Regardless of the size of your company and the number of customers you have, dealing with them can sometimes be overwhelming. Each one of your customers requires to be treated in a professional way, as well as to get their concerns addressed and issues fixed in a timely manner.
This is most likely to be a major challenge unless you are using proper technology. Luckily, CRM software might be the answer to all of your problems! This includes building customer loyalty, acquiring potential customers, building trustful relationships with customers, automating manual business processes and repetitive tasks, providing sales teams with wide range of actionable insights, etc. However, with the numerous different options on the market, it is hard to determine which one is the best for you.
The first step to ensuring you will really get your money’s worth by implementing a customer relationship management solution is to look for the core features it needs to possess. In this article, we will focus on some of the most essential ones, which are guaranteed to bring you success.
Ease of use
No matter how fancy of a solution you choose, it won’t mean anything if it is too complex, as your employees won’t know how to put it to a good use, so it will turn out to be a huge waste of money. Instead, you should opt for simplicity.
Using a CRM tool that is intuitive and easily comprehended will bring benefits to everyone – your staff is going to be more than willing to use it, so the production will increase, which will lead to some serious profits.
Accessibility
In the world where everyone is used to spending time on their smartphones and other mobile devices, having to sit by the desk to get the work done might seem a bit tedious. Accessibility is one of the most important features, as it refers to the ability for everyone to access crucial information such as customer data wherever they are.
That is why you should go for a cloud-based customer relationship management solution, as it will enable you to take care of everything on the go. In fact, according to some reports, more than 80 percent of users are accessing their CRM systems via mobile devices, so make sure you are keeping up.
Reports and analytics
Although CRM systems are the best way to store great amounts of data and information, your solution won’t do you any good unless it has an ability to thoroughly analyze that information and present you with some insightful reports that are valuable for making good business decisions.
That is why reports and analytics feature is an absolute must-have, as it will enable you to spot behaviors, customer satisfaction patterns, trends, as well as the other crucial market insights.
To sum up, if you are looking for more effectiveness, better productivity, increased profits and overall success of your business, customer relationship management technology is the right thing to opt for. However, before making your purchasing decisions, make sure your tool possesses these important features in order for in to really pay off in the long run.
Customer data collection
One of the most important features of the CRM software is customer data collection and storage. In other words, CRM software is designed to collect, store and provide fast access to customer data when it comes to managing customer interactions – thus we can consider CRM solution a customer interaction management tool.
When interacting with a customer, you can access detailed customer information in the CRM system, including history of purchases and conversations with the customer service team, age, preferred payment method, location and phone number of the customer, and other vital details that can be included in the informal format in the customer card in order to hepl the customer support agents provide personalized experiences when interacting with clients.
Marketing efforts automation
CRM software is a must-have solution for automating marketing campaigns. You can set up and run SMS marketing campaigns from the CRM software, as well as email marketing efforts in order to inform customers about new offers, send follow-up messages or just manage customer-brand relationships to ensure customer retention. Additionally, CRM software allows you to automate some vital stages of a sales cycle – for instance, you can automatically send SMS confirmation messages to customers when they place an order.
What is even more important is that you can analyze and track the effectiveness of your marketing efforts in the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software interface and make required changes in the case of a need.
Sales management automation
CRM software is also designed for sales, which means it has some unique advanced features that will help you improve your sales performance and meet sales quotas. It includes sales funnels and sales pipeline management features where sales managers can move their leads through the funnels and plan their further steps to close the deal effectively and in time.
Sales automation is also provided in the form of marketing automation, which means you can see a big picture of your sales efforts and control all operations from the single source of information.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Sales process and contact management is easier to manage with the help of AI – it allows improving sales reps’ performance, automate part of the work of marketing teams, analyze customer journey and customer feedback to meet customer expectations, provide sales forecasting and automate sales activities. Proper customer relationship management software has to include AI-integration or be ready to scale up the platform for integrating