What is Operational CRM? Definition, Benefits & Use Cases

What is Operational CRM?

Operational customer relationship management (CRM) is the lifeline connecting your brand, team of employees, and prospective customers. Its primary purpose is to streamline all business processes to offer the best customer experience. Some good examples of operational customer relationship management include contact and call centers, websites, and data aggregation systems among others. Getting access to information about your existing customers, as well as getting a clear view of their needs is vital to gain an edge against your competitors, and that is where operational CRM becomes relevant.

How Does Operational CRM Work

Operational CRM automates the day-to-day business operations related to customer interactions. It streamlines and blends the processes of all customer-facing teams including sales, marketing, and customer service.

Operational CRM systems help efficiently manage customer data, personalize communication, and improve customer experience. By automating workflows and repetitive tasks, CRM increases employees' productivity and allows them to focus on building strong relationships with clients. Operational CRM helps sales, marketing, and service teams ensure customer satisfaction across the whole customer lifecycle.

Sales Automation

Operational CRM empowers sales teams to work more efficiently by automating tasks like putting customer data into the system, tracking interactions, and scheduling follow-ups. Sales force automation helps improve sales processes, manage sales rep’s calendar, track sales performance, and maintain follow-up schedules.

Using detailed customer data and insights from sales reports provided by the CRM, sales reps can prepare personalized offers and sales pitches. This tailored approach helps them improve their sales efforts, connect with potential customers, and close more deals.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation in operational CRM is designed to streamline and optimize marketing processes. It provides tools to design, execute, and measure marketing campaigns across various channels. It automates tasks such as sending email campaigns to prospects who filled out a form on a website, scheduling social media posts, and lead scoring. With real-time analytics, a marketing team can easily monitor campaign performance and adjust it to achieve better results. They can also improve their marketing strategies thanks to comprehensive insights delivered by the operational CRM tools.

Service Automation

Operational CRM helps organizations provide consistent and timely support, enhancing customer satisfaction. It automates customer service processes like ticket management, case routing, follow-ups, etc. Operational CRM provides the customer service team with relevant customer data and notifications about new tickets, follow-up emails, or tasks, ensuring customer support is more personalized, and efficient.

Automated workflows reduce response time and prioritize urgent cases, so no request is overlooked. With an operational customer relationship management system, service teams can offer tailored support and gain customer loyalty.

Operational CRM Use Case Example

Let’s say you own a manufacturing business that produces custom industrial equipment like metalworking machinery. As your business grows, managing customer interactions across different departments becomes more challenging. To improve your operations and boost customer satisfaction, you decide to invest in an operational CRM solution.

Let’s take a look at how operational CRM can streamline sales, marketing, and customer service processes:

Marketing team

The marketing team uses operational CRM to automate campaigns targeting industries and businesses that might need your custom equipment, like automotive manufacturers, metal fabrication shops, etc.

CRM Creatio - marketing process for the manufacturing industry

Let’s say the marketing team prepares an email marketing campaign. First, CRM segments leads based on industry, company size, and purchasing history. Next, the marketing team prepares personalized content, such as product catalogs, articles, case studies, etc. The operational CRM system automatically sends emails with this content to prospects based on where they are in the customer journey.

Lastly, CRM provides real-time data on which campaigns generated the most engagement and led to requests for quotes. This helps the marketing team optimize their campaigns and deliver more targeted content to prospects with the highest potential to convert.

Sales team

In the manufacturing industry, the sales team plays a crucial role in managing relationships with potential customers, who often have long buying cycles and complex needs.

CRM Creatio - sales process for the manufacturing industry

The CRM helps the sales reps prioritize leads by automatically scoring and qualifying prospects based on their likelihood to purchase. This way sales agents can focus their efforts on the most promising opportunities. When a business in need of your equipment shows interest, through a web form, email, or phone call, the CRM automatically assigns the lead to the most appropriate sales representative.

It also helps them prepare by delivering all the necessary information about the prospect, including a complete history of previous interactions, preferences, needs, pain points, etc. This way sales representatives can deliver a more personalized experience and increase their chances of closing a deal.

Automated follow-ups and notifications help sales agents stay on top of leads, which is crucial in a B2B environment where multiple stakeholders are often involved in decision-making, which extends the customer journey.

Customer service team

The customer service team uses the CRM to ensure that customers are fully supported after their purchase, which ensures they stay loyal to the business.

In the manufacturing industry, businesses might experience common issues like equipment installation, maintenance, and warranties. CRM’s ticketing system helps the customer service team manage these efficiently.

CRM Creatio - customer service process for manufacturing industry

When a customer fills out a support request, the CRM automatically assigns it to the right technician based on the urgency and nature of the problem. The system also tracks all the previous interactions, so the customer service representatives can help clients more effectively and efficiently.

CRM provides customers with updates and notifications about the status of their service requests, which helps businesses establish strong relationships, provide excellent experience, and ensure customer satisfaction.

Implementing an operational CRM in your manufacturing business results in higher productivity and streamlined operations. Your company achieves better coordination across departments, higher sales conversions, and improved customer retention. All of this is thanks to one comprehensive tool that completely transforms how your business operates.

Benefits of Operational CRM

Increased productivity

With a dedicated tool to automate and streamline processes of sales, marketing, and service teams, their productivity increases. Instead of being bogged down by administrative, routine tasks, they can focus on high-value activities that make a difference.

Having more time on their hands, employees can handle tasks efficiently and improve their daily operations. Sales reps can make more phone calls, marketing teams can prepare more campaigns and useful resources, and service teams can support more customers.

