When it comes to building and maintaining positive relationships, it’s all about service and creating a positive user experience that makes it easy for customers to interact with you and the products and services you offer. This is where a customer relationship management (CRM) system can tremendously help your business.
Implementing a CRM system is one of the best opportunities to increase revenue, streamline processes, automate tasks, enhance collaboration, and improve customer service. Once you understand how they work and what you need, it’s much easier to choose the right CRM system for your success.
How Do CRM Systems Work?
A CRM system helps you manage how well you are interacting with your customers over time. They are designed to gather and analyze data and other information throughout the customer’s journey and develop an overview of their needs, preferences, and behaviors. As a result, you can gain a much deeper understanding of your customers, how you need to interact with them, and where you should be focusing your marketing and advertising efforts.
By learning how to communicate with current and potential customers across different channels, you are able to provide a much higher level of personalized experiences that are more engaging. There are three main types of CRM systems you can use to help your marketing efforts.
1. Operational CRM System
An operational CRM system streamlines all customer-facing processes to help improve customer relationships. This typically includes anything that involves customer engagement, like sales, marketing, and customer service.
The system uses a centralized business process to gather typical customer data like contact information, purchase history, preferences, and interactions. It then consolidates the data to generate leads, convert those leads into contacts, and provide the service infrastructure needed to follow a customer through the sales journey and then retain them.
Accessing this type of data allows companies to automate more processes, making their sales and marketing efforts much more efficient. It also allows them to create more sales opportunities by personalizing marketing, up-selling, or cross-selling items that they know customers are more likely to purchase based on their profile.
2. Analytical CRM Systems
An analytical CRM system is ideal for taking large amounts of data and turning it into customer insights that can help create marketing strategies and support decision-making. Using various techniques like data mining, predictive modeling, and segmentation, this system focuses on providing in-depth analysis and reporting on overall customer behavior.
As a result, the system can find patterns, trends, and correlations that help predict the wants and needs of the average customer using your products and services. Having access to this level of customer knowledge can help with forecasting, product design and development, and customer retention.
3. Collaborative CRM Systems
A collaborative CRM system is all about teamwork and can often be considered a bridge between teams and departments. It keeps track of all touchpoints between the business and the customer and then uses that information to determine which communication channel is ideal for each customer.
Instead of specific customer data and information being held by each department, this system creates a centralized place to house its data, making it accessible to all teams to help inform their decision-making and create better experiences. Compared to the operational and analytical CRM systems, this system uses positive communication and interactions as its foundation and focuses more on improving customer service.
Choosing the Right CRM System
Choosing the right CRM system for your business can involve many different factors. While there are a lot of considerations to make in the decision process, here are three of the most important things to consider when selecting the right CRM system for your needs.
- How will the system align with your goals and objectives?
Know exactly what you want to accomplish by using a CRM system. How big is your company? What is popular in your industry? How will the system fit into your marketing strategies, processes, and goals? Answering questions like these will ensure you choose the correct functions and features that work for your business.
- Will your team find the system adaptable and easy to use?
Choose a system that is user-friendly and easy to navigate. Evaluate how tech-savvy your employees are and if a CRM system will be easy to work into their typical processes. It’s also important to choose a system that has good user training and support.
- Will the system grow with your business?
A good CRM system will have the capability to grow with your business and adjust to your marketing strategies and goals. It’s also important to know if the CRM system can integrate with other applications and platforms.
Interested in what a CRM system can do for your company? Let’s connect!
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