What does a CRM system do?
A CRM system essentially provides a central place where businesses can store customer and prospect data, track customer interactions, and share this information with colleagues. It allows businesses to manage relationships with customers, helping the business to grow.
With a CRM system in place, every question, every service request, every preference and every past contact detail about every customer is instantly available, which means that every new interaction with them should always be personalised, relevant and up to date.
As well as tracking every phone call, email sent, meeting held and presentation delivered, CRM systems can also be used to add notes, schedule follow-ups and organise the next steps that need to be taken. This ensures that opportunities to close deals or grow customer accounts won’t be missed.
By understanding customers better, cross-selling and up-selling opportunities become clearer too, giving organisations a much better chance to win new business from existing customers.
Key features of a CRM system
The key features of a CRM system typically include:
Contact management
All the latest information about customers — from contact details to service conversations — is easily available to access and update.
Lead management
The system enables users to track pipeline activities, tasks and targets, all the way from prospect through to conversion.
Sales forecasting
Forecasting reports enable salespeople to get better visibility over their pipelines, qualify leads more accurately, and see how close they are to hitting their targets. Sales managers can use reports to motivate and manage their people.
Instant messaging between employees
Real-time instant messaging functionality makes it easier for coworkers to ask and answer each other’s queries, for instance in support of a live sales opp or service interaction. Managers can check in on staff in the field, and employees can ask for instant feedback or support as needed.
Email tracking and integration with Outlook and Gmail
Syncing email clients instantly with the CRM system allows businesspeople to get a complete view of their customers and leads without having to log in and out of different systems. Calendars and contacts can be viewed across every device, and emails can be created and managed from within a single workflow.
File and content sharing
Team members can upload information to a centrally stored location, and share easily and instantly with coworkers.
Dashboard-based analytics
Information is aggregated and presented in intuitive, meaningful dashboard displays that can be customised based on each individual’s priorities.
Advanced cloud-based CRM platforms, like Salesforce, go much further than this basic functionality, integrating with marketing automation and customer service systems to provide a complete, cloud-based ecosystem for customer data.
