently. You can improve your forecasting through an efficient and transparent sales pipeline. This will show you the tasks and deals that are incoming and going out. Know which of them are moving or inactive so you can respond appropriately. This also helps you make changes to ensure your business goals are achieved.
- Align marketing and sales. These two processes work together to improve your overall customer experience. They both share information about contacts, customer insights, and deals. Marketing teams can help your sales team increase their sales while the sales teams can empower marketing teams in their marketing strategies, brand messages, and campaigns.
- Monitor your customer’s social posts.Social media channels can be managed in a single platform. This makes it easy to respond when a customer reaches out to you. Brand mentions will let you know your customer’s sentiments. Understand what you’re doing right and improve them by knowing your customer’s praises. Meanwhile, resolve and address the rants and issues thrown by your customers to enhance their experience.
- Accelerate data collection. Mobile solutions enable you to quickly gather and save data even when you’re on the go. The quick access to the software empowers how you stay updated with real-time syncing. Sales and marketing teams can respond immediately to their sales pipelines and campaigns at any time, anywhere.
What does a CRM software do?
We’ve answered the question what is CRM software, now let’s consider its main features. Various features of CRM software can organize contacts, manage deals and tasks, automate workflows, track leads in the sales cycle, run and measure campaigns, and generate reports in one platform. CRM software also aligns the workflows and data of various departments, mainly sales, marketing, and support, and promotes collaboration among teams. How does a CRM software work will depend on how many of these features it has.
Here are the key features of a CRM software:
- Contact management. Customer data such as contact information, support interactions, demographics, and transactions, among others, are stored in a unified hub. This also streamlines information retrieval.
- Lead management. It helps you manage leads throughout its entire lifecycle right from prospecting up to conversion. Pipeline stages can be configured to match your requirements. Customer profiles and interactions are centralized for contact management.
- Tasks and deals. Automatically add tasks and deals into customer information. It streamlines populating, assigning and monitoring items on your sales pipeline. Information is updated in real-time to ensure you have access to the latest changes.
- Email tracking. Built-in on the CRM tool or available as an add-on, this feature gives you visibility when your email campaigns are clicked and opened. CRM tools commonly integrate with popular email services such as Gmail, MailChimp, and Outlook.
- Campaign management. Empower your campaigns by managing it from creation to delivery. It segments customers, leverage targetting, and streamline workflows. Metrics are used to measure a campaign’s success with data-driven insights.
- Social media management. Get insights on how your audience interacts with your social media accounts. Information from comments, likes, and dislikes, among others, will give you information to improve your marketing strategies and customer experience.
- Reports and dashboards. It accelerates how you generate reports in real-time with accuracy. Valuable data is consolidated to uncover crucial insights about your market, trends, patterns, and behaviors.
- Mobile app. Access your CRM solution on-the-go through mobile apps on devices such as iOS and Android. Staying connected with your CRM data empowers you to stay connected even when out of the office.
What are the factors to consider when getting CRM software?
Whatever solution you choose, make sure it has the following aspects to fulfill the main purpose of CRM software: nurture customer relationships.
- Analytics. The software must be more than a platform that saves your customer data. It must effectively gather, consolidate and analyze data so you can uncover crucial insights to use in making data-driven decisions. The complexity of your business processes should be considered in how advanced your CRM tool should be.
- Customization. It is essential for your software to be flexible and configurable according to the unique workflows of your business. Having control over your data and approvals, among others, is crucial.
- Scalability. It should support your business as it grows so you won’t have to transfer to another software and start from scratch. Some factors to look at is if you can add more users, unlock advanced features, tighten the security level, and integrate with third-party apps.
- Integration. Connecting with other apps is crucial especially since it deals with your customers. You should check if it integrates with systems you are currently using, especially customer-facing apps for help desk.
- Ease of use. Training can take up your time that should be spent on more important tasks. Hence, the software must be quick and easy to deploy. A short learning curve lets employees understand and navigate around the software with ease.
- Mobile support. When a team member is out, mobile apps help you stay connected and updated. CRM solutions usually offer support for iOS and Android devices.
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