Customer relationship management refers to the processes and strategies to optimize interactions with customers. Every business technically has a CRM. But levels differ based on the strategies and technologies.
As your business grows, you’ll need to streamline processes to maintain or boost customer experience. You’ll need a more efficient way to handle the increasing customer interactions and expectations. This is where a CRM system or software comes in.
Customer relationship management streamlines the process of gathering information and improves customer experiences. Learn what is CRM software in this guide.
What Is CRM Software?
CRM software is technology to help your business nurture relations and improve customer satisfaction. It does this by making data accessible and streamlining customer service. The ultimate goal of CRM software is to boost user experience.
A CRM system increases proactivity when it comes to tackling customer issues. It improves connectivity with customers, encourages retention, and increases profitability. Traditionally, CRMs primarily focused on client databases and contact management. The modern CRM system is more sophisticated and focuses on the entire customer lifecycle.
With the best CRM software, you can manage customer relations in marketing, sales, online and offline. CRM software tracks user issues and experiences across all touchpoints.
Adopting CRM software is the secret to staying on top of entire customer issues. The software gathers data from different customer touchpoints and stores in one place. You can uncover a user’s info, history, and behavior with the data.
You can gather staggering amounts of user data with a CRM system. Successful personalization campaigns begin with CRM software. Let’s look at the core features of a customer relationship management system.
Features of CRMs
Every CRM shares some of the same basic features but not all are created equally. Here are some features of CRM software to leverage.
Contact Management
Contact management is the primary feature of CRMs as it sets the foundation for other functionalities. It allows you to record and segment customer data.
A CRM stores everything about customer information─ from names to location and even social media accounts in an accessible database. It also stores specific user information which helps you segment audiences or personalize campaigns.
Reports and Dashboards
A CRM eases information synthesis by providing you with ready-to-use user reports. You can get quick insights about your customers by viewing real-time stats and reports. Your CRM provides periodical performance figures that help inform your decisions and improvements.
You can run reports based on locations, specific products, or per team member. CRM reports help track user issues and sales performance. With a high level of detail, you can tackle problems and improve your understanding of the whole sales funnel.
Lead Scoring and Management
Lead management is one of the best CRM features. This capability helps you establish the best prospects based on their interests. It enables you to identify, score, and choose which leads to nurture.
Lead management brings precision into the sales funnel by fronting the right leads to your sales team for nurturing and engagement. It boosts productivity by helping you focus on high-potential leads.
Interaction Tracking
A core part of offering the best customer service is understanding users’ exact needs and expectations. This can be a challenge when a customer exchanges hands several times.
Through user interaction tracking, A CRM can ensure each user receives the proper feedback at the right time. This feature allows for documentation of client interactions and feeds your team with a client’s support history.
Sales Pipeline Overview
A sales pipeline is a series of stages that you take leads through before closing them. Each lead goes through different challenges and has unique needs. That’s why you need pipeline management.
Pipeline management helps track and keep the sales pipeline healthy. As leads increase, this process becomes complicated. CRM software is essential for effective pipeline management.
A CRM gives you an overview of all your leads’ wants, needs, and challenges. It shows you what you need to progress to lead to the next stage in the sales pipeline. Without software, you can run yourself ragged trying to stay in control.
Email Integration
Tracking user interactions is much easier when your CRM integrates with email software like Gmail. Email integration gathers all customer interactions in one place. Whoever with the permissions can check on the customer’s history and provide relevant support.
Email integration gives you a unified view of client interactions and helps increase responsiveness. You’ll see a client’s communication history in your CRM and you won’t have to switch apps to help them.
Mobile CRM
The mass usage of mobile devices means people expect instant access to information. More than 5.22 billion people use smartphones representing 66% of the global population.
If you’re not catering to your audience through mobile, you’re leaving money on the table. A mobile CRM helps you run your business from anywhere, anytime. A mobile CRM also improves user experience by delivering relevant support on all internet-enabled devices. Your customer support and sales team can access and manage data from anywhere.
Marketing Automation Integration
A CRM software that allows for marketing automation integration is a powerful business weapon. CRM integrations with marketing will allow you to leverage customer data for marketing and sales.
With marketing automation, you can personalize messaging and improve audience targeting. You can leverage customer interaction data to launch super-targeted campaigns.
You need your CRM supporting marketing and sales functions to save time and reduce redundancies. A good alignment between the two functions improves campaigns and sales activities for higher conversions.
Sales Team Management
Any small business owner can attest to how it’s challenging to follow up with a sales team’s performance. Without real-time data to track an individual’s performance, the sales function suffers greatly.
CRM software features a sales team management feature that allows you to manage your sales team. You can see the progress and challenges of your sales team and figure proactive improvements.
Your CRM system and sales team give you the data to track and improve sales performance. You can follow up and help individuals with data to boost team performance. Data enables you to identify and address problem areas in your sales team.
Customer Support Automation
At the core, CRM systems are about customer relationship management. CRM is a tool to define user issues and provide personalized support. CRM software removes reliance on human and manual processes to streamline customer service.
