CRM Examples:  Powerful Customer Relationship Management Software for Your Business

Making your workflows for managing customer relationships is more than an admirable objective. In the current competitive market, it’s an essential business requirement. To do that, you require technology capable of handling every interaction with customers from the outside.

Remember that managing customer relationships begins with your company’s marketing team. It then moves into sales and operations, and finally, you’re back in marketing and sales. After that, you’re more concerned with maintaining a good relationship with your customers and maybe even promoting your brand.

Managing customer interactions at every step of the process makes an enormous difference in maintaining or losing the customers to turn away. What can you do to increase the effectiveness of your processes? Investing in the best software and intelligent marketing automation along with a best CRM development company can make a huge difference.

Microsoft Dynamics is a CRM platform capable of streamlining, simplifying, and organizing all the functions tied to making you more efficient in keeping your customers satisfied and loyal to the company’s brand.

What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?

Customer relationship management (CRM) refers to the organization’s policies, practices, guidelines, and systems for facilitating customer interaction and assistance. CRM encompasses direct interactions with customers, sales, services contracted needs, forecasting of sales, and analyzing customer behaviour and trends.

Relationship Management: Why Does Your Company Need CRM?

There are apparent advantages of CRM. A CRM solution can help you manage the various steps in developing a successful customer relationship. The best software will guide your service reps step-by-step through interaction with customers to prompt them to take note of the responses they receive. It integrates all communications, from messages to memos, from phone messages to Facebook posts, to give you one source of information for all data from each customer. Three critical aspects of CRM technology:

• artificial intelligence;
• cloud computing;
• software.

You can find an integrative solution incorporating three options, or you can mix and match depending on your business needs. Your choice is vital since it’s directly linked to the performance of your business’s satisfied customers and vendors. 

A well-designed CRM system can help you control your customers’ life cycles. It can help you identify new customers and target and retarget them based on suggestions and recommendations, as well as their education level and preferences, previous purchases, post-purchase activity, and more.

Essential CRM Features

Choosing a CRM is a challenge since many CRMs aren’t alike, and all offer distinct features. So, if you’re trying to buy a CRM but are unsure which one to choose, this article will help you comprehend the eight features you should look for in a CRM program.

Contact Management

All vital information about a lead or customer, such as their name, email address, telephone number, contact information, and past communications, should be readily available and editable.

Lead Management

Keeping track of leads can be a hassle when you’re still using spreadsheets or other tools that aren’t compatible. Lead management opens an additional window feature that gives you a comprehensive outline of leads, including their status, lead score, etc. Clicking on an entry, you can look up the lead’s profile, their most recent activity on your site and prior communications with them, their complaints, and more.

Pipeline Management

The pipeline management feature offers an overview of your current leads and deals. The deals are categorized by phase of your sales funnel. This helps salespeople understand the state of each lead and decide which leads to follow up on.

Sales Automation

The sales team is already under pressure due to excessive work. The added burden of administrative tasks like sending invoices or following up with cold leads can adversely affect their efficiency.

With the sales automation feature, Salespeople can streamline repetitive work so they can focus on reaching sales goals. Automation workflows are initiated according to rules or triggers. For instance, if an individual lead doesn’t respond within three days of following up, the follow-up workflow would be set up, where a reminder email is automatically sent to the lead.

Sales Forecasting

The CRM tool processes tons of data each day. Sales forecasting features use the data to forecast future sales. Salespeople can gain an understanding of their pipeline and how effectively they can increase sales. They can use this information to turn hot leads into sales.

File Storage and Sharing

Instead of relying on external file storage software, salespeople can save essential and often needed documents like quotes, sales scripts, feature sheets, and more in a central repository. They can then communicate them to colleagues instantly.

Email Management

You can connect your CRM email account with your CRM so you do not have to navigate between several pages to mail an email. With the feature for managing emails, you can send emails directly in the CRM interface, note the lead’s status, and even prioritize emails based on the lead’s status so you don’t miss a chance to connect with any leads.

Reporting and Analytics

This feature provides sales performance in one dashboard. You can customize or design new reports according to your needs and then export them in various formats.

Benefits of a CRM Platform

It’s evident that CRM tools help companies manage, plan, and track interactions between customers and brands to give them an improved overall experience. Let’s look at the significant benefits of CRM:

360-View of Customer Experience

Your business contacts customers through various digital marketing channels, from social media to SMS messages to websites and search engines. CRM platforms allow you to easily follow and interact with your customers as they shift between channels.

This is referred to as a 360-view customer.

Automation

One main benefit of CRM systems is that they can let sales, marketing, and other departments delegate the manual work that becomes increasingly time-consuming as companies grow.

CRM automation significantly increases the effectiveness of sales and marketing efforts, whether sending automated emails or sorting leads and segmenting them by their online behaviour.

Personalized Customer Experiences

Customers desire a more personal experience from the companies they purchase from. About 88% of those who participated in surveys said they were looking for a customized experience from merchants.

CRMs allow businesses to design specific marketing materials for each customer. You can organize your leads according to the messages they react to, create more personalized content using templates, and then schedule follow-ups according to their actions.

