Which CRM System Type Is The Best For Your Business?
This means that you need to have the right tool to help you address this challenge - a CRM (customer relationship management) system like Flowlu.
In case you have never heard of CRM systems before, there are a lot of things that you need to understand before you pick the right one for your business.
What Is CRM?
As we already mentioned above, CRM stands for customer relationship management. Even though CRM systems were designed in the first place to manage customer relationships, the truth is that their goal is much larger. In fact, many people tend to describe CRM systems as tools that can help you understand your customers better and use that information so you can deliver the best possible customer experience.
As a business owner, delivering the best customer experience has become harder in the last few years. After all, consumers aren't static. They kept moving between different channels from email to social media, messaging, and phone, to communicate with brands. Decides, with more ways to research products and make purchases, the buyer's journey is more complex than ever. And if your business sells multiple products to multiple audiences, your difficulties are even bigger.
As customers smooth between channels, the data moves with them. This is another obstacle for businesses. After all, the more data you have about your customers the better you can serve them. This means that you need to find a way to keep track of all this data in just one place.
Overall speaking, all businesses need solutions that can help them have ongoing conversations that can move across channels, systems, and departments. This can be achieved when you are using a CRM system like Flowlu.
The 3 Different Types Of CRM Systems
Even though most CRM systems on the market can deliver the solutions to provide great customer experience, they can be divided into three main categories: collaborative CRM systems, operational CRM systems, and analytical CRM systems. Each one of these types of CRM systems may deliver different things. So, depending on your main goals for your business, one may be better than the other.
#1: Collaborative CRM Systems:
One of the main goals of collaborative CRM systems is to break down silos. It's not rare to see customer support agents, sales reps, and the marketing team feel disconnected. And this disconnection can be more noticed in larger companies. After all, these departments can be separated based not only on geographic locations but also on the product they focus on, the channels they serve, and their skill specialties. However, when you are trying to provide the best customer experience, you want to make sure that you have a way to share information across your entire business in real-time.
Overall speaking, in collaborative CRM systems, be sure that all your teams or departments can access the same up-to-date customer data. This means that not only your customer support agents will have access to the information the marketing and sales teams collected, but they will also update data based on customer interactions that occurred over messaging or email channels.
As you can easily understand, a collaborative CRM system treats interaction as a part of a larger, integrated conversation between each customer and your business. This allows your different departments to save time and not keep repeating themselves each time they talked to a new prospect. Each one of your employees can easily and quickly pull up a record of all past interactions with a specific customer and learn all relevant details.
#2: Operational CRM Systems:
Operational CRM systems are meant to visualize and handle the full customer journey. It starts tracking from their first interactions with your business, either through your website or another third-party website, and goes through the whole leave management process as they move through the sales pipeline and continues to keep track of their behaviors even after they become a customer.
One of the things that make operational CRM systems different is that they usually provide automation features. As you can easily understand, sales automation, marketing automation, and even service automation can help your employees to have more time to handle more important tasks.
#3: Analytical CRM Systems:
The main goal of analytical CRM systems is to help you analyze the customer data you have to gain important insights. As you can easily understand, both digital tools and platforms can help you collect large amounts of data. But to actually analyze this data, you need an analytical CRM system so you can see trends in how your customers behave. With this information, you can then better understand what you need to do to increase sales and customer retention, but also discover the most common customer problems.
Which Type Of CRM System Is The Best For Your Business?
Now that you know the differences between the different CRM systems on the market, you may be wondering which type fits your business better. Well, here's a bit more information so you can make the right decision.
#1: Collaborative CRM Systems:
Overall speaking, collaborative CRM systems have two main functions:
- getting real-time information to everyone using just one platform
- making the information easy to find and quickly accessible.
When compared to the other types of CRM systems, we can say that collaborative CRMs are meant to increase customer retention and satisfaction and not so much to make sales. However, it's important to notice that this type of CRM can be a great solution to data silos. After all, the knowledge and information that both sales and marketing teams gain about leads are only relevant if they can be easily accessed by the customer support team. And the same is true for getting customer support insights back to marketing and sales teams.
Some of the most important features you will find inside a collaborative CRM system are:
- Channel Management: As we have mentioned above, customers expect businesses to be available across multiple channels. However, you must understand which channels your customers prefer and discover the best ways to meet them where they are. Collaborative CRM systems can help you track these channels.
- Interaction Management: When you are using a collaborative CRM system like Flowlu, it will be easy to keep track of any interaction a customer or lead has with your business, no matter the channel. In our platform, you can keep track of all these interactions no matter if they are done using the phone, email, messaging apps, or social media. It will also keep track of how the interaction was resolved, and even any important details that can be helpful for future interactions.
- Document Management: Some collaborative CRM systems on the market can also help you store important documents about your customers. For example, your business may need to deal with customer contracts, proposals, or quotes.
Overall speaking, collaborative CRM systems are a great option for businesses with many departments. Your business may include multiple locations or simply provides omnichannel support.
#2: Operational CRM Systems:
Operational CRM systems usually include not only the features of collaborative CRM systems but also include others related to tracking, managing, and improving the full customer lifecycle. Overall speaking, this type of CRM system is meant for businesses that are trying to discover more about how your customers first learn about your company and all the steps that they took to become customers.
One of the main differences between operational CRM systems and other types is that this one provides automation features. This will help you bring greater efficiency to all processes related to managing customer relationships.
Some of the most important features operational CRM systems offer include:
- Marketing Automation: Instead of continuing with manual work, an operational CRM system can help your marketing team create email campaigns that Streaker relevant emails based on specific activities the customer makes. It can also be used to tailor content recommendations for your business website depending on where your lead is in their journey. Ultimately, your marketing team will deliver a more personalized, relevant experience for your customers.
- Sales Automation: Sales automation can make your leave management process simpler. You can, for example, automate the lead scoring process. This helps you to easily identify which potential customers should be prioritized. But more than this, an operational CRM system can also automatically determine the best tasks to assign to each sales rep depending on priority level.
- Service Automation: By taking into consideration all the information available about a customer's situation, an operational CRM system can help determine the most important details an agent needs to help a customer quickly and effectively. You can also use this CRM system to automate the process of sending service to customers, for example. This can help you measure their satisfaction as well as help you figure out how your team is doing.
Generally speaking, operational CRM systems are a good option for businesses that want to get more information out of their customers. At the same time, it will help businesses make processes more efficient for employees.
#3: Analytical CRM Systems:
The main difference between analytical CRM systems and the other two types is that these are more meant for high-level strategizing.
Analytical CRM systems tend to deliver a wide range of reports that can help you understand:
- What kinds of leads most often turn into sales
- Which types of customers have the highest lifetime value
- What specific marketing campaigns generate the most leads
- What issues do customers most often contact support about
- What features and resources do customers use and like the most
- What types of sales actions lead to a purchase
- The most frequent customer complaints
- How quickly your agents achieve resolution
- How effectively your support team resolves customer issues.
If your business has a lot of customer data and you don't know how to effectively use it, analytical CRM systems are the best option for you.
