Every business in 2022 is attempting to achieve a single goal: to find new ways to stay in touch with their customers.
Whether a company is established or new, staying committed to providing exceptional customer service can help it stay ahead of the competition. Customer relationship management (CRM) software assists SMEs in engaging with existing customers and finding new ones. The software, which can be hosted on-premises or in the cloud, provides businesses with a powerful and user-friendly way to manage their customers’ data. On the other hand, it helps boost existing processes for large companies and helps to improve their customer relations. Incorporating the best CRM software into your business processes will benefit everyone involved, from customers to management.
What is CRM: CRM is Customer Relationship Management. To put it simply, it helps any organization to manage the entire lifecycle of a business process with its customer. That means it handles all the customer data from lead generation, finding new and potential customers to providing additional business support. The best part is through any CRM, an entire team of customers, service users, and colleagues or suppliers can collaborate and work together.
Why do businesses need CRM tools? Nowadays, CRM has been an integral part of maintaining a business. Large enterprises, particularly SMEs, need to use CRM to keep customer data. For SMEs, it’s easier to maintain customer data on any spreadsheet initially when the number of customers is more petite. But later on, it’s tough to manage all that scattered information about various customers from various sources. It’s better to have a consolidated place to gather and store all the data and later refer to it. Here’re some of the vital benefits of using CRM rather than a spreadsheet.
Consolidated Customer Data: In a CRM tool, all the customer-related data- from lead generation, progress, business process, customer activity to support and issues can be put together. It becomes easier to track the progress, follow up, and schedule upcoming tasks.
Customer Support: From CRM data, it’s easier to understand customers’ pain points as there’re forums where customers can raise their concerns. Providing support becomes much more convenient. Some CRM tools even support self-service, which saves customers time.
Collaborative Work: CRM tools allow internal teams, customers, and third-party vendors to increase excellent business value collaboratively.
Predictive Analysis: Using CRM’s report generation tool, an organization can understand the present sales situation and plan the future sales target. A CRM tool can help long-term strategic sales planning and create a sales pipeline considering the available opportunities.
Marketing Campaigns: Using existing email templates in CRM tools, automated newsletters about new products can be sent directly to the customers’ inbox without any hassle and extra marketing budget.
Alerts: With the notification system, be it a text message or email, a CRM tool can notify the customer about the progress of the process.
How to choose a CRM tool for Your business? In this era, information from diversified sources can be overwhelming, and the same can happen to you when you’re researching the right CRM software for your business. There’re a lot of options with various pricing ranges for CRM. But here are some essential things to be considered while opting for a CRM for a particular business.
CRM can be categorized into three main types.
Collaborative: Top focus of a collaborative CRM is to put customer data in a single place so that different departments of an organization, i.e., marketing, technical, sales, and customer support, can work collaboratively and be updated about the changes.
Operational: Operational CRM system provides a visual representation of the lifecycle of a customer process, i.e., from lead generation to post-delivery customer support. These CRMs are responsible for automating marketing, sales, and operations processes.
Analytical: Analytical CRM tool analyzes the customer data and helps to understand customer trends, pain points, and demands and thus catalyze the future strategic business decision.
Although these three functionalities can overlap in any CRM, still a business can prioritize its momentary needs and choose accordingly. For example, someone must opt for a collaborative one if the company has multiple departments or channels in different geographical areas, i.e., large organizations. Analytical CRM would be a better option for SMEs or growing businesses to understand potential customers’ trends and their wants to make critical decisions. Lastly, operational CRM is helpful when a company wants to improve an end-to-end business process that is already implemented and wants to automate some of the features to employ more efficiency.
Apart from these, third-party integration facilities, pricing, ratings, and reviews should be considered before taking a final call.
Five Best CRM Softwares in 2022: According to the features, ranking, pricing, and ease of usability, here are the five best CRM tools in 2022:
Salesforce: Salesforce is a cloud-based enterprise-level CRM that is most suitable for large organizations or growing businesses with diversified verticals. Its unmatched analytics, robust integrations, different divisions, and easy-to-use UI is popular. Salesforce CRM consists of both free and priced plans.
Hubspot CRM: With a 97% satisfaction score, Hubspot is one of the most popular CRM tools in the market. It’s especially suitable for SMEs as it’s a free software. With unlimited data storage, it helps to manage contacts, tasks, and sales pipelines. Also, it comes with extended functionalities by many optional add-ons. This easy-to-use tool brings down repetitive tasks and enhances productivity.
Zoho CRM: With a 78% satisfaction score, Zoho is another CRM tool with free and priced versions. It has unlimited data storage. One can access and edit data from Zoho CRM’s app without any internet. That’s why it can be the best choice for remote teams and sales professionals who work in the field most of the time.
PipeDrive: It is a paid CRM tool with a 91% satisfaction score. Pipedrive is different from any other CRM tool because of its unique Sales Pipeline Visualization. It collects Lead related data from multiple media platforms like chatbots, web interactions and puts them into the pipeline. One can get a complete picture of each deal’s current stage and use the drag-and-drop interface to perform mission-critical tasks like adding contacts or moving sales between stages.
BigContacts: It helps businesses find the right customers at the right time. Bigcontacts is a paid CRM tool mostly useful for SMEs for its easy-to-use UI. Its easy task and contact management system, automated process and follow-up reminders, marketing module with email and letter templates, custom and report facilities make it highly beneficial. Also, it’s one of the best collaborative tools. One can track all the tickets, emails, files, activities, notes, etc., from one location.
What’s in 2022: CRM software has become more advanced and integrated with a vast range of business operations in recent years. The functionalities will continue to expand as artificial intelligence and machine learning become more prevalent. In 2022, there might be more automation and integration facilities to increase productivity and business prospects. In addition, there is a growing demand for CRM solutions that embrace and integrate voice technology. According to a PWC survey, more than 90% of respondents use voice commands to control their smart devices. As a result of consumer demand, the CRM industry has begun integrating conversational applications and voice assistants. Ultimately customer satisfaction is the goal, and implementing a suitable CRM tool can catalyze the process significantly.
About: About: Jay Anthony, Marketing Head at Techved Consulting adept at SEO and integrated marketing illustrated accross 15+ years of experience in related to roles. Strategic and innovation along with a passion for driving brand awareness and product performance.
The authored article is written by Jay Anthony and shared with Prittle Prattle News exclusively.
