Alexa CRM Software: What is CRM (Customer Relationship Management)?

Customer Relationship Management – Explained

Find and grow your customer with #1 CRM Software

Customer Relationship Management – Explained
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What is a CRM

A CRM or a customer relationship management tool is a software program that streamlines customer relationship management and more. Modern enterprise grade all-in-one CRM comes with more than one feature and also helps streamlining sales, marketing and support all at the same time. It helps enterprises and SMBs deliver delightful CX, close more deals, increase profits, revenue and more.

Explore how ConvergeHub helps businesses of every size with:

  • Contact and lead management
  • Sales opportunity management
  • Real-time analytics & customizable reports

Reimagine customer relationship management in a whole new way. All-in-one CRM platform ConvergeHub is all set to help you build and nurture meaningful relationships with customers- understand their needs, and preferences and identify new opportunities right from there. It helps SMBs to stay customer-focused by providing easy and quick resolutions to queries anytime anywhere. It offers a seamless 360-degree view of all the customer interactions that are required for sales, marketing and support.

ConvergeHub Ranked One in Software Reviews
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Nurture & Convert leads to Close Deals Faster

As an integrated CRM platform, ConvergeHub lets your sales and service agents connect with your customers (both existing & prospective ones) to lead winning conversations. It also helps track how frequently your sales team gets in touch with prospective leads and customers, and the status of conversations.

A single view of all the customer interaction

  • Easily follow up on leads and identify key contacts
  • See a clear, customizable view of all your sales details

No more manual works on spreadsheets

  • Automatically track emails, calls, and meetings
  • Collect and sync key insight right from your inbox
  • Saves resource time & operational expenses

Close deals faster

  • Add speed and personalisation to every customer interaction
  • Access and update your key data anytime on cloud
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Over 5000 SMBs have trusted ConvergeHub to grow their business

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Benefits of CRM- Exploring ConvergeHub Capabilities

Let’s find out how ConvergeHub takes care of your growing business needs.

From turning cold prospects to high-paying customers- ConvergeHub helps you deploy a smart CRM strategy. In the first place, you get a clear and customizable view of the customer details, sales pipeline and more without wasting time digging through spreadsheets. Secondly, you can automate conversations, track emails, calls, set up meetings, and sync key info to a single database that can be accessed across departments. Having a 360-degree view on a single dashboard, it’s easier to sell faster and give quick resolutions to customers.

Benefits of CRM- Exploring ConvergeHub Capabilities

Close sales deals faster, identify new opportunities

The biggest advantage of enterprise-grade CRM software is to identify potential leads, nurture them, and accelerate conversion. ConvergeHub CRM platform helps sales reps get automatic prompts or reminders to follow up on a lead or activity. On the other hand, sales managers can keep a tab on the buyers’ journey by simply monitoring the platform. Since the entire process is automated, the manager no longer needs to manually check where a contact is in the buyer’s journey. He can subsequently watch their progress in closing. Better visibility helps them find effective ways to push the closure.

Your next level marketing starts here!

Marketing automation is one of the biggest blessings of the CRM software. It accentuates your marketing efforts while saving your productive time. ConvergeHub’s marketing automation features facilitate lead scoring and email follow-ups with prospective leads and customers. It automates your online and social marketing campaigns and helps measuring the success. Since automation frees up a lot of time, marketing reps can spend that in approaching prospects.

Customer support like never before!

Enterprise-grade CRM product ConvergeHub is the chosen product of the customers, when it comes to usability and intuitiveness.

ConvergeHub Vendor Capability Satisfaction
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Three Different Types of CRM Software

More than 80% of customers prefer conversational experiences while interacting with brands. All that matters for a successful customer journey is the customer interaction. It impacts your customers’ feedback and frames their mindset about your brand. Based on your SMB’s specific needs, there are three different types of CRM software, based on their functionalities - Operational, Collaborative & Analytical - and ConvergeHub fits in all three.

analytical crm

Operational

Operational CRM is featured with a variety of business process management (BPM) tools which tracks the customer journey at every touchpoint. The primary role of an operational CRM is to manage customer interactions and relationships throughout the lifecycle. It is focused on sales and marketing automation and customer service automation.

