In the CRM system selection process, you will be easily get caught up in all the sales razzmatazz, features charm, and price comparisons. Yet, identifying your business needs a CRM system is itself a huge first step. But, before sending out a single RFP, or meeting with your first potential vendor, it’s vital to get an idea about “what type of CRM system is right for my business?”
Different types of CRM systems are going to support your business goals in different ways. To identify the right CRM system for your business, you must evaluate all your objectives to decide the principal customer management problems you and your team need to be resolved.
The three elemental types of CRM systems in the market today. Those are:
• Operational CRM Systems
• Analytical CRM Systems
• Collaborative CRM Systems
Many new CRM buyers look online and quickly find out the half-dozen of “big names” in the CRM market. Most of these big names offer the same core type of CRM solution. Finding the right CRM for your business means getting the idea of what you need in advance so that you get a solution that matches your business, and not the other way around.
What are Operational CRM Systems?
You might guess that operations CRM systems are built to make these things easier – managing and automating day-to-day processes in your business. This means functions like marketing, sales, and customer service.
Sales automation is usually the fundamental element of any operational CRM system. It is designed to help your sales team to manage their sales pipeline, bring up leads, track opportunities, and get new leads.
Marketing automation tools let you automate a variety of common tasks to increase your team’s productivity. Lead capturing, newsletters, bring-up campaigns, and other tasks can all be automated and clarified with custom guidelines that read out how the system will be going to perform based on user-selected criteria.
Service automation can help customer service teams of almost any size. These tools let service reps generate automatic messages with answers to frequently asked questions via email, text message, or phone.
Operational CRM is the most common, and also the popular type of solution in the marketplace and works across an extensive range of industries.
What are Analytical CRM Systems?
Analytical CRM is expected to make handling customer acquisition and retention much easier, as well as keep track of detailed customer data. Businesses that have huge detailed customer data to analyze are better to consider this type of CRM.
The more data your business collects about its customers – their purchasing behavior, pain points, and patterns– the analytical CRM system will become handy.
This type of CRM is also useful for recognizing places where your sales funnel is bottlenecked and/or underachieving sales and marketing strategies. Analytical CRM will provide the info you need to separate your core business functions and develop more successful ways of operating.
What are Collaborative CRM Systems?
Collaborative CRM is built around the goal of refining the overall customer experience. This starts with the rationalization of communication between all parties involved on both sides of the sale.
Collaborative CRM carries out this idea by allowing you to track and share customer data with everyone from sellers and suppliers to customer support and even marketing managers. Making this information accessible to your team not only reinforces internal relationships but the relationships with your customers as well.
The two main elements of a collaborative CRM solution are interaction management and channel management.
Interaction Management: This lets your team manage all relations between your organization and its customers. Customers prefer to communicate through specific channels, and interaction management handles all of those communications across numerous channels.
Channel Management: Supports you to reach customers more efficiently and successfully using their chosen interaction channels. This could be social media, email, phone, or maybe face-to-face.
Which type of CRM will work?
Sometimes, your business may benefit from more than one type of CRM. As an example, in enterprise-level organizations with many employees across multiple departments, what works for one may not for another.
With that, finding the right type of CRM system almost always requires a detailed examination of your company’s business goals and challenges. Putting your business through a hard examination to determine bottlenecks and pain points almost always brings new information to light that can be integrated into your CRM selection criteria.
This process can be done entirely with your internal resources but most of the time it is good to work with an outside party who can be neutral and objective at each stage of the process.
To get an idea about the CRM process, or if you want to find out which CRM system will work for you, contact us without hesitation. We are here to assist you all the time you need us.