What is customer relationship management (CRM)? CRM is the technology and combination of practices, principles, and strategies that an organization uses in managing interactions with customers, service users, suppliers, or colleagues. It helps improve customer service relationships and profitability.
CRM enables you to focus on your customers, manage them, and analyze your customer interactions and data. It uses data analysis or a CRM system that compiles the customer’s history across different channels with the company. This includes the organization’s social networks, website, email, direct mail marketing, telephone, or live chats.
Example of Customer Relationship Management
There are different kinds of CRM and solutions available in the market, which is useful to both small and large businesses. Enlisted below are six CRM tools that are available in the market.
Pepper Cloud CRM
Pepper Cloud stands is one of the best sales CRM software primarily dedicated to small and medium-sized businesses. The CRM facilitates sales management, opportunity handling, sales and marketing automation, workflow streamlining, lead generation and contact and account management. With an intuitive interface, the CRM ensures that it is user-friendly, enabling smooth navigation and effective utilisation of its features. Key features of Pepper Cloud CRM include:
- An all-in-one sales CRM solution with multiple tool integration
- Integrated with WhatsApp and Facebook
- Easy sales pipeline management and revenue forecasting
- Voice calling capabilities
- Automated workflows
- AI-driven CRM
- Highly flexible and customisable
- Affordable and easy-to-use CRM
- Access to advanced lead analytics
- No hidden charges
- Pre-approved PSG vendor
- 24/7 customer support
Freshworks (formerly Freshsales)
Freshworks is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) solution that helps businesses manage their interaction with customers. Freshworks’ features include:
- An inbox that can prioritize un-responded emails from contacts and leads.
- Sending bulk emails and monitoring their activities.
- Sales management.
- Sales lead tracking.
- Event tracking.
- One-click phone.
Zendesk
Zendesk is one of the most popular help desk software and works smoothly with other CRM software packages. It includes software for customer management that improves the communication and relationship between businesses and customers. Main features of Zendesk include:
- Ticketing system
- Door to door sales app
- CRM software
- Sales email analysis
- Customer management software
- Email automation
- Lead tracking software
- Mobile sales management
- Auto-dialer software
- Lead scoring software
FluentCRM
A WordPress plugin that made customer relationship management affordable. FluentCRM has become the go-to solution for over 20,000 businesses in just two years. This plugin gives you the much-needed CRM functionalities within your WordPress dashboard.
- Automatically create contact profiles with important business data such as general details, email activities, purchase activities, form submission details, notes, and support tickets
- Design stunning emails and newsletters using visual and block-based email editor
- Grow your email list with beautiful contact forms
- Send email campaigns, recurring campaigns, and newsletters with the ability to A/B test subject lines
- Create email sequences that will be sent according to your requirements
- Automate email marketing workflows and shape user journeys to boost revenue
- Generate reports for emails, sales, and courses
- Integration with 30+ plugins and platforms)
Zoho CRM
Trusted by a global network of over 150,000 businesses in 180 countries, Zoho CRM helps businesses convert more leads, grow revenues, and engage with customers. You can customize Zoho CRM to meet your specific needs to manage sales, marketing, and customer relations. Zoho CRM top features are:
- Sales automation, marketing, and support functions.
- Create personalized customer journeys.
- Process management.
- Converse in real-time with customers and prospects.
- Measure the performance of every sales activity.
- Generate price quotes and access sales scripts.
- Predictive sales and intelligence.
- Combine various features to mold your CRM to fit your business.
- Stay on top of business everywhere, all the time with Zoho CRM Mobile Edition.
HubSpot CRM
HubSpot CRM is an all-in-one marketing, sales, and service platform that helps you improve your customer experience with your business. It is easy to use, and has many CRM features.
- Track your performance and communication.
- Design attractive online profiles for your brand.
- Move a deal along the sales process, from one stage to the next, as simple as dragging and dropping.
- Sort dashboard easily and quickly.
- Track your performance.
- Sync Outlook and Gmail.
- Create email templates and track them.
- and more!