Key functionalities of an Operational CRM include the following:

Sales Force Automation: This is for the sales teams to automatically track and manage their sales activities that include lead and contact management, identification and management of sales opportunities, sales forecasting and pipeline management.

Marketing Automation: This is for the marketers who can make the most of their campaign management, lead generation, and customer segmentation efforts by simply automating them.

Customer Service Automation: For the customer support agents, an operational CRM helps in automating resolutions, track and manage support and support requests, manage customer issues, and automate customer service processes such as ticket management and escalation.

Inventory Management: Some of the operational CRM software comes with inventory management features that help businesses manage their inventory levels with zero difficulty and automate the entire ordering process.

Does Your Business Need an Operational CRM System?

  • struggle to keep contact details organized
  • Want to use win probability and lead scoring features
  • assign task manually and want to streamline it
  • want to scale up your email marketing efforts

Analytical

The job of an Analytical CRM is to transform customer analytics into crucial business insights. Deploying this CRM helps you track data from every level of the customer journey. It includes behavioral trends, purchase habits and so on that help businesses to frame their own marketing strategies. It helps decide whether the potential leads will further translate into customers or not.

Some of the key features of Analytical CRM include the following:

Customer Segmentation: Automate customer segmentation ( segregate them in specific groups) on the basis of demographics, behavior, and purchasing history.

Data Mining: Automatically analyze the large volume of customer data to and identify correlations, patterns and trends to build strategies and nurture customer relationships.

Predictive Analytics: Make the most of statistical models and algorithms to predict the future customer behavior and accordingly identify opportunities and potential risks.

Campaign Management: Analytical CRM Software Comes with campaign management features that help businesses to measure the result of the targeted marketing campaigns.

Does Your Business Need an Analytical CRM System?

Brands that are presently dealing with a large volume of customers and simultaneously inquiring about the efficiency of their marketing efforts can choose Analytical CRM. It’s a great investment if you:

  • want to identify why customers are not buying your product
  • gather more data on customers’ behavioral trends
  • want to identify revenue-generating touchpoints
  • want to get rid of spreadsheets and manual data mining
  • want to seamlessly track KPIs
  • plan to improve sales based on strategic data

Collaborative

Maintaining a seamless communication across departments as well as with vendors is one of the key role of a CRM Software. With collaborative CRM software this becomes a reality. Keep in mind that a smart collaboration is essential for improving customer satisfaction, retention, and acquisition.

Some of the key features of Analytical CRM include the following:

Customer communication tracking: Whether it’s sales or support, a collaborative CRM helps both the departments with real-time tracking of customer interaction at every stage.

Nurturing customer relationships: Closing deals does not happen overnight unless you nurture your leads. With a collaborative CRM you can have a complete database of the potential leads that you would like to nurture and take to the next stage.

File management: Collaborative CRMs keep your crucial data, files and documents in a safe and secured place. Like every CRM solution, it provides a centralized and safe location to keep those files. It helps every stakeholder access the same without manually asking others to give access to the file.

Does Your Business Need a Collaborative CRM?

You might need one if you:

  • plan to improve communication between departments
  • work on customer retention and loyalty
  • track specific needs and offer personalized service to the customers
  • Share customer data with different stakeholders at different touchpoints
  • plan to align marketing efforts in a personalized manner
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Do You Need All Three CRM Systems?

Apparently, yes. You will need all three CRM systems. But, if you can have three different CRM software capabilities in a single system, why won’t you adopt the same. Make sure that the CRM system that you are opting for comes with sales and marketing automation capabilities alongside lead and contact management. After all the job of a CRM software is to manage and nurture leads, automate the process to acquire new leads and maintain amicable customer relationships.

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Do you need a Desktop, Server, or Cloud-based CRM?

Honestly, there is no one-size fits all solution. Each of these three types have their own kind of pros and cons. However, the best one for your organization depends on your specific needs.
Desktop versions are installed on the local system which makes it extremely secured and faster in terms of processing. Bigger enterprises often opt for the desktop CRM version, due to the highest level of security. However, this entails a lot of expenses since post implementation would need licenses on per user basis and regular software and hardware support, especially during the updates.

