What is CRM?
CRM is a combination of business strategies, software and processes that enable companies to build long-lasting relationships with their customers.
CRM definition
CRM stands for “Customer Relationship Management” and refers to all strategies, software and technologies used by organizations for engaging, acquiring and retaining customers.
CRM software stand for
CRM software allows companies to automate customer-related workflows and ensure that all interactions with customers and prospects happen smoothly and efficiently across the entire customer journey. CRM software enables organizations to increase close rates, boost loyalty, and drive profits. With CRM software, companies can easily collect and manage customer data from multiple channels to build more precise customer profiles, provide personalized customer engagements and ensure maximum productivity of customer-facing teams
How does CRM work?
A CRM system typically includes a customer database, data management tools to work with diverse customer data, workflow automation features for process design and management, analytics, dashboards, and other features such as forecasting and intelligent scoring.
By using those features, companies can engage their customers through their preferred channels, such as websites, emails, phone calls, chatbots, and others.
Widely accepted as the #1 solution for sales, marketing, and other customer-facing teams, CRM software greatly simplifies daily work by automating a broad variety of activities related to managing sales and marketing funnels, reporting, forecasting, analytics, etc.
Advanced CRMs also provide similar tools for customer service teams, who can use a CRM to have complete visibility into customer profile data, streamline customer request management, automate service operations, and continuously optimize workflows for customer care excellence.
Best CRM systems include customer behavior tracking features that record customer interactions across all available channels. For example, interactions can be tracked via website forms, e-commerce shopping carts, banners, buttons, and other interactive elements. Intelligent CRM solutions can process behavior data to enrich the customer profile and use AI to suggest the most relevant next best offer/next best action for customer-facing teams.
To further improve operational efficiency, CRM systems enable managers to automate routine processes, as well as easily measure team performance. For example, a CRM offers such productivity features as task and project management with the ability to create business rules and automate routine tasks.
Some CRMs also offer extensive analytical capabilities, allowing users to track the efficiency of various customer engagement strategies and efforts to continuously optimize customer-facing tactics and drive better conversion rates.
Name
Type
Owner
1
Alpha Business
Partner
John Best
2
Kub & Sons
Client
Verdie Swift
3
Howheel LLC
Integrator
Naomi Wong
4
Glory Bank
Prospect
William Brown
Profile
Profile completeness
100%
Name
Alpha Business
Type
Partner
Owner
John Best
Web
www.alfabusiness.com
Primary phone
+1 617 765 7997
Category
A
Industry
Information Technologies
Profile
Profile completeness
100%
Name
Kub & Sons
Type
Client
Owner
Verdie Swift
Web
www.kubandsons.com
Primary phone
+44 203 384 00 40
Category
SMB
Industry
Manufacturing
Profile
Profile completeness
100%
Name
Howheel LLC
Type
Integrator
Owner
Naomi Wong
Web
www.howheelllc.com
Primary phone
+6 126 145 28 88
Category
A
Industry
Automotive
Profile
Profile completeness
100%
Name
Glory Bank
Type
Prospect
Owner
William Brown
Web
www.myglorybank.com
Primary phone
+3 572 200 88 43
Category
A
Industry
Banking
What are the key capabilities of CRM software?
In many cases, when people talk about CRM, they are referring to sales force automation — the most popular set of CRM capabilities primarily used by sales managers and business development representatives to streamline their daily work with customer data, sales history, and sales funnels.
However, enterprise-grade CRM systems also provide in-depth capabilities for marketing and customer service teams. Marketers use a CRM to orchestrate lead generation campaigns and nurture leads, while customer service specialists can take advantage of automated request management and other customer service workflows.
As a result, CRM software allows businesses to focus on the full scope of their company’s relationships with customers, partners, suppliers, etc. With a professional CRM in place, it becomes much easier to generate new opportunities, win new customers, build long-lasting relationships, provide qualified support, and ensure maximum customer satisfaction across the entire customer journey.
What are the types of CRM systems?
There are four major types of CRM systems. The best CRM systems usually combine capabilities for different use cases to cover customer engagements across the entire customer journey
Collaborative CRM systems
Collaborative CRM systems enable companies to connect multiple departments, such as sales, marketing, and customer service, and ensure their organized daily work based on single-source customer data. Using a collaborative CRM, for example, your sales reps will have instant access to the customer’s service history or history of marketing campaigns, thus giving them a complete profile of the customer’s needs.
Collaborative CRMs are essential for distributed teams and businesses that apply a multi-faceted approach to customer acquisition and retention. Ensuring quick access and sharing of customer data between these teams makes it possible to provide seamless customer experiences at every stage of the customer journey, eliminate data duplication or data loss, increase teams’ productivity, and improve win and retention rates.
