What Is A CRM Platform?

A CRM platform is a system of software or an application designed to support the process of managing sales leads, opportunities, and customers.

Our Complete Guide to CRM Platforms

Businesses always look for ways to multiply their sales, expand their customer base and propel their business to new heights. And along the journey, they look for tools and approaches to simplify their business processes, help improve customer relationships, and improve teams’ efficiency. If you are one of them.

Then, choosing a customer relationship management system comes into play. And, if you are out of the loop not knowing what CRM is or what benefits it can garner for your business, then here is your take.

What is a CRM Platform?

In simple words, if we are talking about crm, then it stands for customer relationship management.

CRM is software that helps businesses manage the company’s relationships and interactions with customers and prospective customers. In all, it simply improves your business relationships to expand and grow your business.

Moreover, CRM has become more essential in the digital age with digitalization. Businesses—big or small—in various industries are working hard to collect data from their customers and potential customers, and a CRM application helps them achieve it.

It helps businesses stay connected with customers, enhance their teams’ productivity, streamline processes, and boost profitability.

Previously, CRM used to be all about sales. But not anymore! CRM can be widely used for every department. It is not just sales but also marketing, commerce, service, and IT.

A great CRM, well-equipped with many features and functionalities, lets you do a lot. For example, it allows you to handle all your customers’ information and centralize it along with company data in one place. So, your team is supercharged and powered with the right information to deliver an excellent customer experience.

The right CRM empowers your business and delights your customers. It unites everyone in your team with one shared goal to enhance customer experience and expand your business.

Further moving to explore what benefits CRM carries for your business, let’s first understand what CRM platforms are used for.

What Are CRM Platforms Used For?

CRM platforms allow handling various processes, including contact management, agent productivity, sales management, and more. Effective CRM systems are used to deal with customer relationship management that spans the customers’ entire buying journey from marketing, sales, digital commerce, and customer service interactions.

Benefits of CRM Platforms

CRM loaded with advanced technologies provides a range of benefits to businesses to grow and empowers their teams to level up and increase their efficiency. So, let’s find out.

1. Improves customer services 2. Helps increase sales 3. Retains more customers 4. Provides better analytics 5. Improves customer service team productivity 6. Increases marketing effectiveness 7. Better knowledge and information sharing 8. Accurate reports 9. More transparency 10. Reduced costs 11. Work from anywhere 12. Increased collaboration 13. Faster deployment 14. Automatic software updates

CRM carries many more benefits for businesses, more specific to various industries, not limited to just these benefits. So, cherishing the benefits, let’s explore the different types of CRM platforms that can be helpful for your business.

Different Types of CRM Platforms

There are three major types of CRM platforms:

Operational CRM Analytical CRM Collaborative CRM

Let’s dive into each of them.

Operational CRM

Standing true to its name, Operational CRM enables businesses to handle day-to-day sales, marketing, and customer relationship service operations. It is one of the most common types of CRM that streamlines and simplifies these primary business processes. Operational CRM is highly beneficial to generate leads, convert those leads into sales and contacts, and improve customer service processes to delight and retain customers. The three major components that Operational CRM carries are:

Marketing Automation

Teams usually get tired due to mundane marketing tasks like posting campaigns, assigning dates, and sequentially arranging different promotions. However, with marketing automation, all the marketing activities are streamlined and automated to free the team to work on more critical tasks. This operational CRM component is all carried from scheduling regular campaigns, email marketing, website monitoring, and directing leads to particular processes.

Sales Automation

For any business, sales play an important role, and automating most sales tasks helps the business grow faster while focusing on the vitals of sales. Sales Automation streamlines some sales processes for more clarity and automates numerous time-consuming and manual tasks that are usually part of sales operations.

Customer Service

Happy customers make happy businesses. And nothing better than excellent customer service has this magic. Speeding up the customer processes is what effective customer service automation does. It expedites various customer service operations like call center routing and customer information management and provides customer self-service options like chatbots, automation tools, policy/compliance management, and more.

Analytical CRM

The Analytical CRM type provides data visualization for clarity and gives you in-depth insights about customers, their interactions, and relationships with your business, and the future possibilities. It helps you analyze the overall collected information, including customers’ preferences, contact information, and behavior. Hence, it doesn’t matter where your customers are in the buying cycle, or no matter when or how your customers like to interact with your brand, you are well-equipped to meet their requirements.

Collaborative CRM

The collaborative CRM system is designed to improve the overall customer experience by bringing together the company’s entire channels - marketing, sales, and service data. It collaborates data to improve synergy within the business, giving each department the proper understanding of your customers’ needs, preferences, and expectations.

The two major components of collaborative CRMs are Interaction/Contact Management and Channel Management.

Interaction/Contact Management

It helps to track every interaction between customers and business - whether via social media, email, face-to-face, phone calls, or any other communication channels. Interaction management allows gathering and stocking these kinds of information, which is usually further shared with different business units for higher outputs.

Channel Management

Channel management is one level higher than interaction management. It collects the information and helps to analyze the data to identify and finalize which communication channel best suits your customers’ preferences. Whether your customer service team connects with customers via phone call or chat or whether real-time notifications or email works the best, these sorts of challenges are taken care of by channel management.

No doubt, each type of CRM platform has its own benefits, and any business type or size can leverage them for their business growth. So, let’s see which CRM to choose.

Why Use CRM from 500apps?

The CRM system from 500apps is customizable and can be used for any industry or any department. This custom solution is quite flexible and designed to suit your business requirements. Surprisingly, with 500apps, you get CRM at the minimum price with 37+ FREE other applications. So, what more do you need to enhance your customer relationships

Your Takeaway

Undoubtedly, CRM platforms help better understand customer requirements and manage customer relationships efficiently. Moreover, the gathered information, great insights, and quick collaboration among various teams help provide incredible customer-centric experiences. Eventually, this helps your business to outperform competitors and exceed your customer expectations.

If you are new to CRM or searching for one for your business, then 500apps CRM is a perfect fit for you. It simplifies processes and tracks customer data that can help you get future sales. So, stop thinking and start acting!