Server-based CRM comes with the pros and cons of a desktop CRM version, but the software program lies inside the server itself. The expenses of installation are more or less same though it requires high end tech support for the job of an implementation.

Cloud-based CRM software are great for the growing SMBs as they are hosted on the remote servers and can be accessed as pay-as-you-go models. It can be accessed from anywhere and comes with greater scalability.

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Which Companies use CRM

Honestly, any company that is into digitization would need a CRM software to streamline the process. A CRM software adds significant benefits to any company. From operations to Analytics, a CRM has its impact everywhere. However, in terms of business process, CRM software is extremely beneficial for the real estate firms, Accounting firms and lending firms where client communications and sales are the integral part. Their business relies on client communication and the way it impacts on their mindset.

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How a CRM software adds value to your business

According to recent studies CRM software is the fastest-growing enterprise application software category in the SaaS marketplace. In the next few years, global spending on CRM software will be USD $114.4 billion. For the growing SMBs, having a CRM software helps build a strategy for the future that’s customer-focused, highly targeted and completely up-to-date. When you have set targets for sales, business objectives, and profitability, having the tech support is always a great idea.

When it comes to multiple sources of data coming in from sales, marketing, customer service, and social channels, a CRM or customer relationship management software monitors and translates it into useful business.

It brings everything in a place- which is simple, customisable and intuitive. Right from a single dashboard you can get to know about everything, right from the customer's previous history with you, order status, outstanding customer service issues, and a lot more. You can even choose to include information from their public social media activity — their likes and dislikes, what they are saying and sharing about you or your competitors.

Marketers can adopt a data-driven approach to build a marketing strategy with a CRM software at their access. It helps in better understanding of the sales pipeline and sales forecast. In fact, you will get a clear visibility of every opportunity or lead, showing you a clear path from inquiries to sales. Some of the biggest gains of implementing a CRM software is to shift the focus on customer centricity. This helps to ensure that customer needs are at the forefront of business processes and innovation cycles.

  • Improving bottom lines
    CRM platforms can show you real-time results and ensure some significant improvements to the bottom line. Businesses can make the best use of CRM software with 30% increase in leads, 24% lead conversion and 27% customer retention.
  • Identify and segment the leads
    Businesses can identify and add new leads effortlessly and segregate them accurately. By focusing on the right leads, the sales department can prioritize opportunities that will further increase the chances of closing deals faster. It also gives you enough insight to differentiate between an ordinary lead and a high quality lead.
  • Increase referrals for business
    CRM software gets you a better understanding of the customers and increases the chances of cross-selling and upselling opportunities- thus increases your chances of referrals to win new business from existing customers.

    Also, with up-to-the minute information at your fingertips it is helpful for the agents to keep customers happy and content with better service. Happy customers are likely to become repeat customers, and repeat customers spend more — up to 33% more according to some studies.
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How Does CRM Work - ConvergeHub Workflow

ConvergeHub users get their business process streamlined at every level. It helps manage customer interactions, stores vital data about their needs, preferences, and demographics and automates several processes connected with a customer’s journey through the marketing and sales funnels.

CRM software ConvergeHub enables marketers and salespeople to manage and evaluate interactions with the company's existing and potential customers right from the core. It helps keep track of every customer interaction and gathers crucial business data. This helps ConvergeHub users offer personalized services to their clients, enjoy higher conversion rates, and foster consumer loyalty.

According to Software Reviews, 100% of our customers plan to renew their subscription with ConvergeHub for better managing their customers.

ConvergeHub - customer relationship management - minmarket

ConvergeHub users can track customer/company interactions through various available touchpoints, including those from:

  • Contact forms
  • Search engines
  • Emails
  • Phone calls
  • Social media

ConvergeHub offers end-to-end management of the sales funnel that involves the right blend of marketing automation (top of the funnel) and CRM functionalities (bottom of the funnel). Here’s a snapshot of what ConvergeHub does to streamline business processes and increase operational efficiency.