Data Alignment

CRMs offer a single source of truth for all customer information. This means that regardless of your department or team, you’ll have access to the same data about current and prospective customers.

It’s easy; however, many companies must work hard to ensure their data is aligned and in sync, mainly as they grow and acquire many more customers. Instead of having different data hubs susceptible to errors, CRMs keep all data in one central location, which means everyone can work from exact data.

Data Tracking and Security

CRMs ensure that data is aligned and in sync and regularly updated while limiting access to information to a strictly need-to-know basis.

Manually updating customer information increases the chance of error and provides more people with crucial information about your market. CRMs update customer profiles automatically according to their actions and allow you to keep this information confidential.

After reviewing some of these platforms’ primary advantages, let’s examine some examples of CRMs businesses use.

Examples of Customer Relationship Management Worth Knowing

There are many ways to learn and communicate customer-centricity, all with distinct advantages. Below are eight examples of customer interaction that will help.

Tracking Customer Behavior

Understanding your customers’ needs and how they use your product is essential. You’ll discover valuable information on the motives behind purchases, factors that cause friction, and other factors to determine what works and doesn’t with your current audience.

Based on the information you wish to collect, there are many methods for studying customer behavior. You can track on-site or in-app activity, gauge engagement with a particular feature, monitor the behaviour of specific users, etc.

With this information at your disposal, you’ll be in a better position to improve customer retention and attract more satisfied customers.

Automated Feedback Collection

Customer feedback lets you understand what people like and dislike about your service. It can also be a reliable way to reduce the guesswork and gather data to help you create improvements that customers will enjoy.

Surveys such as CSAT and NPS can collect both qualitative and quantitative feedback. Then, analyze the results to find valuable insights.

It’s a hassle to do this by hand. Thus, using CRM software or a dedicated feedback tool to streamline the process and gather feedback massively reduces time.

With software such as Userpilot, you can analyze qualitative and quantitative feedback. Quantitative data can be visualized using an interactivity dashboard. You can sort users by type to see how they responded to your questionnaires.

For qualitative feedback, it is possible to identify common themes in responses and link them together. Furthermore, Userpilot is working on an AI feedback analysis feature to complete your work.

Data-Driven Decisions

With massive amounts of data accessible to businesses, It’s more convenient than ever before to make informed choices.

The customer data will allow you to identify trends, analyze users’ performance, predict their behaviour, and more. This will help you make more informed decisions, make strong customer relationships, and grow your business.

Personalized Customer Experiences

This is among the most crucial customer relationship management techniques in SaaS. From contacting potential customers by delivering a specific marketing message to providing personal service and closing the sale, companies must focus on delivering personalized interactions.

Personalization helps customers feel appreciated and valued, which creates a bond with the business.

Start your journey to personalization by segmenting your users based on similar traits or behaviours. Every department that deals with customers within your company must be able to access this information. This way, no part of customer service will be generalized.

Automated Customer Support

In simple words, automating CRM development services uses technology to enhance the customer experience. Support will be quick and available 24 hours a day, precisely what modern customers demand. Automated customer support keeps your customers happy and lowers support costs, as it means fewer human support agents.

Chatbots are a popular choice for SaaS companies focusing heavily on CS automation. If you’re not already using them, you should consider doing so.

In addition to robots, self-service resource centres are a different method of automating customer support. They are a collection of useful services constantly available to customers to ensure they never get lost.

Omnichannel Service

Supplying support on one channel alone won’t cut even if you’re highly responsive. Each user prefers to communicate using their channel. Inviting them to change to your preferred method could make the experience more difficult for users. Therefore, it’s recommended to be flexible when providing a variety of communication channels.

Most SaaS companies integrate the web, in-app social media, in-app email, and SMS as their primary communications channels. However, selecting the proper channels for your business will depend on your target audience. Examine different channels and the users’ responses before deciding which ones to choose.

Be aware that having multichannel support doesn’t necessarily create an omnichannel experience. Omnichannel means your channels are integrated, and your customers can switch between them seamlessly. That’s what you want to achieve.

Additionally, when you design your omnichannel customer support, consider your customers’ points of contact across different phases of the user journey.

Strong Social Media Presence

We must discuss examples of customer relationship management by mentioning social media, the 21st-century source of relationships. From connecting with old friends to discovering love, people use social media daily to create high-quality relationships.

The business world isn’t unaffected, as most people rely on social media to perform value-based tasks like customer support or discovering high-quality products.

It would help if you weren’t absent from social media. Use it to interact with your customers, provide product information, hear what people say about your business, and more. When used correctly, social media platforms can help build trust with customers, increase your business’s image, and generate free word-of-mouth.

Marketing Automation

So far, we’ve only discussed support automation; however, your marketing activities could also be automated to reduce time and improve efficiency. Tools for automation can assist you in creating efficient workflows and help you reduce the number of repetitive tasks.

The most common uses for marketing automation are lead management, content planning, distribution, scheduling social media, and so on. Most marketing automation tools also incorporate analytics to help companies track the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Another possible use of marketing automation is making automated surveys for various users.

