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Customer Loyalty Is Key for Your Business Success. So if you want your business to prosper, you need to earn customers trust while continuously improving and fostering your relationship with them.
You will know if your heading into right direction as your client base will continuously grow. After a while, it may become impossible to keep track of all your customer data. This is when a CRM system comes in handy.
Customer Relationship Management software (also known as CRM) is special software that can significantly improve the relationship with clients by providing businesses with smart tools for developing a successful strategy.
Suitable example – CRM system manages business relationship and information associated in between.
In simple terms, using CRM, you can store customer and prospect contact information, accounts, leads, and sales opportunities in one central direction. All this information can be accessed in real time in real time.
In this article, we’ll take a look at various types of Customer Relationship Management as well as the must-need features needed for a proper CRM.
However, why your business actually needs CRM. What are the advantages of CRM? What are the benefits gained from CRM?
Why is CRM a must-have for your business?
CRM software offers a dozen of advantages for a different types of business and their sizes. It streamlines sales workflows and helps entrepreneurs forge a stronger relationship with the customers.
Streamline the sales process
Without a crm software in place, most of the business’ sales processes are managed on Excel sheets, email, and variety of other static tools.
It may be sufficient for managing a small number of leads. However, with the volume growth, it may become difficult to manage all the leads and customers. Static tool such as Excel not exactly beneficial when tracking sales leads. As a result, it’ll be impossible to find out how they interact with a business or move down the business’ sales funnel from the point entry to the point of conversation and so on.
Using CRM, you’ll be sure that there are no leaks in your sales funnel. Every lead that comes into your system from any kind of lead source will be accounted for.
CRM for more effective selling
Having integrated a CRM software with your organization’s business tools, including email, calendar, and marketing automation software, you’ll be able to make your employees’ lives easier and help them focus on their main tasks. You would be able to automate all your daily tasks, such as storing in one place and making sure it’s always available, providing access to analytics, integrating with external services, and syncing with mobile devices.
In addition for making life easier, CRM systems also improves communication at the organizational level. Imagine sales works with a lead that some of the colleagues used to talk a few years ago. And all the information, including communication notes, documents are stored in an Excel spreadsheet. That would not be an ideal scenario for the business.
However, with a CRM, anyone with a permission can immediately receive the necessary information they need. There’s no need to look for a person, who’s responsible for the communication. All the information is already in the system.
Types of CRM
There are 3 types of CRM.
- Operational CRMs
- Analytical CRMs
- Collaborative CRMs
Operational CRM
In this case, a name speaks for itself. An operational CRM assists businesses in managing their day-to-day marketing, sales, and customer service operations. The platforms of this type are the most common CRM platforms and are popular among businesses in a wide range of industries.
- Sales force management. This feature manages pipelines, nurture leads as well as acquiring new customers.
- Marketing Automation. An operational CRM is a great option for automating aspects of marketing and focus on targeting customers at various stages of the sales funnel.
Analytical CRM
Analytical CRM is a subset of CRM, where data is collected by a company about their customer interactions, with the goal of increasing customer satisfaction and their customer retention rate. Basically, analytical CRM is behind the scenes process, the customer actions and interactions with the company are captured and analyzed. Using this information, companies can predict trends and suggest these type of products to the customer.
The main functions of an analytical CRM system are the following:
- Customer Retention. Analytical CRM keeps the customers happy and coming back for more.
- Data management. This kind of CRM allows tracking customers interactions and other information.
- Customer Acquisition. Turns the prospects into the customers and increases your sales.
Collaborative CRM
This is a CRM approach, in which various departments of a company, including technical support, sales, and marketing share any information they collect from interactions with customers.
For example, a customer’s feedback, which was gathered from a technical support session, could inform the marketing staff about products or services that might be of interest to the customer.
Basically, these CRM features streamline communication for all parties – both between the customer and your company between various departments and stakeholders.
Having made the information free internally allows strengthening the relationship that holds a customer business together. Additionally, it provides a seamless multi-channel customer experience across all points of the contract.
Why Building a Custom CRM?
A CRM software is superb but a custom CRM is exceptional. And here are a few reasons why;
Custom CRM has a specific solution for your business
There is a vast number of various pre-built CRM systems. However, they’re created to appeal most of the businesses. This means they could have various features and functions that would be irrelevant for your business needs. All these extra features could create unnecessary complexity in form of extra expenses.
Imagine you need a CRM system that would include everything from corporate social media integration to complex marketing automation functionality. So you purchased a CRM system, which turned out to have functionality for the sales department’s lead generation and contact management activity.