Operational CRM systems
Operational CRM systems focus on streamlining and automating diverse workflows for customer-facing teams. This type of CRM typically offers flexible tools to create, monitor and optimize customer-facing business processes.
While collaborative CRMs emphasize single-source data access and unified data management, operational CRM systems focus on operational excellence and automation, and improved performance of each business unit.
Analytical CRM systems
Analytical CRM systems specialize in providing in-depth business intelligence based on customer data. These CRMs feature multiple types of analytics, including interactive dashboards, campaign pipelines, workflow-embedded analytics, AI/ML-powered predictive analytics, text & speech analytics, etc. Analytical CRMs offer great reporting capabilities and ensure transparency of customer-facing activities for managers and executives.
Although analytical CRMs may not be the first place to look when considering adopting a CRM, they provide value for large enterprises looking for solutions to visualize data.
All-in-one CRM solutions
All-in-one CRM systems support not only customer-facing use cases, but they enable organizations to automate back-office workflows and operations. All-in-one CRMs provide a full range of workflow automation, collaboration and analytical capabilities to enable full-cycle automation of all business units. An all-in-one CRM combines the above-mentioned capabilities serving as a unified solution for workflow automation for enterprise-level organizations across marketing, sales, service and operations. All-in-one CRM systems can also be integrated with other solutions and data providers for seamless data-sharing, while serving as a one-stop-shop for both customer-facing and operational units.
Solutions of this type also provide powerful workflow automation capabilities that allow for designing, managing and optimizing business processes.
The best solutions of this type can also be effectively applied beyond standard CRM processes and used to implement industry-specific automated workflows for your organization. All-in-one CRMs can be of great advantage for workflow-intensive organizations in such industries as FinServ, Manufacturing, or Telecom, where adherence to standards and process automation are critical.
CRM features
Contact & Accounts Management
CRM systems help you build and manage a 360-degree customer profile including their contact and business information, connection to business accounts, current engagement status and activities, history of previous interactions and other AI\ML-powered intelligence (e.g., predictive score). Having access to all this information enables your team to engage with customers at the right time in the right channel and with the most personalized messages.
Lead & Opportunity Management
CRM offers a range of tools to automate and streamline lead-to-revenue workflows, from initial contact to repeat sales. You can easily aggregate leads from multiple sources, automatically verify and deduplicate lead data, nurture them using embedded CE tools, as well as transition them across sales cycle stages based on their sales readiness.
Orders, Invoices & Contracts
CRM enables you to easily create orders and other related documents, such as invoices and contracts. You can quickly personalize your orders by adding installment plans, product lists, discounts and other data stored in CRM. You can also use templates to automatically populate your purchase documents with customer or product data, as well as create supply schedule templates. CRM systems provide tools to set up automated document management workflows, track current document status and document history, and analyze order processing effectiveness.
Collaboration
Unified CRM enables better alignment between teams as it supports a single database of customer data with an ability for employees to collaborate on various deals and projects within the same environment. With CRM you can also manage your tasks/projects with a calendar that can be easily integrated with MS Outlook or Google Calendar. For continuous improvement of your team’s performance, CRMs also feature broad capabilities to analyze employee productivity based on their tasks, emails, and phone calls.
Campaign Management
CRM empowers marketing professionals with a complete set of tools to create, run, analyze, and optimize multichannel marketing campaigns. With CRM, you can easily segment your target audience according to predefined criteria and design an automated marketing campaign to engage with prospects or customers through various channels (e.g., email, chatbots, calls, social media, etc.). You can also use embedded campaign analytics to run A/B tests and keep track of campaign effectiveness in real-time with performance indicators.
Service Management
CRM offers customer service teams a digital workspace to provide omnichannel customer service, effectively manage customers' requests, drive better efficiency across agent teams, and automate other service workflows in a single environment. Customer Service is one of the most popular areas of CRM, alongside Sales and Marketing.
Workflow Automation
Modern CRMs go beyond standard CRM processes and enable users to set up automated workflows that meet the unique needs of their business or industry. Using workflow automation tools, CRM users can also easily customize and improve core CRM processes, such as lead management or campaign management. Furthermore, workflow automation capabilities significantly expand the scope of use of CRM solutions and in many cases allow for enterprise-grade workflow automation including complex back-office processes.
Field Sales
Management
CRM must support and empower your field sales representatives with everything they might need during their on-site meeting with a potential client or when planning their business itinerary. A rich mobile application that enables your sales team members to quickly pull up customer profile details, contracts and orders, pricing information, or marketing collateral can help ensure the perfect scenario for the client’s meeting. A great CRM solution also enables a senior sales manager to view a schedule of visits for each representative, keep track of meeting locations on a digital geo map in real time, and monitor the status of the visits by geo-tags from field sales rep check-ins in each of the locations. This comprehensive data can then be leveraged for performance evaluation, training, and field sales workflow optimization.