  • Lead management: ConvergeHub automates the process of lead tracking, which allows marketing teams to enter and analyze new leads in the system.
  • Marketing automation: ConvergeHub offers total marketing automation. It automates the process of marketing email blasts, publishes social media posts according to a schedule, and more. The objective is to keep the sales leads engaged throughout the sales cycle and turn them into loyal customers. Moreover, automation relieves pressure from the sales reps but executes the tasks within the shortest possible time.
  • Sales automation: ConvergeHub tracks customer interactions and automates key functions of the sales cycle that are necessary to follow leads and attract and obtain new customers.
  • Workflow automation: ConvergeHub automates workflow and creates an optimized ecosystem by streamlining mundane workloads, which enables employees to focus on creative and more high-level tasks.
  • Analytics: ConvergeHub is featured with intelligent Analytics tools that offer users meaningful insights on sales, marketing as well as customer interactions. Real-time data helps users to formulate highly targeted campaigns. It also helps in tracking attribution and providing vital insights into the quality of the customer experience.
  • Individualized customer experiences: You can also use a CRM to create personalized and consistent experiences for your potential customers across various marketing channels, which may help increase conversions and boost brand awareness.
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Future-proof Your SMB with CRM Integration

As per the recent statistics, global internet penetration is increasing rapidly. Along with it is increasing technology adoption. SMBs striving for bigger success are embracing digitization as a survival imperative. For companies that need to connect with their customers on a regular basis, a CRM software thus becomes a necessity.

What is CRM integration

Seamless CRM integration helps connecting the CRM software with other third party applications or existing software programs of the company. A well-planned CRM integration syncs customer data with sales and marketing tools so that the process becomes more streamlined, data-driven and result-oriented.

  • A unified CRM boosts customer experience: Get a 360-degree view of the business connecting sales, marketing and customer services. ConvergeHub users get real-time responses with accurate data , which helps them strategize their business accordingly. Studies reveal that 65% of our customers experience higher conversion rates just by providing on-time responses and quick resolutions at every touchpoint.
  • CRM Integration makes hyper - personalization a reality: With key customer data at their access, ConvergeHub users are always equipped to provide personalized support every time. Today most of the businesses are embracing hyper-personalization to reach out to the millennial customers. By leveraging omnichannel data, it’s easier for the ConvergeHub users to personalize interactions they have with their customers. In the first place it leads to higher level of user satisfaction and accelerates the chance of closing deals faster.
  • Strategic decision making and increased productivity: With built-in analytics and reporting tools, it’s easier for ConvergeHub users to track and analyze customer behavior and tailor further interactions accordingly. Even there are curated answers for self-service channels like knowledge bases or customer portals, so that it leads to better engagement in the long run.
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Time to bring results?

ConvergeHub starts creating value and works for your business from the very moment you enter your first lead. One most pertinent thing about using this platform is to ensure that all the leads are processed through your CRM platform. This will guarantee that your sales, marketing, and customer support team will adopt the new business solution quickly so that you start earning the return on your investments right away.

As the sales process becomes much more transparent and visible when you use a CRM to track it, so CRM helps in finding where the bottlenecks are, as you can easily see which reps are following the process and who are not abiding by the rules.

The sales pipeline visibility of a CRM helps in understanding whether your business has an adequate number of leads and deals in the sales process that are required for meeting your cash flow needs and/or your required revenue goals, within a few minutes after installation and implementation of the CRM software.

top performers
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Get Started with ConvergeHub

Interested in using ConvergeHub to better manage your process? Here’s how:

