Businesses these days are striving to prove their superiority. In this era of competition among companies, keeping in line with your customers has been necessary. If businesses fail to choose the right person at the right time, they can’t grow their business efficiently. CRM is a tool that lets you connect to them at the root level. With the right CRM in hand, you can be in touch with your leads properly. It provides a way that is not only beneficial to you but also pleasant to your customers. Of course, the primary objective of any company or business is to sell its products or services. But, unless and until you run a business that only needs customers for once, you need to retain your existing customers. CRM lets you achieve it with the help of an artificial intelligence mechanism. It helps you capture leads, guides them through a well-planned path to make sure they convert into deals. It also enables you to understand your customers’ needs and requirements. Moreover, it helps you analyze their data through various mediums and generates reports whenever required. With a better understanding of your clients, you can ensure the proper growth of your business.
Types of CRM
Any CRM software works on the primary goal of making your customer relations better by providing better services. But, it includes a wide range of tasks and responsibilities. Based on its applications, CRM has been categorized into three major types for an enhanced understanding. Three types of CRM are:
- Operational CRM
- Analytical CRM
- Collaborative CRM
In this blog, we will discuss these types in detail. So, let’s start.
Operational CRM
The first on the list is operational CRM. This kind of CRM covers the broadest range of services. It does the task of streamlining the entire process of a business. It generates leads and further converts them into contacts. It further collects all the details about the leads required for a company and provides service throughout the customer journey.
Functions of operational CRM
The main functions of operational CRM are sales automation, marketing automation, and service automation. So, before we move on to the other types of CRM, let’s have a brief idea about these functions of operational CRM first.
- Sales automation – For any business, the ultimate aim is to upscale sales activities, and automating the sales processes makes it easy to achieve this aim. It streamlines the collected information so that a company can better understand its customers’ requirements. This way, it helps the company to increase its sales rapidly. Effective increase in sales of a company is proof that the sales activities are being managed smoothly and efficiently. However, sales automation includes so many tasks like lead management, contact management, quote-to-order management. But, the primary purpose is to create opportunities to acquire new leads and deal with the existing customer base.
- Marketing automation – As we have already discussed, the main goal of any business is to increase sales. But, do you think it’s possible without effective marketing? of course, not. Every company wants to increase its sales, but not all can achieve it. Only a company with good marketing strategies can experience growth in sales. With a tool to activate marketing automation, a company can present its offers on products and services in the best way possible. Marketing automation lets you approach potential customers by identifying the channels that bring you more leads. Furthersome, you can nurture these customers and send multiple follow-ups to them to convert them into deals. The most crucial marketing automation module is campaign management, and campaigns play a significant role in promoting your products.
- Service automation – The best way to win your customer’s loyalty is to provide them the best quality service. With better service, you can build a strong relationship with your customers and retain them for a long. Therefore, it becomes necessary to find out ways to provide good service to your clients. Service automation can help you achieve it. From call management to issue management, it has several applications in a business. With the help of a service automation tool, you can fix your clients’ issues within seconds, handle all incoming or outgoing calls, and monitor your service’s quality based on various performance indicators.
Analytical CRM
As the name suggests, this type of CRM mainly deals with data analysis. It analyses clients’ data from different touchpoints in a well-structured way and extracts detailed insights about the organization. As a result, it allows top management, marketing, sales, and support executives to provide better services to the customers.
Characteristics of analytical CRM
With the knowledge of customers’ behavior and reaction,
- Top management can make better decisions,
- Marketing personnel can understand the effectiveness of the campaigns being run,
- Sales executives can increase sales, and
- Support staff can improvise the quality of their support service to build a solid emotional connection with the clients.
Collaborative CRM
This one is the last type of CRM we will be discussing in this blog. It is also referred to as strategic CRM. With the help of collaborative CRM, a company can share some information about the clients among various departments or units pretty effortlessly. Thus, it minimizes the communication gap and helps provide a better service. For example, A support executive can share the feedback given by a customer with the sales department. It will help a company understand its flaws and provide an insight into the areas they need to work on. The marketing executives can benefit from that as they can make better strategies to market their products once they know what the customers really want. With the help of customer’s feedback, they can target some specific sections where their products are more likely to be appreciated. In general, businesses are divided into several units, and each of them works independently. Due to the lack of mutual collaboration between different departments, a company fails to achieve good numbers. With collaborative CRM in hand, all separate units can unite with the ultimate goal of uplifting the company’s profile.
Conclusion
These are the types of CRM available. As you can see, different kinds of CRM have different applications. So, you can only get the best use of CRM when you understand the detailed features and benefits of these types. You also need to understand the exact objective of your business so that you can develop your strategies according to that. A good CRM tool like BUOPSO CRM can help you achieve your goals with its unique features. You can reach out to us for any further inquiries regarding it through our social media platforms.