What is CRM?

СRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and refers to the software that enables businesses to convert prospects into customers, engage and nurture leads, and retain existing clients, encompassign the entire customer lifecycle. The primary objectives of using a CRM platform are to enhance a company’s relationships with clients, increase loyalty and conversion rates, as well as boost profits.

To accomplish objectives, CRM stores and processes a substantial amount of data related to customer relationships, such as customers’ information, history of customer interactions, business performance metrics, documents, sales quotes and employees’ tasks, making this data easily accessible to all customer-facing departments. This centralisation streamlines customer engagement and facilitates collaboration between marketing, customer service, business development teams and sales teams.

Customer relationship management (CRM) software assists businesses in acquiring new customers, earning their trust and satisfaction, and retaining them by organising their information, such as order history, preferences, or service cases, in a manner that assists in building stronger relationships with them.

Moreover, the ability to run omnichannel personalised communication, based on data-driven insights improves customer satisfaction. CRM software consolidates all customer data, enabling sales and marketing teams to understand audience preferences, and equips them with the CRM tools to integrate customer knowledge into all front office interactions.

Enhanced business productivity and customer satisfaction contribute to profit growth. Furthermore, a CRM platform can save your financial resources by replacing multiple business tools and automating a significant part of routine work.

CRM software optimises the work of each customer-facing team inside your company.

For sales management, it provides the ability to monitor sales leads, manage sales pipelines, and analyse and score prospects with the help of AI. Such complete control over your pipeline ultimately increases win rates and leads to more conversions. Moreover, CRM empowers your sales representatives to upsell by providing a detailed history of orders and customer information, ultimately increasing customer lifetime value.

Marketers derive advantages from a CRM system’s customer data analysis, which provides marketing insights and enables marketing departments to construct automated personalised campaigns. Understanding customer needs enhances your campaigns and generates more leads for your pipeline.

From a customer service viewpoint, a CRM tool enables agents to effortlessly access client information, communicate across multiple channels, and oversee and monitor customer support cases, all of which enhance the customer experience and increases retention.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software consolidates all customer data from various channels into one platform, organises it for straightforward processing, and provides CRM tools to streamline every interaction with a prospect or client.

Here's an example of how a CRM assists in managing customer relationships. Imagine you have an accounting agency and wish to initiate geographic marketing campaign. You create a landing page with a contact form and start running targeted social media posts and adverts encouraging prospects seeking accounting services to complete the form.

After a prospect completes a form, their data is incorporated into the CRM. The CRM generates a lead for the prospect and asses it according to the information provided, establishing whether the lead is ready to make a purchase or necessitates further nurturing

According to the score, the CRM solution recommends further steps to convert the lead into a loyal customer. In the former scenario, the lead is allocated to a sales representative who gains access to presentation materials and pitches essential to close the deal via the CRM.

A lead that requires nurturing will receive automated emails demonstrating the value of the offer and moving it further down the pipeline. When they are prepared to make a purchase, the CRM will highlight them for the sales team to follow up. If your nurturing campaign proves unsuccessful, the CRM solution can remove the lead from the funnel after a certain period or return it to the top of the funnel for a new nurturing process/to initiate a new nurturing cycle.

All the customer data gathered during this process is logged and analysed to gain insights aimed at enhancing your performance and sales productivity. Furthermore, this data is shared with the support team to facilitate the contact centre agent's job and assist them in resolving the existing customer's issues.

This represents just one of the possible use cases for a customer journey facilitated by CRM software.

A client database featuring comprehensive, detailed customer 360-degree profiles, incorporating contact details, business information, current engagement status, activity logs, and AI/ML-driven insights such as predictive scores.

Opportunity and lead management to centralise leads from various sources, verify and eliminate duplicate data, facilitate nurturing, and move them through sales cycle stages based on their readiness for conversion.

Campaign management tools to create, execute, analyse, and refine multichannel marketing campaigns.

Data management and segmentation tools to analyse your audience and automatically categorise them into target segments.

AI-powered sales and marketing automation tools, including lead scoring, sales forecasting, trigger actions and web-hooks for automating emails and targeting ads, as well as workflow automation tools for internal processes like quote building and approvals.

Service management tools to provide omnichannel support, manage customer requests, automate service workflows, and boost agent team productivity.

AI/ML (machine learning) tools to recommend the most relevant next-best offer/next-best action for customer-facing teams.

Interactive and customisable dashboards and reports with analytics that provide insights into business performance for business executives and colleagues.

Content creation tools to construct marketing assets such as emails and landing pages.

Task management to allocate tasks between team members and monitor their execution.

Document management that permits users to monitor document status and history, generate invoices and contracts, and customise orders with CRM database-stored information.

Additionally, CRM systems should integrate with other applications. Due to its all-encompassing nature, it's crucial for CRM software to be compatible with other business tools you utilise, including calendars, messaging and email services, applications for phone calls, and more.

A CRM system enhances the efficiency of your customer-facing teams and internal business processes by providing one source of truth that is easy to navigate and automating routine workflows. Let's explore through the CRM benefits by department.