  • Sign Up: So, you are convinced with ConvergeHub capabilities? Click on the "Start Free Trial" button and register. Also, provide your name, email address, and create a password to complete the process.
  • Set Up Your Account: You signed up and now you will need some basic business information to set yourself up. Once done you are ready to use the trial version.
  • Customize Your Dashboard: Set up is done? It’s time to work with the templates, add, remove or customize the widgets based on your needs. You can also start using the tools for automating campaigns, sales pipeline arrangement and more.
  • Import Your Customer Data: Import your customer data to ConvergeHub CRM and start managing it.
  • Manage Your Sales Processes: ConvergeHub CRM provides tools for lead management, opportunity tracking, and sales forecasting. You can create custom sales processes and workflows to automate your sales processes. This helps save time and improve efficiency.
  • Automate Your Marketing Processes: ConvergeHub CRM provides tools for marketing automation, including email marketing, social media marketing, and more. You can create and execute marketing campaigns, track campaign performance, and generate leads.
  • Manage Your Customer Support Processes: ConvergeHub CRM provides tools for managing customer support tickets, tracking customer issues, and more. You can create and manage support tickets, assign them to team members, and track the status of each ticket.
  • Stay connected with your team: To connect with your team members, set up meetings and share team calendars, shared contacts, and more. Get customer information, collaborate on sales deals, and work together to provide better service to your customers.
  • Analyze Your Data: Get real time analytics on your sales performance and marketing campaigns and strategize your business decisions accordingly.
  • Continuous Improvement: ConvergeHub CRM is a powerful tool for managing customer relationships, but it's important to continually improve your processes. You can use the analytics and reporting tools to identify areas for improvement and make changes to your processes to improve efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Why have a CRM system

Business is data-driven and highly customer-focused. And, customer data is everything to run a business. Having a detailed list of the contacts help you organize and store contacts and automate the subsequent tasks to drive marketing and sales efforts. A CRM software is none but a centralized, organized hub that helps running consistent communication , no matter whether you are on a hybrid or an on-premise setting.

What Does a CRM System Do?

As mentioned previously, a CRM Software is not just a contact management software, rather more than that. It syncs sales, marketing and support and takes a prime role in driving automated sales and marketing campaigns. On a bigger scale, a a CRM system helps in sales tracking, better organization and top-notch data analysis which can be translated into substantial profits for any business.

What are the key features of a CRM system?

Ideally, a CRM system manages and streamlines customer communication for businesses. Today, with businesses becoming more data-driven, it’s imperative for the SMBs to rely on enter-prise grade CRM systems. Here are some of the key features of a CRM system that you must check while investing in one.

  • Contact management: An all-in-one CRM system offers a top-notch centralized customer database to store name, contact details, purchase and interaction history and so on.
  • Workflow automation: The biggest advantage of implementing a CRM is to bring in work automation at every level. Having ConvergeHub in your company means you can automate the mundane tasks. Also, it can track opportunities, create quotes, target sales and marketing campaigns, manage customer complaints, interactions and more.
  • Seamless integration: make sure that the CRM tool that you are investing in helps in seamless integration with the existing tools and software like ERP and others in your company.
  • Analytics & Reporting: While buying a CRM software make sure it comes with intuitive analytical features, so that you can keep a track of what’s going in your business and accordingly make decisions.
What happens when you do not want a CRM Software?

Gone are the days when tracking data via manual process was a norm. These days everything is data-driven and in the era of digitization, you simply cannot afford to miss out on the key data. So, when you do not have a CRM system, your business might face the following challenges.

  • Zero organization in contact management
  • Missing out leads
  • Zero automation
  • Poor accuracy level as well as decreasing customer satisfaction rate
  • Poor customer retention
Does CRM improve business process?

Of course it does but only when you choose a software system as per the specific business needs. For that, it is essential to consider your line of business thoroughly and your day-to-day needs. While choosing a software , check out if the features are in line with your specific business needs.

What are the five key features of ConvergeHub?

As you know ConvergeHub is a feature-rich CRM Software. However,m three main features that makes ConvergeHub stand out are listed here:

  • Sales Automation
  • Marketing Automation
  • Dynamic billing process
  • Smart collaboration
  • Setting up Meetings
How CRM helps in Sales?

CRM gets all the sales pipeline information in one place ( specifically in your CRM), the team can make sales forecasts well in advance. It helps them set the revenue goals for business.

How CRM helps in marketing

Marketing automation by CRM software can save a lot of productive time for the marketing managers and representatives. It automates routine tasks like email campaigns, social media marketing campaigns, lead nurturing, and marketing analytics.

How CRM helps in Customer Service

Customer service and support is a crucial role that the enterprise grade CRM Software has to play. The software captures customer data from every single interaction and thus, it’s easier to keep a detailed track of the customer requests and interactions at every touchpoint.

