How To Choose The Right CRM Software For Your Business [2024]

Pat Walls

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Updated: October 8th, 2022

What Is A CRM System?

CRM stands for “Customer Relationship Management” and refers to the software used by an enterprise for developing, retaining, and acquiring customers.

A CRM system ensures that every step of customer interaction goes smoothly and efficiently in order to increase overall profits.

Therefore, getting a CRM system ensures your organization enjoys better collaboration among departments and with consumers.

Customer Relationship Management Key Takeaways

70% of consumers say they have already made a choice to support a company that delivers great customer service.
Investing in new customers is between 5 and 25 times more expensive than retaining existing ones.
Consumers who rate a company’s service as “good” are 38% more likely to recommend that company.

Understanding How A CRM Works

Customer Relationship management software includes functionalities that allow users to track customer and company interactions through different channels like phone calls, emails, contact forms, chatbots, etc.

The CRM software provides the customer representatives and sales team the entire sales tools required to ensure accurate management of the entire sales and marketing funnel.

Therefore, the company ensures smooth operations from lead qualification, opportunity management, forecasting to closing the deal.

Ultimately, customer service teams can manage customer requests and automate customer service operations by following pre-defined processes to ensure excellent customer care.

For CRM solution to serve the purpose, it comes packed with effective tracking features that record numerous customer interactions online.

Therefore, the CRM software automates routine processes and provides managers the tools for tracking and measuring the company’s performance and productivity.

Types Of CRM Systems

Companies consider the type of CRM before deployment to ensure the system meets the business needs.

The common types of CRM software are On-Premise and Cloud-Based Software.

On-Premise CRM: This is the CRM software installed on the company’s servers, but takes more time and resources to deploy.
Cloud-Based CRM: Features a software-as-a-service and stores the data on vendor's servers. In this case, the vendor has full access to the database all the time and takes less time to deploy compared to on-premise CRM.

What Are The Benefits Of Installing CRM?

In today’s fast-changing business world, a CRM is an important consideration.

Here are the important benefits of acquiring the CRM.

1. Better Understanding Of Your Customers

The CRM system stores important customer information helping you to understand the customers better.

The information stored in the CRM can include customers' full names, telephone numbers, addresses, websites, social media handles, and other critical information.

Like a cheat sheet, the CRM gives your sales, marketing, and customer service teams a competitive advantage.

With all the information in one database, you can personalize communication with customers, and know better, who they are what they do.

2. Better Customer Segmentation

Customer segmentation is all about classifying customers so that you can come up with better predictive models based on customer data.

With a CRM in place, the business can classify the customers based on address, performance, and other metrics.

Therefore, you can create content that sets you apart from the competition.

3. Connect With the Ideal Customers

An integrated CRM helps provide multiple departments a complete view of leads and prospects so you can create targeted engagements and reach key decision-makers much faster.

Therefore, businesses that invest in a good CRM can nurture the opportunities, and turn leads into paying customers within less time.

4. Ensures Proactive Management Of Customer Relationships

A CRM system will help your organization to learn what matters to your customers quickly.

Besides, you can engage the customers with relevancy as you collect the data on their business needs.

Therefore, our sales team can recommend promotional materials or educational content that aids the customer conversion rates.

5. Reduces Cost Of Sales

Acquiring new customers is a key ingredient of continued business growth.

Unfortunately, customer acquisition can be an expensive journey.

With good customer service, you increase the chances of earning recommendations.

You gain better market visibility thanks to the trust you have earned already. Ultimately, the CRM system contributes to reduced cost of customer acquisition.

6. Increased Employee Productivity

Manual operations like searching customer files and processing customer orders slow the process of satisfying your customers.

Adopting the right technology gives your customers time to connect with customers.

Automating customer service will free the employees so they can spend more time talking to the prospective customers and strengthening relationships with the existing ones.

7. Improved Customer Retention

According to Salesforce, seventy-six percent of customers expect consistent interactions across departments.

A CRM will enable your business to serve customers efficiently across the departments.

Therefore, the customers will keep coming back for more.