Dashboards & Analytics
A good CRM solution must include advanced analytical tools that allow users without special skills to visualize collected data and share it across the organization. Full-fledged CRM solutions include interactive dashboards that can be created and personalized using visual design tools ( e.g. overall business performance, snapshots of the current sales funnel health, team KPIs, sales forecast or lead generation overview) to facilitate better reporting across any business function These dashboards can be configured in a variety of visual formats using any data entry from the system with an ability to set up access rights for specific individuals based on their role. Modern CRM solutions can also be easily integrated with other data providers/solutions and IT environments.
AI/ML Data Models
Leading CRMs take advantage of modern AI/ML technology that supports the automation of workflows and the building of data-backed forecasts/recommendations for different use cases. Advanced CRM solutions provide pre-configured AI-powered ML models of different types (classification, regression, recommendation, segmentation, scoring, similarity, etc.), and vertical-specific AI/ML data models, for example, a Next Best Offer solution for banks, or a Customer Segmentation solution for retailers, etc.
With these capabilities, CRM systems can help users provide recommendations based on the historical data aggregated in the system. For example, a CRM can automatically identify the best product to offer to a customer; the best channel in which to engage a prospect based on their behavior history or identify the best-suited service agent to which to assign a case.
Top educational content on CRM
Who can benefit from CRM?
The best part about a CRM system is that almost any organizational unit can benefit from it — from sales and business development to marketing, customer service, recruiting, and so on. CRM software supports improved external relationship and internal process management.
Storing all customer information in one place, recording service issues, identifying sales opportunities, managing marketing campaigns — these are but a few basic capabilities of a CRM system. These capabilities are relevant for companies of all sizes and in all industries.
Since a CRM system is capable of orchestrating diverse data via a single user interface, it enables users to collaborate on processes in a seamless manner which increases the efficiency and productivity of employees.
CRM software for every business role
Marketer
Profile
Profile complication
71%
Name
William Brown
Job title
Chief Marketing Officer
Industry
Manufacturing
Category
Enterprise
Web
marketingcreatio.com
Primary phone
+442033840040
Email
wb@marketingcreatio.com
Sales manager
Profile
Profile complication
57%
Name
Amira Baker
Job title
Head of Sales
Industry
Banking
Category
Corporate
Web
salescreatio.com
Primary phone
+16177657997
Email
emmabakerhos@creatio.com
Customer service manager
Profile
Profile complication
86%
Name
Rahul Anand
Job title
Senior CSM
Industry
Hi-Tech
Category
SME
Web
servicecreatio.com
Primary phone
+35722008843
Email
r.anand@studiocreatio.com
Operations manager
Profile
Profile complication
43%
Name
Naomi Wong
Job title
Operations Team Leader
Industry
Business Services
Category
SMB
Web
studiocreatio.com
Primary phone
+61261452888
Email
naomi@studiocreatio.com
Marketer
Accelerate lead to revenue cycles
CRM systems with integrated marketing capabilities enable marketers to streamline lead management workflows, and design personalized marketing campaigns to better engage customers and prospects.
Stay aligned with the sales team and ensure that all leads are qualified and handed off to sales managers on time.
Run effective personalized campaigns
Advanced CRM solutions enable marketers to build more targeted communications with customers using a 360-degree customer view, marketing dashboards, and AI/ML-powered tools for next best action, product recommendations, and lead quality scoring.
With embedded campaign management tools, CRM can enable marketers to design, manage, and optimize complex omnichannel marketing campaigns in a single interface.
Track customer engagements across every touchpoint
Having marketing integrated into your CRM bundle allows users to capture online customer data via web pages and eCommerce websites, analyze intent data, track engagements happening with human-assisted chats and chatbots, monitor calls, and analyze social media data.
Customer behavior tracking allows users to keep tabs on all customer interactions, analyze historical data, and utilize AI/ML-powered tools to create personalized offers and product suggestions through appropriate marketing channels.
Sales Manager
Automate sales processes to boost close rates
Sales professionals can take advantage of streamlined sales workflows that guide them through a complete sales cycle, from generating and nurturing leads to a successful deal closure. CRM systems can help identify process bottlenecks and help sales reps nurture better customer engagements at each stage of the sales cycle.
CRM enables businesses to track both individual sales rep performance, as well as analyze the effectiveness of sales teams and identify top performers.
Manage sales of any type and complexity
With CRM, businesses can automate long and short sales cycles including B2C, B2B, or B2B2C. CRM allows users to manage multiple sales channels in a single workplace (agent desktop), with a 360-degree view of customer data and complete engagement history.
Automate and streamline opportunity management with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) tools that enable you to build data-backed scoring models, suggest next best action/next best offer, and assess your sales process effectiveness.