What is the difference between Cloud and On-premise CRM

On-premise CRM system installs the product on the local computer while the Cloud setting gets the product installed in a remote server from where it can be accessed. However, the desktop or on-premise version is more expensive than the cloud version, but ensures the highest level of data security.

How is CRM relevant for companies with smaller customer base?

Even if you have a smaller customer base, it is not always easy to maintain the time-to-time tracking of all the key customer interaction. A CRM comes to the rescue at this point of time. It keeps things organized. Furthermore, having everything in one place helps in streamlining processes and provides insightful business information, so that it can be realized into strategic business goals.

Is a CRM software Customizable?

Yes, definitely it is. Get in touch with the ConvergeHub experts to customize your product accordingly.

What does CRM stand for?

CRM stands for Customer relationship management, but the job of a CRM software extends much beyond that.

Does CRM help your team work better?

Of course. In every possible manner, it helps teams in any company perform better. As you know CRM is a tool that streamlines collaboration at every touchpoint. So is true in cross departmental collaboration and communication. When each and every team member in your firm is well aware of what’s going on in sales deals or customer communication, they can better address it. Basically, no manual communication is involved in between, which also reduces the chance of errors to a zero level. As a result, having a CRM also brings organizational efficiency and increases team’s productivity.

How CRM is useful in real estate?

CRM streamlines client management with superb efficiency and help builders maintain a beautiful connection with their customers or potential leads. Here’s how CRM is crucial in the real estate domain.

Contact Management: Builders can process a pool of data using this system. They can organize and manage their contacts in a centralized database along with their details for future uses. Being stored in a centralized database, there’s no threat of contact leaks or so.

Lead Management: Leads are crucial for any business, be it real estate or any other. With the lead management tool that is available with ConvergeHub, real estate dealers and builders or brokers can track the status of leads. Also, they can set follow-up reminders to ensure that leads are properly nurtured and engaged.

Sales Management: CRM can help agents and companies manage the entire sales process, from lead generation to closing deals. It can track opportunities, create quotes, and automate the sales process.

Marketing Automation: With ConvergeHub, you can automate marketing campaigns as well as targeted ad campaigns. What’s more! You can track the effectiveness of those campaigns right from the CRM platform itself instead of going outside.

Customer Service and Support: This is the most important role of a CRM software. Since it has a set of tools to automate and streamline customer communication, it’s easier to track customer issues, customer complaints, and provide support through multiple channels.

Analytics and Reporting: Last but not the least is the intuitive re[porting dashboard of ConvergeHub CRM. It can provide a 360-degree view of the customer behavior, sales trends, and other metrics. No doubt, it can help real estate owners to predict sales and calculate profits in a more seamless manner.

How useful is CRM in accounting

For accounting firms, a CRM software is no less than a blessing. The role of customer relationship tools is almost the same, but the benefits differ in terms of the industries it serves. For an accounting firm, a central database of contacts is crucial like every other sector. It stores client data that can be accessed any time.
Secondly, comes the role of workflow automation. Two major jobs in the accounting firm are invoicing and billing. A CRM software totally automates it. Depending on the requirement a CRM software can generate invoice and track payment status. So, there is zero involvement of phone calls, follow-up emails or so as everything is system generated.

Apart from these, the analytical feature of a CRM software helps in understanding key business and customer insights, which is fundamental to create a business strategy.

Tell me about CRM platforms

There are three different CRM platforms. SMBs can opt for any of these according to their requirement. Here’s a look at those.

  • Operational CRM: It streamlines a large volume of operational jobs and plays a key role to streamline the central business process. Operational CRM is solely into lead generation process, lead conversion, and also provides service infrastructure needed to retain customers.
  • Analytical CRM: It helps companies understand and process customer data so that the customer interactions with the business can be tracked to build the business and sales strategy accordingly. It helps in transforming large amounts of data into actionable insights.
  • Collaborative CRM: As the name suggests, collaborative CRM helps in seamless collaboration with customers as well as across companies. With a collaborative CRM, you can bridge the gap between teams and departments and accordingly share information across every touchpoint. It helps create a seamless customer experience with your vendors, teams and every other stakeholders involved in the process.