Automation of repetitive tasks

Data entry, lead tracking, ticket routing, email campaign scheduling, follow-ups, and many more daily activities of customer-facing departments can be automated. With operational CRM, businesses can rest assured, that these tasks are being completed on time and without human errors.

Centralized customer data

With operational CRM, businesses can access up-to-date and accurate information about customer interactions, data, and preferences. This data is easily accessible from a unified platform, which helps marketing, sales, and customer support teams provide clients with a personalized and seamless experience.

Customization and scalability

Operational CRM can be customized to fit the business needs. Some solutions, like CRM Creatio, go a step forward and offer composable architecture and no-code capabilities that ensure businesses can build software tailored to their unique processes, workflows, dashboards, and reports.

Additionally, Creatio CRM offers industry-specific solutions that help businesses quickly set up processes crucial to their industry, and customize them to incorporate all unique requirements. For example, financial institutions can use workflows related to loan application management and adjust them to fit their more complex needs.

Creatio’s loan application management

Operational CRM platforms can scale and accommodate growing business needs, like larger teams, more business data, and increased customer interactions. Thanks to this capability, businesses don’t have to worry about choosing a different solution in the future as operations CRMs continue to support business growth effectively.

Cost reduction

Operational CRMs can help businesses reduce their operational costs. Thanks to process automation and higher efficiency, organizations can save on additional staff to handle administrative tasks.

Additionally, personalized and enhanced customer service can help businesses increase customer satisfaction and retention. This is a great way to save costs on customer acquisition.

Operational vs Analytical vs Collaborative CRM

There are 3 types of CRMs that can help businesses improve their operations. They offer different functionalities and answer to various business needs. Let’s take a look at some of the main differences between operation, collaborative, and analytical CRM:

How to Choose the Right Operational CRM Software

When selecting the best operational CRM, you should consider some key factors that will help you assess whether a certain solution is the right one for you.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you through the process:

Define your business needs and goals

The first step is to clearly define the business needs and goals that you want to achieve with operational CRM. Consider how you can improve sales, marketing, and customer service operations to boost their effectiveness and productivity.

Ask questions like:

• What tasks do I need to automate? (lead tracking, email marketing, ticket routing, etc.)
• What problems am I trying to solve? (slow response times, manual data entry errors, etc.)
• What are my business goals? (increasing sales, boosting team productivity, improving marketing campaign success rate, etc.)

Understanding your needs at the very beginning will help you decide which operational CRM offers the features that are crucial to achieving your goals. Don’t waste your money on elaborate solutions that provide hundreds of features if you're only going to use one or two. Defining your needs and goals will also help you assess whether you made the right decision.

Evaluate usability and integration

Is the operational CRM of your choice easy to use? Does it have a user-friendly interface that your team can quickly adopt? Is the CRM intuitive for both tech-savvy and non-technical users? There’s no point in selecting an advanced solution that only an IT professional can navigate if your team consists of business users. It will simply make their job even more difficult instead of easier.

Additionally, you need to check if the operational CRM can integrate with your existing tools and systems, such as ERP systems, accounting software, etc. This way all customer data is unified in a single platform, and your employees don't have to waste time switching between systems. Seamless integration will also ensure that operational CRM has all the data necessary to provide valuable insights and reports.

Consider budget and scalability

When selecting an operational CRM make sure it fits into your budget. Consider not only the base price but all additional fees for advanced features, vendor support, etc. Evaluate the overall costs and potential return on investment (ROI).

Think also about the future of your business and the long-term strategy. As your company grows, you might need more features, users, or data storage. Choose an operational CRM software that will allow you to scale your operations without any disruptions.

Prioritize data security and compliance

In today’s world data privacy is not only important for the customer but also enforced by various laws. Ensure that the operational CRM software you choose doesn’t get you in trouble. It should comply with data protection regulations like CCPA, GDPR ( if your business operates in the European Union), HIPAA (for healthcare providers), and other relevant regulations.

Key security features to look for include:

• End-to-end data encryption - data encryption prevents unauthorized access during data transmission and storage.
• Role-based access controls - limits user access to sensitive customer data to authorized personnel only.
• Two-factor authentication - users are required to use two forms of verification (e.g., a password and a one-time code).
• Backup and recovery options - in case of an outage or cyberattack CRM system prevents data loss.

Test through demos or trials and review support

Before making a final decision, which can have a great impact on your business, ask vendors to test their operational CRM software. Most CRM providers offer demos or free trials, so you can see firsthand how the system works. Encourage employees from different teams to test it out and gather feedback on features, ease of use, etc.

Also, check what support options are provided. Vendor support can make a real difference, especially during the implementation phase. Look for vendors that offer support via multiple channels, training resources, and updates on the system’s functionality.

Try Creatio Operational CRM

Investing in the right operational CRM can transform your business. Creatio operational CRM is the comprehensive platform that your business needs to streamline sales, marketing, and customer service processes. It offers a user-friendly, intuitive interface and composable architecture that empowers businesses to automate tasks and optimize workflows without relying on IT professionals.

Creatio CRM allows businesses to automate repetitive tasks, such as data management, lead management, customer follow-ups, and service requests, enhancing productivity and efficiency. By centralizing customer data, Creatio offers better insights, seamless team collaboration, and informed decision-making.

Creatio operational CRM is built to scale alongside your business. As your organization grows, the platform will support your expanding needs without disruption. Whether you're looking to boost efficiency, scale operations, or enhance customer engagement, Creatio offers the tools and flexibility you need to achieve long-term success.

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