No matter whatever that you may sell, managing your customers is important for the success of your business. This is where exactly choosing a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) comes into play.
There are mainly three types of CRM. All these CRM systems support your business from different angles, which helps you to accomplish different goals.
Therefore, choosing the best CRM system for your organization requires identifying your objectives and determining the main customer management problems that you need to resolve by adopting a CRM for your businesses.
The CRM industry has seen staggering growth in recent years. Cloud-based CRM revenue will likely make up almost 50% of the 2017 projected $31 billion CRM sector.- Gartner Click To TweetOperational CRM
This kind of CRM system centers on using software apps, which help to incorporate a different set of information that is available on each lead, prospect, and customers into one useful file. For instance, this type of CRM system brings together customer’s contact details, purchase history, and any other communications that the customer have had with the users of the CRM on one window so that employees can provide the customer with fast response and service. Operational CRM provides support to marketing, sales, and support reps across different departments in an organization.
This type of CRM system can also be useful to help Sales Force Automation:
- Sales Force Automation
SFA or Sales Force Automation help to keep a record of every stage in the sales process, aiding marketing and sales departments to automate activities like scheduling calls, making reports and creating email campaigns for relationship management and drip marketing campaigns.
Analytical CRM
Analytical CRM systems help in looking into the lead, prospect and, customer data from an analytical angle to come up with unique marketing strategies that can be implemented for harnessing future sales. This type of CRM views data points from different databases and then use techniques like data mining to come up with patterns and trends. Using Analytical CRM, companies can create better and long-term strategies for customer management and sales.
Collaborative CRM
Collaborative CRM systems focus on integrating contacts with external agencies, like distributors and vendors, and cater this data to its customers through an extranet. This type of CRM system helps customers to get proactive about the services they get from the company, by providing them with a support center, along with technical support and new tools (e.g. instant messenger).
Furthermore, a CRM platform is divided into 2 types:
On-Premise CRM
An On-Premise CRM system puts the onus of security, administration, control, and maintenance of the CRM’s database and information on the company itself. Users of this CRM systems purchases licenses upfront for implementation of the CRM system, instead of buying monthly, quarterly or annual subscriptions. The On-Premise CRM system’s software and database resides on the company’s server and it requires a prolonged installation process for integration of the software with other existing and traditional software (if any), used by the company. In general, a very large business organization with highly complex Customer Relationship Management needs benefits more from this type of CRM.
Cloud-Based CRM
Cloud-based CRM like ConvergeHub which is also an on-demand or SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) CRM system, is a platform, where data is stored on a remote, external network that users of the CRM can access anytime, with the help of an Internet connection.
In many cases, third-party services are deployed to oversee maintenance and installation of these CRM systems.
The Cloud-based CRM system needs relatively easy and quick installation and is so adopted by companies who have limited expertise, technology, or resources. Cloud-based CRM is also more cost-effective as vendors of these CRM systems charge users on a subscription basis with the option of yearly, monthly, or quarterly payments.
Why small businesses and salespeople prefer Cloud-based CRM?
One of the primary benefits of Cloud-based CRM software is its scalability. All SaaS or Cloud-based CRM systems are designed to be flexible, which means, it can expand its capacities, depending on the organization’s needs. Moreover, as the cost of this CRM platform is based on the number of users and storage requirements, which can scale up and down as your requirements change, hence this CRM solution is often the most preferred CRM platform for small and medium businesses in today’s world.
Apart from this Cloud-based CRM, also most often include integration with commonly used email systems and office applications along with integration with social media data and automatic backup tools.
Lastly with the growth of mobile technology, we presently also have Cloud-based CRM system applications that are built for tablets and smartphones. Mobile CRM apps use features that are unique to mobile devices, such as Voice-recognition capabilities, GPS, and others in order to better serve the customers and essentially provide access to the sales employees for using this technology on the go.
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