In a continuously growing competitive market, a business needs to share the right information with the right person at the right time, otherwise, the business will lose its opportunities to sell products or services. Customer Relationship Management software is the only solution that can help businesses to communicate with prospects or customers properly. For any CRM application, the primary goal is to enable an organization to understand customers’ needs and behaviour and provide a better quality of service. It helps to retain existing customers and capture new opportunities by building a strong relationship between an organization and customers. CRM can analyze data and generate reports whenever required. There are mainly three types of CRM applications – Operational, Analytical and Collaborative to perform all these activities.
Types of Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Operational CRM
Operational CRM streamlines the business process that includes Sales automation, Marketing automation and Service automation. The main purpose of this type of CRM is to generate leads, convert them into contacts, capture all required details and provide service throughout the customer lifecycle.
Sales Automation: Sales automation helps an organization automate the sales process. The main purpose of sales automation is to set standards within an organization to acquire new customers and deal with existing customers. It organizes information in such a way that the business can meet customers’ needs and increase sales more efficiently and effectively. It includes various CRM sales modules like lead management, contact management, Quote-to-Order management, and sales forecasting.
Marketing Automation: The main purpose of marketing automation is to find out the best way to offer products and approach potential customers. A major module in marketing automation is campaign management. It enables businesses to decide effective channel/s (like emails, phone calls, face-to-face meetings, and ads on social media) to reach out to potential customers.
Service Automation: Service automation enables businesses to retain customers by providing the best quality of service and building strong relationships. It includes issue management to fix customers’ problems, customer call management to handle incoming/outgoing calls, and service label management to monitor the quality of service based on key performance indicators.
Analytical CRM
Analytical CRM helps top management, marketing, sales and support personnel determine the better way to serve customers. Data analysis is the main function of this type of CRM application. It analyzes customer data, coming from various touch points, to get better insights about the current status of an organization. It helps top management to make better decisions, marketing executives to understand the campaign's effectiveness, sales executives to increase sales and support personnel to improve the quality of support and build strong customer relationships.
Features of Analytical CRM:
Gather customer information, coming from different channels and analyze data in a structured way
Help organization to set business methodology in Sales, Marketing and Support to improve customer relationship and loyalty
Improve the CRM system effectiveness and analyze key performance indicators, set by the business
Collaborative CRM
Collaborative CRM, sometimes called Strategic CRM, enables an organization to share customers’ information among various business units like the sales team, marketing team, and technical and support teams. For example, feedback from a support team could be useful for marketing teams to approach targeted customers with specific products or services. In the real world, each business unit works as an independent group and rarely shares customers’ data with other teams, which often causes business losses. Collaborative CRM helps to unite all groups to aim only one goal – use all information to improve the quality of customer service to gain loyalty and acquire new customers to increase sales.
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