Best CRM Tools for Your Business [Need Image]

Implementing a CRM system that works seamlessly within your company’s framework is challenging. CRM software assists you in managing customer interactions and serves as an essential point, allowing other departments to work with sales. Therefore, ensuring that the CRM software you choose meets all these requirements is necessary.

This section will examine five CRM programs you can test and then adopt.

Note: Most tools listed below provide the basics, such as emails, calls, SMS social CRM reports, etc. However, we will focus on the tools that should be mentioned here.

HubSpot CRM

HubSpot’s free CRM is a superior system for new businesses or anyone wanting to learn more about CRM tools.

HubSpot CRM lets you track your sales pipeline, design automated email sequences to your prospects, contact potential customers through live chats or email, and track social media interactions or phone calls. It comes with templates and numerous integrations.

HubSpot CRM offers free contact lists up to 1,000,000. As your business grows, you can upgrade to additional marketing, sales, and customer service tools and connect other third-party applications to the application.

Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is among the many products in Zoho’s extensive business suite. It provides features appropriate for both SMBs and large companies. The CRM software comes with sales automation, marketing automation, pipeline management, and process management capabilities. With one interface, you can communicate with your leads across multiple platforms.

Zia Zoho’s AI bot aids businesses by finding trends, predicting sales, and enriching data.

Businesses can start with Zoho CRM for as little as $18 per month and then grow as they go.

Freshsales

Freshsales is a CRM for sales developed by Freshdesk. It features events tracking, email, phone workflows, and more. It lets you track your leads and offers throughout the purchase process.

Like HubSpot and Zoho CRM, Freshsales offers mobile CRM and a selection of business-focused products that make creating a complete MarTech stack simple.

Freshsales is ideal for small and mid-market businesses. It is also affordable for mid-market enterprises and SMBs. You can begin using it for just $18 per month.

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a CRM tool that Salesforce can use to manage the entire buying process. It offers features like managing contacts and accounts, opportunities, lead management, agile workflows, file sharing, and sales forecasting.

Salespeople and business owners can track their sales activities via mobile CRM.

Beginning users can select an entry-level plan called the Salesforce Essential plan at $25/user/month (paid annually). Users can get add-ons like Sales Cloud Einstein (Salesforce’s AI tool) and Pardot (Salesforce’s marketing automation tool) at the cost of a subscription.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is primarily a MAP, but it also has particular CRM features. It is ideal for startups, freelancers, and SMBs because it has the perfect mix of features that can help marketing and sales departments.

Mailchimp offers a free plan for lists of up to 2000 contacts, with basic CRM features, and paid plans beginning at $9.99/month.

Entrepreneurs and SMBs extensively use Mailchimp because of its ability to connect with other enterprise CRMs, such as Salesforce.

Creating a CRM Strategy: Step-by-Step Process

Implementing a CRM strategy place can ensure the smooth running of your CRM initiatives. Here are some guidelines for developing an effective CRM plan for your business.

Know Your Business Goals

It is vital to determine your objectives to make the most effective use of CRM software development as an enabler for your business. Understanding your business goals will allow you to create an effective CRM strategy. For example, suppose your company’s goal is to increase annual revenue by 10% due to new customer acquisition and by 25% from customer retention. In that case, you can determine the actions that will be performed to meet the goals.

When you link these actions to sales goals, you can see how they help you achieve the objectives.

Involve Your Employees

There are two elements to this process.

The first step is to educate your employees on how CRM implementation will benefit them and then actively engage them. This is especially important since those working at the grassroots level can be extremely helpful in the tactical aspect.

Additionally, since CRM is not limited to sales personnel, it is essential to foster interdepartmental collaboration among the departments that deal with customers as well as break up the traditional silos.

Revisit the Buyer’s Journey

Begin by looking at the customer information stored in your current systems. This will give you an understanding of the information you’re collecting and the additional data you must collect through the CRM.

Reexamine the buyer’s journey to see how leads become customers. Each step of the buyer’s journey must be linked to a similar sales funnel stage. This will enable you to understand the processes that result in deal closure.

Pick the Right CRM

Learn about the features you require in a CRM application and confidently decide about the best CRM tools. TestTesting the five CRM software tools discussed in the article below is recommended to discover the perfect one for your needs. In addition, you should identify their most popular competitors and test the tools that best meet your needs.

Be patient, and don’t commit to purchasing a software solution. Take advantage of the trial period provided by each CRM provider to examine the features thoroughly, then choose an option based on capabilities that are compatible with your current system, one that fits your needs is easy to use and can integrate.

Keep Improving Your CRM Practices

Likely, you won’t hit the perfect spot on the first attempt, particularly when implementing a MAP or CRM. There will likely be issues initially, but continue to tweak the procedure until it is simplified. You can also cut down on the trial-and-error process by enlisting a CRM consultant in the beginning stages of the implementation.

Conclusion

CRM isn’t only limited to software applications. It’s a comprehensive method that requires the right approach, establishing processes, and analyzing outcomes to make better decisions. This article has fulfilled its promise to provide examples of customer relationship management and CRM tools you can begin using. Start by implementing the examples that impressed you.