With CRM software, businesses can automate long and short sales cycles, including B2C, B2B, or B2B2C, and oversee end-to-end sales processes. CRM enables users to handle multiple sales channels in a unified workplace (agent desktop), empowered by a 360-degree view of customer data and comprehensive engagement history. Sales professionals can utilise streamlined sales force automation to guide them through the sales cycle, from generating and nurturing leads to successful closing deals.

CRM can assist in identifying bottlenecks and enable businesses to monitor sales representatives' performance or teams' effectiveness, and analyse current sales pipeline and sales plan fulfilment. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) tools within CRM enable you to create data-backed scoring models, suggest the next best action/best offer, and eveluate the effectiveness of your sales process.

With campaign management marketing automation tools, CRM software empowers marketers to design, manage, and optimise complex omnichannel marketing campaigns (email campaigns, banner ads, search ads, social media ads, ABM ads, etc.). within a single interface. Businesses can develop targeted customer communications utilising CRM insights such as a 360-degree customer view and history of interactions.

CRM enables marketers to capture online customer information via web pages and lead forms, analyse intent, and track engagements with human-assisted chats and chatbots. Customer behaviour tracking enables marketers to monitor all interactions and utilise AI/ML-powered tools to create personalised offers and product suggestions through appropriate marketing channels. Built-in analytics tools help marketing executives monitor lead generation plans and compare marketing spending with the effectiveness of each marketing channel.

CRM systems provide an all-encompassing customer service desktop. Customer service teams gain a holistic customer view, consolidate all communication channels within a single environment, align traditional and digital helpdesk operations, and establish enterprise-grade automated service workflows. AI-powered task automation assists in reducing manual tasks and dramatically enhances case processing times.

A complete history of customer service communication enables agents to swiftly comprehend potential issues and identify solutions. Flexible case and queue management facilitate the prioritisation of requests from customers with high-priority ranking for swift resolution and adherence to all accepted SLAs. CRM tools enable customer service managers to monitor the average response and case resolution time, the workload of each operator, the current customer satisfaction score, and much more.

Utilising analytics, operations managers can identify patterns and trends to create proactive business strategies. A CRM system assists in enhancing the visibility of teams' and individuals' KPIs, easily identifying obstacles, managing projects, and creating workflow templates based on established operational strategies.

Boost your operation with out-of-the-box apps, connectors, and templates available at your disposal. For instance, support your customer service representatives with a chatbot, assist your sales team with AI integrations for the next best offer, and aid your marketing team with email templates or landing page builders. Additionally, utilise ready-made workflow templates tailored for various industry solutions.

A CRM system enables the business owner to craft customised dashboards displaying the overall state of the business just within a few clicks - revenue, sales funnel, the number of opportunities, and the dynamics of new deals. It allows the CEO to swiflty evaluate vital business indicators and identify significant channels driving revenue growth - affiliate sales, marketing activities, brand development, partner engagement, event participation, etc. This data ensures the right decision-making and assists in planning further growth investments. Analytics also aid in identifying the least effective channels, allowing for adjustments to the growth strategy.

CRM enables business owners to utilise analytics to establish KPIs for each department, such as sales and marketing lead generation plans and quotas, and a level of customer satisfaction for customer services. This facilitates alignment of expectations and enhances productivity.

In response to the market demand for more powerful CRM software tools, vendors continue to innovate CRM platforms and improve customer experience. Here are the most prevalent trends that will define the future of CRM solutions in the years to come.

Modern CRM systems can provide targeted product recommendations, tailored marketing materials, and engage customers in personalised conversations. The increasing demand for sophisticated and seamless individualised experiences will force CRM providers to develop additional methods to automate personalisation, including targeted communication based on customer interests.

Any CRM tool can assist in supporting customer relationships throughout the primary stages of the customer journey, an increasing number of vendors are striving to encompass the entire customer lifecycle, extending to the most complex CRM processes and industry-specific suctomer interactions. CRM systems are progressively being integrated with back-office applications that facilitate journeys such as lead-to-cash or managing warranties, including the recovery of costs from suppliers.

The ability to easily customise your CRM to suit unique cases provides you a competitive advantage over less adoptable companies. Gartner names composability as one of the leading technology trends, expected to amplify the impact of digital business and innovation over the next three to five years. CRM vendors will continue integrating more no-code tools and libraries of composable elements to make business app development accessible to everyone.

Analysts predict a growing adoption of Generative AI in CRM technologies, perticularly emphasising Gen AI CRM assistants. These assistants possess the ability to comprehend natural language prompts and swiftly produce reports, marketing materials, and recommendations for sales representatives in a matter of seconds. Another method to leverage AI for managing customer relationships is through AI-powered no-code development tools like Creatio AI, which facilitates the creation of new AI scenarios and business applications by simply describing them.

Based on various reports, these numbers illustrate the significant trends in CRM development:

To assist industry-specific processes and workflows, CRMs provide pre-built automation and configurations tailored for various industries. Creatio, for instance, offers 14 industry-specific customisations to expedite setup and produce quicker ROI.