Real-World Examples Of Brands Using CRM To Connect Better With Customers

You can draw inspiration from the following companies that have deployed CRM successfully.

1. How KPN Saw Customer Satisfaction Soar With Salesforce.

KPN, a Dutch telecom company wanted to ensure reliable and future-proof services for their consumers.

To achieve the objective, KPN invested in the Salesforce CRM.

The CRM system has since helped KPN in transforming its internal operations. Besides, the CRM helped the company to give customers the best possible experience.

The CRM system supports the customers from the time they purchase new products, reach out to the KPN customer service, and enabled the customer relationship officers to manage customer accounts.

Here is what the Customer operations VP had to say about the CRM software.

“By automating manual processes and giving staff better visibility into the customer journey, efficiency has already increased, and a team of 130 people is able to process up to 1,000 orders a week – compared to 150 people processing 150 orders previously.”

ARKAITZ JAUREGUI CREMERS | VP CUSTOMER OPERATIONS BUSINESS MARKET SME AT KPN

2. How CRM Enabled Prezi To Manage 45% increase in Ticket Volume During A Pandemic

When the Coronavirus pandemic challenged business operations, customers turned to Prezi, a software that provides business collaboration software.

With millions of users switching to cloud-based presentation software, Prezi experienced a surge in customer tickets. Prezi turned to Zendesk to support the 11,000 tickets.

As the business grew, Zendesk ensured Prezi enjoyed the flexibility to adapt. Prezi's team switched to Zendesk explore, a feature that enabled them to track performance data and identify opportunities for improvement.

Here is what the director of global Customer Support at Prezi had to say about Zendesk.

“Zendesk helped us understand, keep up with, and predict the needs of our users.”

Anita Plesiu, Director of Global Customer Support at Prezi

How To Choose The Right CRM For Your Business

Choosing the right CRM for your business can seem overwhelming. We are here to guide you! Here are important tips to guide you when choosing the CRM for your business.

1. Identify The Goals

Before heading to the market in search of a CRM, it helps if you understand the problems you are trying to solve.

Here are common goals businesses are trying to solve when acquiring the CRM:

Track leads and lead activity
Tracking the customer base
Identify business opportunities and tracking closing rates
Offering interdepartmental and inter-team connectivity for better customer service
Managing customer relationships
Generating a customized reporting software
Organizing the business operations
Increasing business profitability

2. Understand The Implementation

Whenever you are acquiring new software or changing the existing software, there is going to be an implementation period.

In some cases, you may need a third party to deploy the software, while in other cases the in-house team can handle the deployment effectively.

Understanding the implementation process is critical to determining which software suits your business operations.

3. Preparing Users For Adoption

No matter how important the software is to your organization, there are employees who resist change.

In the case of CRM software, the sales team may feel threatened, and so they end up resisting the change.

The key is to ensure your team is well informed about why they need the CRM software, and how the solution eases their experiences.

4. Understanding Product Mobility

In today’s connected world, mobility is the key to effective competition.

Your staffs are likely to be dispersed geographically.

Therefore, you may consider a cloud-based CRM to ensure timely reporting.

Remember that a stand-alone or server-installed software is likely to limit your team reporting capabilities especially where you have regional operations.

5. Consider A solution That Suits Your Business Processes

CRM tools feature a multitude of business processes. Choose a CRM that is easy to customize.

It is important you ensure the CR is flexible enough to handle business processes.

6. Request Product Demo

Make sure you get access to a product demonstration.

More importantly, you can run the trial version in parallel with the existing system.

Make sure the new software adds value to your business operations before signing off.

Look at the reporting capabilities to ensure that the software provides elaborate reporting.

Conclusion

Choosing the correct CRM for your business is an important process.

However, the process is often lengthy, and overwhelming.

Taking into consideration the tips highlighted in this post could ease the overall experience.

Claritysoft CRM

Claritysoft CRM's unique blend of simplicity, utility, and flexibility delivers powerful marketing automation, sales automation, customer service tools and much more in an intuitive, completely customizable interface