What is CRM? The Ultimate CRM Guide 2021

Types of CRM technology

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System depends on three major types namely, Operational. Analytical and Collaborative.

Operational CRM
This type deals with creating a complete customer journey through sales and marketing automation.

Analytical CRM:
The data collected through campaigns at every step of customer journey is the studied carefully in order to form repetitive patterns to make better decisions in future.

Collaborative CRM:
In this type the data that gathered in analytical stage if further shared with internal and external stakeholders to improve customer relationship.

Let’s take a closer look at advantages and features of each type.

Operational CRM: Designing a customer journey is extremely critical for any business in order to understand and predict what kind of service they have to offer and how will their clientele look like. In simple words, customer journey is a careful study of the amount of time and actions taken by any visitor of your website to finally getting converted into a customer. Operational CRM is used to create a comprehensive customer journey by automating sales and marketing activities.

• Contact Management: Each time a potential lead takes an action, CRM updates its contact details automatically. If there are multiple people dealing with a single customer, one person can easily resume the case from exactly where the other had paused.

• Lead Scoring: This type of CRM is capable of identifying the most potential leads to help you invest time and efforts in the most winnable opportunities. Nurturing leads gets even better when you know your top most customers and the amount that needs to be invested in them.

• Salesforce Automation: Based on the customer interactions and deal value, Operational CRM automatically assigns tasks to sales team in order to best utilize their time. If the deal value exceeds a certain amount you fed, the sales representative will get notified. Until then, the lead nurturing will be an automated process.

• Marketing Automation: It is easier to create different conversion funnels for specific accounts / customers based on their persona and previous interactions. You know if the prospect has invested a lot of time talking to your sales rep or is just window shopping. This helps your marketing teams automate specific tasks in order to define cold, warm and hot leads.
  
  

Analytical CRM: Based on the data derived from Operational CRM, it is further drilled down to even more details like average deal cycle, recurring revenue, account retention rate, and more such relevant information. This is beneficial for sales teams organize and analyze the existing data in a systematic manner to make more informed decisions.

• Data Mining: Serving as a data warehouse, it uses statistical analysis to identify data relevancy. Customer segmentation helps in targeting right audience with right message.

• Cross-selling and Up-selling: This feature offers more revenue opportunities by identifying and analyzing customer buying patterns.

• Buyer Persona: This enhances your marketing team’s efforts by creating a comprehensive customer background to decide what collaterals and messages to pitch – generic or personalized.

• Sales Forecasting: Every business will have its own pastureland to develop for its customers at certain favorable times. In order to predict future consumption demands, this feature allows teams to study sales trend patterns to know which month, quarter or season; even a product is more favorable to sell.

• Attribution: Some customers convert with little efforts, while others grill you over until your last drop of blood. However, understanding at what point customers convert is important to make the most out of any opportunity. Analytical CRM provides revenues to the first, last, and multi-touch attribution.
  
  

Collaborative CRM: Now that the Operational CRM and Analytical CRM have given enough information about your customers to drive your marketing and sales strategy efficiently, it is now time to move on and share this data with internal and external stakeholder – multiple departments, vendors and suppliers, and distributors. Collaborative CRM focuses on customer acquisition and customer retention through a great service.

• Interaction Management: Each customer might have to talk to multiple people in order to get their query resolved. The interaction management feature logs all these conversations at various points with multiple people in a central repository to share across teams to provide customer satisfaction.

• Customer Relationship Management: With a complete customer background and their detailed history of communication, it is easier to feed the right collaterals or solutions. Also, it is possible to offer a personalized communication, which makes customer feel more important and comfortable.

• Document Management: There are times when your team needs to access technical datasheets to pull out the relevant information. At such times, instead of going through stack of files, document management feature simply allows your teams to access any collateral you feed in it at just the click of a button.