Stay in touch with marketing and customer service
Advanced CRM solutions provide seamless integration of sales, marketing and customer service which keeps track of customer interactions across the entire customer journey. Improve customer engagement by having all your customer data in sync, thus gaining a deeper insight into the customer’s history, preferences, and needs.
Customer service manager
Streamline customer request processing
Unified CRM solutions also provide capabilities for customer service agents to manage service workflows and engage with customers in any channel. CRM allows automatically distributing customer requests (cases) among service agents and track interaction history. Some CRM solutions provide an integrated self-service portal with a knowledge base.
Improve customer satisfaction and boost loyalty
CRM solutions enable agents to create and manage SLAs to ensure high-quality service delivery and collect customer feedback to assess the service quality.
Automate and integrate complex service workflows
Organizations can simplify the agents’ work with an integrated service agent desktop, a field service application, reporting and analytics tools, etc.
Enterprises can take advantage of more complex service process automation, such as configuration management, change management, problem management, etc.
Operations manager
Streamline operations across all major departments
Sales professionals can take advantage of streamlined sales workflows that guide them through a complete sales cycle, from generating and nurturing leads to a successful deal closure. CRM systems can help identify process bottlenecks and help sales reps nurture better customer engagements at each stage of the sales cycle.
Measure and improve performance
Operations managers can improve the visibility of teams’/individuals’ KPIs across multiple departments, easily spot bottlenecks and inefficiencies, manage projects, and create workflow templates based on tried-and-proved operational strategies.
FAQ
Why is customer relationship management important?
CRM software is a special system with one primary purpose – improving relationships with clients by providing businesses with smart tools to effectively engage customers and prospects. CRM software helps organizations streamline crucial business operations, such as marketing, sales, and service to enhance customer experience across the customer journey from initial contact to repeat sales and customer service.
What companies use CRM?
Deploying CRM software is beneficial for companies of any size. CRM solutions allow SMB organizations to easily manage the complete customer journey, while not overloading employees with unnecessary complicated functionality. Moreover, by implementing a highly scalable solution, small businesses will be able to expand CRM capabilities in accordance with the company's growth.
Mid-size and enterprise-level organizations usually leverage CRM solutions to orchestrate workflows, unify and visualize data and break silos across departments for improved operational efficiency, productivity, and customer experience.
What is No-code CRM?
No-code is the technology that leverages visual design tools (e.g., drag and drop) that allow users without deep technical skills to create new business applications, automate workflows, set up integrations and configure software without coding. No-code technology in CRM offers rich customization options for non-technical users, thus enabling organizations to adapt quickly to an ever-changing business environment.
For example, no-code capabilities of CRM Creatio enable users to build customer engagement apps, configure integrations with other sales, marketing and service solutions (e.g., telephony solutions, ABM platforms, conversational platforms, chatbots) and automate CRM, operational and vertical workflows without a line of code. No-code CRMs also allow users to interactively visualize data and create AI/ML models for better decision-making (e.g., prescriptive lead scoring or sales forecasting). With a no-code CRM, you can have full freedom over your CRM automation.
Online (cloud-based) or on-premise CRM?
With on-premise CRM, a company needs to purchase the licenses beforehand. Considering that the software is located on the company’s servers, on-premise CRM is a good choice for organizations with a strict security policy, but in this case, the implementation process takes more time and IT resources. Although it is the buyer's responsibility to ensure the constant maintenance of the on-premise system, including data security, the vendor will still provide technical support in the event of critical circumstances.
On the other hand, software-as-a-service (SaaS), cloud or on-demand CRM stores data on the vendor’s servers. In this case, the users have full access to the database at all times, wherever they are, and, most importantly, the vendor takes all the responsibility for the seamless operation of the system and provides all the necessary system updates and support.
Most importantly, cloud-based CRM software is highly scalable, which means that an organization can easily expand its functionality when business requirements grow or change.
What is CRM in marketing?
For Marketing teams, CRM systems provide automation tools to streamline marketing lead engagement and management workflows – from demand generation to lead nurturing, to final hand-off to sales. Marketers use CRMs to personalize customer engagements by building omnichannel marketing campaigns (email campaigns, banner ads, search ads, social media ads, ABM ads, etc.).
What is CRM in sales?
CRM system for Sales delivers end-to-end sales processes to manage the complete customer journey – from lead to order, and continued account maintenance. Sales teams leverage CRMs to better engage prospects and customers, create a 360-degree customer view and keep track of all customer engagements to ensure win rates.
What is CRM in customer service?
Customer support and service teams leverage CRM solutions to create a holistic customer view in order to ensure customer service is provided on time and through the right channel by automating key workflows (e.g., case/request/problem management) and leveraging Artificial Intelligence to reduce manual workload.
