What is CRM? Defination of CRM Software

Being a businessman, you must have heard CRM quite often and must have wondered what CRM stands for? Well, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a process in which you manage and maintain your customers’ data.

The idea of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) came into existence in the early 1970s to ensure customer satisfaction. Back then, data was collected usually from manual surveys or the front-line questioning. The collected data was subject to rigorous statistical analysis to explore valuable insights into the data. The whole process was quite time-consuming and painstaking.

This system’s primary purpose is to improve the relationship between you and your customer and strengthen your business.
CRM has enabled organizations worldwide to improve their customer relationships, communication, expand the collaboration sphere, optimize their business plans and practices.

You want to launch a particular product and want your existing customers to buy it. How would you do that if you haven’t kept your customers’ data in order? CRM lets you manage your customers data and gives you meaningful insights into this data. All these insights can then help you better understand your customers consumption patterns and your sales effectively.

If you want to learn more about the CRM software, Types of CRM, How CRM works and features of CRM then read this article of CRM Software.

What is CRM Software?

CRM software is a type of software that allows you to handle your customers data proficiently and drive growth and benefit. It is the conceptual application of the CRM system.

In 1993, Tom Siebel introduced the first commercial stand-alone CRM software named Siebel Systems. Similarly, in 2004 SubgarCRM developed the world’s first open-source CRM. Many free CRM softwares and commercial CRM softwares are available in the market that can work on both computers and smartphones.

CRM software compiles customer data from the company’s official website, telephone, email and social media. The software allows you to learn more about your customers. This way, you can cater for their needs effectively and retain them. It is a massive storehouse of valuable customer information in a single system.

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What are the Types of CRM Software?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is a handy tool that enables you to manage interactions with existing customers and potential ones.

Its main objective is to integrate and automate sales, marketing, and customer support. CRM softwares have evolved tremendously in the last few years.

Your customer’s complete transaction history with your business is efficiently and intelligently monitored and recorded along with those of all your customers and other business deals. CRM software integrates all business-critical information between a customer and your stores into a single unified system. In a single interface, you can access everything: your sales calls, inquiries, appointments, emails, etc.

Salesforce automation, marketing, contact and project management are the essential features of the best CRM.

However, only five types of CRMs are available in the market, which are:

1. Strategic

Strategic CRM puts customers first and concentrates on the development of customer-centric business culture. It allows you to use the information about customers and market trends to make better business plans.

2. Operational

This type of CRM allows you to manage your business based on the collected customer data. Such CRMs typically have a dashboard that gives an overall view of the existing and prospective customers’ record on a single customer view. The customer data may include personal information, past sales, previous marketing efforts.

3. Customer Data Platform

This CRM collects data through surveys, support calls and various sources like its official website, etc. It then assembles this collected data into a single database with which other software systems can interact.

4. Analytical

This CRM allows you to visualize customer data to get better insights about your customers and their business interactions with your company. Analytical CRM systems use various mining, correlation, and pattern recognition techniques and analyze the customer data. This analysis helps you identify critical problems for improvement.

5. Collaborative

This CRM shares customer feedback data collected from various surveys and technical support calls with external stakeholders, suppliers, vendors and distributors. This shared information of customers sets the direction for the marketing products and services to that particular customer in the future.
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How does CRM Work?

CRM software collects information from social media, your company's official website, email, voice calls, and other channels.

This information is analyzed with various statistical methods. The results are then visualized and interpreted. Based on this analysis, CRM generates each customer’s detailed report. This report gives you a clear perspective on your company’s relationship with the customer and prospects. It eventually enables you to design good fruitful strategies to gain more customers and keep the existing ones.

It gives you a single platform to gather and organize customer data and business processes. This way, you can collaborate, close more deals, and get more done effectively. Whenever customers visit your company’s official website, check out your product offerings, and click your promos, CRM systems can notify you in real-time.

What are the Features of a CRM?

Client management can sometimes be quite a challenging task. Sometimes, maintaining contacts, effectively diagnosing technical and non-technical issues, and ensuring your clients’ satisfaction may be an uphill task. CRM software is specifically designed to alleviate this burden off your shoulders. Here is a compiled list of features of the best user-friendly CRM.

1. Contact Management

Contact management is a vital CRM capability. It allows users to keep and maintain contacts. With this functionality, you can gather essential customer data and strengthen your marketing strategies at the time of introducing new products. It improves your company’s personalization with customers, making them feel they are cared for and special.

Contact Management is a major key factor in customer satisfaction.

2. Proficient Lead Management

A CRM software without Lead management can not endure any further. It is part and parcel of every good CRM to determine and manage lead scores – a score that determines prospects that are most likely to convert. CRM collects customer data like demography and psychographic factors. This data helps in determining the lead score.