At the same time, a custom solution will get you exactly what you need without any unnecessary functionality.
Custom CRM as a scalable solution
A custom CRM can be used both as an enterprise or standalone piece of software. You build a CRM system for your business’ needs so it’s up to you to decide. If you use CRM as a base for building applications for various departments, they’ll have a single database.
Building a custom CRM means you can do anything you want. Scale it when you need, expand, change, or modify – do as much as your heart desires.
Custom CRM as a cost-effective solution
The price for the majority of CRM systems depend on the number of users. However, this model is far from reality. If the sales use the CRM system daily, other departments may need to access the system only occasionally.
As a result, you’d have to either restrict access to the system or pay an unreasonable amount of money for every registered user.
Custom CRM as a secure solution
Open-source CRM solutions mean everyone can download and investigate the source code. Who knows which intentions they have. The website, which is built on this solution, may be easily hacked if the wrong person gains access to the code or a database.
On the other hand, the extensions in the majority of pre-built solutions are made with the help of third-party plugins. This may create additional risks in term of security as well as the reliability of the system.
When it comes to the custom CRM, access to the data on the server belongs only to you.
Features every Custom CRM should have
One of our recent projects was building a custom CRM for the mortgage industry. Basically, it’s a CRM software for a finance business that provides home solutions through their broker and direct referrer channel.
We integrated our system with Zoho CRM to provide brokers with an effective solution of leads search. Having collected all the necessary information, they put it into our system and create mortgage applications.
Users, in their turn, can get access to their application, where they can put changes or add some extra information
Here are the main features that effective CRM software should have.
Leads and deals
In business. all the potential customers are considered as “leads.” While clients are working on turning the leads into the actual customers, they need to have a possibility of adding and then tracking the information about the potential customers.
An effective CRM system should accompany a customer through the whole process. This means you need to build an option that would allow customers to see and to track all of their leads activity through the sales pipeline (starting from the first contract and finishing with a signature).
We realize all the importance. For this very reason, the first priority of our system was helping brokers with their clients.
You may also add a feature that would allow adding the leads from the existing CSV files or other third-party sources just as with contacts. It’ll be even better if a customer would be able to upload files from Google Drive, Dropbox as well as other cloud storage services.
Mobile Access
One of the advantages of mobile access is a possibility of accessing deals and contract information from any device. This is especially helpful for sales reps, who need to be equally effective both inside and outside the office.
Mobile provides a greater degree of flexibility and efficiency. An opportunity to work on-the-go can greatly affect the sales. Especially taking into account the fact that modern customers expect to contact a company outside normal business hours and want to get feedback.
Notifications
To make our CRM more user-friendly and notify users about important milestones, notifications is a great option. An email will be sent to all stakeholders when changes or updates are made to tasks or deals. This will help customers stay up to date on what really matters to them.
File Sharing
When developing a custom CRM, it was crucial to allow brokers to share mortgage applications with their clients.
We developed a piece of functionality for storing all the documentation in one place and sharing it with the users.
This solution solved a few challenges at a time. Firstly, brokers can easily send their documents to the users, if it’s needed. Secondly, the system will store all the files records, so you can see where it’s now, who’s been working with it and what edits have been made.
Integration with Social Media
People like to use various forms of communication. So if you want your business to prosper, you’ll need to cater to each preference. On the other hand, if you don’t have specific platforms, or they’re not integrated, your reputation and authority may be viewed poorly.
This makes a social integration an important feature for a custom CRM systems of social media presence.
CRM is closely related to sensitive company data, including customers details, financial data, and more. That’s why it’s crucial to give users the security they expect. This means that except the main functionality, we need to devote special attention to data encryption, advanced authentication as well as support for different access roles, session timeouts and other security measures.
Who can Build a Custom CRM for me?
Developing a fully-fledged Customer Relationship Management software is not an easy process. To successfully build a CRM that would fully meet all your business’ requirements, you’d need a team of skillful developers and business analytics.
We have a rich experience of building cost-effective CRM solutions and can provide high-quality software for managing all your company’s relationship and interactions with customers and potential clients. Additionally, we are recognized as a top California Mobile App Development Company on DesignRush but we’re not going to stop. Soon, you’ll see us in the list of Top Software Developers companies.
By the way, take a look at the Top Web Development Comapnies.
Thanks to our living experience of developing custom CRM software, we know exactly what your marketing strategy and customers really need.
Drop us a line about your business idea to get a free project estimate and see what we’re capable of.
