What is CRM | Features, Advantages and Job Roles

All the businesses use CRM to manage their relationship and with their customers effectively.

What is CRM?

CRM is Customer Relationship management. It is software used by companies to manage their relationships and interactions with their customers and potential customers.

It helps you to enhance your relationship with customers (how you deal with the customers and how well you deal with your customers and be in touch with your customers so that you can make them loyal customers).

Goals of a CRM

To maintain Business Relationships by

• Customer Retention: Retaining Old Customers
• Customer Acquisition: Acquiring new customers

So the End goal is

More Leads converted into Customers and More Customers become the Loyal advocate of your product…

Why CRM?

Before CRM…

• It was very difficult as all the data were unorganized
• Manually updating the Address book
• Manual Event scheduling
• Difficult to manage the tasks to be done
• Tracking communications with clients/customers is difficult
• Loss of productivity as more manual power and time is spent
• Transparency is not there as there is no access to all data in one place
• As Data is not collected and organized properly it is difficult to analyze the data and take business decisions properly
• Using multiple tools for different use cases ( Event, Contact and lead management)

As a Result lack of customer satisfaction and we end up maintaining poor relationships with the customers.

Features of CRM

1. Contacts and Lead Management

You can easily manage the contacts based on the hierarchy of your company as well as the customers. So it becomes very easy for the customer support, sales and marketing team to access the contact and interact with them.

While contacting your customers, follow the standard business communication etiquette.

2. Analytics

Easy to use Analytics that help you to make business decisions easily. It has an inbuilt no-code dashboard and data analysis features that can help any person from the Non-tech team to get to know about business insights.

3. Interaction Tracking

You can keep track of all the customer interactions and also create alerts that will remind you to talk to a customer after a particular amount of time.It will also have all the tickets raised by customers and the people solving and it’s complete history.This helps Managers to track the number of tickets solved and interactions done.

4. Easy integrations

This helps you to easily integrate with other third-party applications like MailChimp, one signal, SendGrid, and also are other services that will help you to enhance the power of CRM and easily automate the interactions you can have with prospects or leads.

5. Reports

You can easily apply multiple filters in clicks and generate reports that can be sent to the management. User access management can be performed by the admin which helps in protecting confidential reports by giving access to particular people.

If you are running eCommerce business, CRM is one of the right technology to pick.

Advantages of using a CRM

• Make Decisions based on data
• Reduce Manual tasks and use modern automation techniques that will help your business to make use of the resources efficiently
• Easy to Track your lead and convert them as a result increasing sales
• Access the data from any devices from anywhere
• Data Security
• Track the Performance of your Sales Team (Quarterly, Halfely and Annually)

Popular CRM Systems

Zoho is one of the popular CRM and it is used by companies like Amazon, OLA, Zeta Etc. It can be easily integrated with third-party applications like Slack, Shopify, Zoom, G-suite, Zoom, Paypal, and much more.

HubSpot is one of the biggest CRM and it is used by companies like Surveymonkey, Soundcloud, Trello, and G2. It also provides its own learning academy known as HubSpot academy to help budding sales and marketing people.

SalesForce is the number 1 CRM in the world and an industry leader in this domain. It is used by all the top companies like Spotify, Toyota, AWS, and American express.

If you are looking for CRM for you business, also read the detail about popular CRM softwares.

CRM Job roles

These roles are also known as CRM access roles.

1. Representative and Individual contributor Access

Sales Development Representatives come under this access. So in this access, you can add leads, convert leads, cross-sell and upsell opportunities to customers and much more.

Customer Support representatives can provide support and manage the accounts of customers. They can also identify high-value and active customers.

2. Manager and Direct Access

Sales Manager comes under this access and they can track the team performance and this also helps in rewarding the salespeople and track whether each of them has reached their target. Sales managers can redistribute or assign tasks to people in the sales team. CRM Marketing manager also comes under this access and has to take care of the CRM flows and also responsible for quality marketing automation.

3. Executive and Administrative Access

CRM Analysts come under this access and they are highly paid who take care of performing analysis on CRM Data and provide business insights. CRM administrator is like an owner or a superuser who can create a new set of users and also track the workflows of Individual teams and users. He has the right to perform CRUD operations on users.

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