3. Prospect to customer conversion management

It is every leading business’s priority to increase its customer base. Without good relationships between customers and your sales teams, you can not increase this base. A good CRM software enables you to bolster and strengthen sales team relationships with prospects and existing customers.

4. High Mobility and Portability

Modern-day CRM applications are highly portable and mobile. You can install them on computers, smartphones, tablets and hand-held laptops. From anywhere, you can access your customer data, dashboards and marketing campaigns. You can access CRM, even on the go. Your management can view data and receive valuable notifications about campaigns on a mobile device.

5. Sales and Sentiment Analysis

It is always a challenging task to launch a new product and make your existing customers buy it. Without a meticulous sales analysis, you can not achieve it. To accomplish this uphill task, you must know your users’ consumption trends and the corresponding lead scores. Here comes the CRM with its marvellous ground-breaking sales and sentiment analysis feature. Sales and sentiment analysis is the most critical feature of a CRM. By analyzing users consumption trends, demography, sentiment towards a particular product, you can plan better sales strategies.

6. Dashboards and Automated Reports Generation

Every best CRM software has artificial intelligence-powered dashboards and report generators. This feature is the hallmark of every CRM. Every leading business firm keeps its customers updated with corresponding statistics. Dashboards enables you to view statistics and consumption trends in a visual, engaging perspective in the form of charts, graphs and customized reports. This AI-powered CRM feature gathers data from various platforms in real-time and updates the dashboard accordingly.

7. Automated Salesforce

Another prominent feature of CRM is its ability to automate certain aspects of the sales process. It should be able to place automatic ongoing calls and follow-up marketing campaigns and, above all, keep and maintain customer data. This automation can save your employees’ time and let them devote their time to more engaging and productive tasks.

8. Data Synchronization

CRM software is highly synchronized. You don’t need to record customer data, emails, campaign updates and other details manually. CRM does the heavy lifting by collecting all data mentioned above. It creates a single shared repository from where you and your management can access this data.

9. Sales Prediction

While launching a product, you must be super sure that your product will attract the targeted audience. Sales prediction gives you an advanced bird’s eye view of the viability of your sales marketing campaigns. You run sales analysis, sentiment analysis, and other statistical algorithms. The results will give you the feasibility of the product marketing strategy. This prediction sets a benchmark by which you can decide whether your results are actually on par with your marketing efforts or not. You can also use this data to identify critical areas for improvement.

10. Email Integration

Are you fed up with sending emails to everyone who subscribed to your company’s email service? Well, don’t worry; with the CRM email integration feature, you can automate your email service. With this feature, you don’t need to send emails manually. You need to set email templates and preferences. And with one click, you are free of all this email sending hassle. With this automated email service can send monthly or weekly reports, new policies, details about your new products, etc.
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What are the Benefits of CRM Software?

CRM software collects information from social media, your company's official website, email, voice calls, and other channels.

The CRM market is expanding rapidly and might reach more than $80 billion in revenue by 2025. The primary factor for its popularity is its user-friendly features. These features are arguably the most effective tools to acquire and retain customers. If you are interested in knowing your target audience better – location, preference, spending habits, demography, feedback, engagement with your brand – then you must invest in an intelligent CRM.

Here are some Exciting Benefits of CRM Software:

Reliable Reporting

CRM software collects information from social media, your company's official website, email, voice calls, and other channels.

For every business’s sustainability, reliable performance reports are significant; not a single business thrives without it. And to generate such reliable reports, one must have trust-worthy data. Before CRM software, business people usually collect this by taking manual surveys or front-line question answering sessions. To generate performance reports, one has to apply various statistical operations to the data manually. The possibility of personal error and personal bias sometimes made this report quite suspicious. But after CRM software, it made you free of all this hassle. A CRM software automatically collects all necessary users data, conducts online surveys, and gathers this data in one place. This collected data goes through different validation checks. These checks establish the reliability of the data. Reports generated from this data are highly reliable and let you make performance-driven decisions.
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Dashboard & Customized Report Generation

CRM software collects information from social media, your company's official website, email, voice calls, and other channels.

Gone are the days when you had to manually collect, input each data and make reports. Now, CRM software gathers and organizes all the data. It also creates a dashboard or an interactive user interface to see all the necessary details about your customers and the company’s overall performance in real-time. Not only you can use this dashboard, but you also can set it up for both your employees and customers. This dashboard helps all see and manage their tasks. For example, if you wish to know how many prospects have clicked on the ad. And how many bought from that link. Furthermore, you can opt for an automated report generation or manually generate reports. In an automated report generation method, one can receive the report, whether monthly or weekly, in email or directly see it on the CRM.

Social Media Outreach

CRM software collects information from social media, your company's official website, email, voice calls, and other channels.

Since CRM software captures data in real-time, it gives you more insight into your targeted audience. This insight helps you in creating more relevant, personalized social outreach campaigns. This dynamic content and automated messaging lets you find people of the same interest in a niche product.
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