AWeber
AWeber is an email marketing solution that allows you to create an email list and capture data o it. It also provides CRM functionalities in terms of contact management. This is by integrating AWeber with other CRM, such as Salesforce, LiveAgent, CotactUs.com, etc.
Are you interested in learning about how to use Aweber for email marketing and list-building? Here are the top AWeber online courses from Skill Success.
- AWeber: Email Marketing For Massive Subscribers And Sales
- Email Marketing With Aweber: Email Marketing For More Sales
Clientjoy
Clientjoy is an all-in-one CRM and Growth Engine for Agencies & Freelancers. Used by 3100+ Agencies in 90+ Countries, it is a one-stop solution for agencies & freelancers to manage leads, proposals, invoices, payments & clients.
Top features of Clientjoy are:
- One place for all your client relationships
- Client Portal to manage your customers
- Create Proposals with pre-defined templates
- Receive updates of Proposal statuses
- Set recurring invoices & directly send to your clients
- Different payment gateways Dedicated Client Portal
- Sales pipeline management
- Recurring invoice and timely auto-reminders
- Email integration & calendar to manage your schedule
- Multi-currency payment feasibility
Engagebay
Loved by over 46,000 businesses, EngageBay delivers powerful features for a highly affordable price. EngageBay’s all-in-one CRM offers marketing, sales, and customer support, all integrated to give a 360-degree view of your customers. With multi-step visual automation, you can automate all your business tasks and improve efficiency.
Key features of EngageBay include:
● Multistep visual automation
● Drip campaigns
● Email personalization
● Predictive lead scoring
● Free CRM
● Sales pipelines and deal management
● In-CRM telephony
● Intuitive dashboards and reports
● Web analytics
● Live chat, helpdesk, and ticketing
Salesmate
Salesmate is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) solution that caters to small and midsize businesses across various industries. Key features include contact management, sales pipeline management, email automation, sales automation, and marketing automation.
You can also use it as a power dialer software which automatically dials contacts from the selected activities one by one using automation.
Why is Customer Relationship Management Important?
CRM can give you an overview of your customers. You get a clear overview of your customers. You can also learn more about your target customers, whether they are existing or potential customers, and customize your services or products to best cater to their needs.
Since you are using technology or a CRM system, you can see your customer’s previous history or transaction with your business. You will have an overview of their purchasing habits, customer opinions, preferences, order status, and any outstanding customer issues.
Marketers use CRM software tools to collect information and build a customer database. The data collected from customers is used to come up with marketing strategies and tactics to optimize customer relationships.
The strategies marketers develop from the collected data help them craft a powerful marketing campaign that will reach a specific audience. This will drive more customer loyalty, retention, and revenue.
Why Use Customer Relationship Management in Your Business?
It Boosts Customer Satisfaction
You need to make your customers happy for your business to grow and gain more customers. The best way to do this is by giving them a positive experience with your business, products, and services.
Statistics show that 70% of consumers support a company that delivers great customer service, and 52% made an additional purchase from a company after a positive customer service experience.
CRM helps improve customer experience and increase satisfaction by:
- Personalizing the communications based on the demographics of your customers.
- Communicating with your customers regularly by sending automated messages.
- Identifying and categorizing leads accurately.
- Ensuring consistent messaging and timely response to customers.
- Collecting insights into your customer’s needs and behaviors.
Create Targeted and Personalized Campaigns
One of the hardest tasks of a marketer is to gather all of the customer data. Good thing CRM software can go through your customer database, like what you have gathered on an email list, and target profitable customers.
CRM software can segment your customer based on their personal likes, products they purchase or viewed, recent (social media) activities, and so on. The sharper your customer profile, the more targeted and personalized your campaign or content will be and win more customers.
When your content or campaign is personalized, your customers’ response rate increases, which helps increase your revenue. You can also analyze the performance of your campaigns with CRM software if they are successful or not.
Without customers, a business will not succeed. That is why you should pay attention to building a strong relationship with them. Fortunately, we have the technologies that business owners and managers can use in interacting with their customers.
Using the CRM can provide good customer service that will keep customers satisfied and increase a business’s profitability. CRM can help you retain existing customers and find new ones. With CRM, you can engage your customers and prospects on a more personal level.
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