Madrid, May 12, 2023 – Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is indispensable for fostering a culture focused on customers, who should be at the heart of companies. It is such a key driver of corporate results that it is worth taking a few minutes to learn about the features, types, and benefits of CRM solutions.
Twelve features of CRM solutions
Broadly speaking, CRM solutions make it easier for customer service, marketing, and sales teams to work together, which in turn leads to increased customer satisfaction and retention. In addition, thanks to CRM, companies always have a comprehensive view of their current customer demographics, purchase history and customer service interactions.
With respect to leads, CRM solutions help monitor them, send emails, automate sales tasks, or create customized reports.
But let’s go into detail and see the basic features of this type of software:
- Calendar and reminders: CRM sets reminders on customer accounts that are synchronized with the calendar. It allows alerting customers that the end of a trial period is approaching or reminding sales reps to follow up with customers by phone.
- Contact management: CRM stores contact information of current and potential customers in a centralized, searchable database.
- Email marketing: CRM manages email mailing lists, monitors the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, announces new product launches, and promotes services.
- Interaction monitoring: CRM documents conversations with customers, monitors activities related to specific contacts and adds notes on interactions.
- Lead generation: CRM collects lead contact information.
- Lead qualification: CRM determines whether a customer is appropriate for the product or service based on their activity and interactions.
- Marketing automation: CRM helps automate and manage marketing campaigns.
- Sales flow management: CRM provides a complete view of the sales flow. It reports the stage each lead is in and the number of leads in the different stages, as well as the maturity of the leads and the sales that have been closed.
- Segmentation: CRM differentiates between current and potential customers by grouping them into categories according to their common characteristics to identify the target market.
- Task management: CRM assigns responsibilities or tasks to team members and monitors their progress.
- Territory management: CRM plans, allocates and manages sales territories to generate leads and boost sales.
- Workflow automation: CRM automates tasks such as scheduling follow-up events and determining criteria for defining who the leads are.
Integration of CRM with document software and CCM solutions (Customer Communications Management) further enriches the functionality of CRM platforms allowing, among others, the design, generation, and distribution of multilanguage business documents.
As can be seen, the potential of CRM solutions is overly broad, but that is precisely why it is important to know the types of CRM software available in order todetermine which one best suits the company’s objectives or the problems to be solved.
Four types of CRM software
According to their features, CRM software can be divided into four categories:
- Operational CRM increases the company’s operational efficiency through automation.
- Strategic CRM focuses on customers and their interactions with the company.
- Analytical CRM organizes and analyzes customer data by looking at certain metrics, such as recurring revenues, top-selling accounts, and customer retention rates.
- Collaborative CRM focuses on the exchange of customer information across in-house teams.
Ten benefits of CRM solutions
Whether running on cloud-based platforms or mobile devices, most companies use CRM because of the clear benefits and value it provides. CRM solutions:
- Increase sales forecasting accuracy and sales productivity.
- Allow collecting customer data and analyzing it to better understand customer preferences and behavior.
- Improve customer experienceby using the communication channels and content that customers want.
- Facilitate decision making and help understand business management, measure customerrelationship quality, and calculate sales volumes.
- Provide access to information in realtime, since, being an automated management software, it allows obtaining customer data in real time.
- Optimize sales processes, since they facilitate numerous tasks that could be tedious for the human team behind them. This allows employees to devote their time and effort to selling more.
- Increase sales by understanding customer behavior and anticipating their needs.
- Enhance growth and scalability by providing valuable information that can be used to tailor marketing campaigns and respond to customer requestsin a personalized way.
- Apply automated intelligence to generate leads by providing accurate and concrete data to create new sales opportunities.
- Improve customer service since they allow solving problems or doubts raised by customers quickly and effectively. In addition, CRM stores customers’purchase history, which can be reviewed whenever necessary to know the reason for the failures.
There is no doubt that CRM technology is an unbelievably valuable tool because it allows understanding how business processes, marketing campaigns and sales procedures work. By analyzing the reports that CRM generates, it is possible to determine what works and what does not, as well as the mistakes that have been made, which need to be investigated in depth so that they do not happen again.
CRM solutions are an indispensable asset that help substantially improve business management and bring benefits to all types of companies at a time like the current one, when they need to keep customers more satisfied than ever.
About DocPath
DocPath is a leading enterprise document software company that offers its international customers the technology that allows them to complement their ERP and implement advanced Document Output Management, Customer Communications Management and document software pooling processes.
Founded in 1993, DocPath is based in Europe, USA and Latin America and is present with its Solutions in companies around the world. Among its customers there are prestigious banks and top-tier corporations, facilitating the difficult and complex task of designing, generating and distributing their business-critical documents. DocPath keeps a strong commitment to R+D+i, an area to which it allocates a large part of its revenues, and in which lies one of the keys to its success.
For more information, visit: www.docpath.com.
Legal Notice: DocPath is a registered trademark of DocPath Document Solutions. All rights reserved. Other trademarks mentioned herein might be the property of their respective owners.