Examples of automated customer support include live chatbots and voice assistants. These tools can provide automatic support instead of a user waiting for a customer service agent. This helps to speed up customer service and boat retention rates.
Social Media Integration
Social media is a customer engagement and marketing tool. CRM software that integrates with social media can boost customer relations and improve marketing processes. Social media CRM integration allows you to optimize multi-channel customer service and marketing.
Users can reach out to you on the channel of their choice anytime. This could be through emails, messaging, chat apps, or your website. A social CRM software also helps you to gather valuable audience data.
You can discern user interests and online behaviors and use the data for targeted marketing. A social CRM software is an excellent opportunity to optimize multi-channel experiences and boost service. It can help you understand your audience and determine the best response speeds for your social followers.
Benefits of CRM Systems for Your Business
Using a CRM can help to enhance and improve efficiency in any business. Here are some benefits that come with having a customer relationship management system.
Improves Customer Service
A CRM system gathers every bit of details about your customers. This helps you develop individual user profiles and personalize customer service. You can better understand individuals’ needs by looking at their data or previous chat histories.
Understanding needs ultimately helps you to provide valuable support and save time. Your customers won’t have to retell their issues and you’ll provide solutions from an informed perspective. You’ll increase precision, save time and improve customer service using CRM software.
Boost Conversions and Increase Sales
Lead scoring, interaction tracking, and informed decision-making contribute to improved sales processes and increased sales. A CRM allows you to nurture high-quality leads which boost the rate of conversions.
CRM software gives you more control of your communication channels. Faster response on your channels is likely to boost retention and increase sales. You’ll close more deals by being at the right channel, the right time.
Automated marketing allows for personalization and messaging which can ultimately boost conversions. 93% of companies report increased conversion rates after personalization.
Increase Customer Retention
The average American company loses 23% to 30% of its customer base each year. This makes CRM software a must-have in business. It’s the way to boost customer satisfaction, increase retention and boost loyalty.
A loyal customer base helps you to generate repeat sales and keep profits steady. Loyal customers are great word-of-mouth soldiers. They can help you cut marketing costs and improve sales.
A CRM system provides your team with the data to address an individual’s issues and challenges. It enables you to provide value to customers. And this, in turn, helps you to attract back new customers for repeat business.
Improve Customer Experience
The first way CRM software improves customer experience is by enabling personalization. With a user’s data across their lifecycle, you can always launch personalized messages. Personalization boosts satisfaction and customer experience.
A CRM also improves communication and boosts response rates through an omnichannel communication approach. Customers with issues can quickly and easily reach out to you on their choice of channel.
CRM software also helps you reinforce relationships with customers. Speeding response rates, personalized messaging, and improved customer service contribute to a better user experience.
A CRM software feeds you with user data that shows you the causes of user experience issues. You can pinpoint UI issues on your apps and websites by leveraging user data. Data informs the improvements you’ll make which goes a long way to elevate the user experience.
Cut Customer Relationship Management Costs
A big advantage of a CRM system is its cost-effectiveness. Using CRM software reduces labor costs by 40%. CRM cuts the need for paperwork and removes manual processes hence helping to cut costs.
Task automation ends redundancy and error and allows your team to focus on cognitive tasks. You’ll require less staff and resources to manage CRM. You also have your significant functions consolidated, making for better coordination and efficiency.
Audience Segmentation and Targeted Marketing
Any CRM system allows for the segmentation of audiences. Segmenting is grouping your customers into different interest groups. It’s a crucial step towards delivering targeted campaigns.
Without software, segmentation is an error-prone and arduous process. With a lack of ample user information, you can easily place them in the wrong group and send them the wrong message.
Reliance on CRM software provides marketers with data to segment audiences and launch targeted campaigns. Marketers can improve marketing results by sending messages to the right audience group.
Segmentation is the foundation of niche marketing. It moves marketing from broad categories to specific interest categories like hobbies. Good CRM optimizes user engagement by helping you leverage segmentation.
Informed Decision Making and Forecasting
CRM tools provide you with a whole range of user data. This data is often relevant and easy to use. It helps you make informed decisions and improve planning activities in your business.
CRM also has real-time updates concerning individuals, sales teams, and overall operations. This makes it easier to make timely strategic decisions, leading to improved processes.
Once you’re in the loop of what your salespeople are doing, CRM software can be beneficial. It helps you coordinate your sales team and feed them with reports that they can use to improve decision-making.
The decision-making boost from CRM is pivotal for better marketing results and outputs. Relying on CRM can have a massive impact on your business as it leads to smarter decision-making processes.
Get a CRM System for Your Business
Customer relationship management systems can help you boost customer loyalty, increase sales and save marketing costs. Investing in CRM software is a sure way to give yourself the edge in your industry.
Now that you understand what is CRM software, you can start leveraging it in your business. Contact us and we’ll help you with the right lead nurturing solution to transform your business.