Types of CRM – Operational, Analytical, Collaborative
In continuously growing competitive market, it is very much important for a business to share right information to the right person at the right time, otherwise business will lose its opportunities to sale products or services. Customer Relationship Management software is the only solution that can help business to communicate with prospects or customers properly. For any CRM application, primary goal is to enable an organization to understand customers’ need and behaviour and provide better quality of service. It helps to retain existing customers and capture new opportunities by building a strong relationship between an organization and customers. CRM can analyze data and generate reports whenever required. There are mainly three types of CRM applications – Operational, Analytical and Collaborative to perform all these activities.
Types of CRM:
1. Operational CRM
Operational CRM streamlines the business process that includes Sales automation, Marketing automation and Service automation. Main purpose of this type of CRM is to generate leads, convert them into contacts, capture all required details and provide service throughout customer lifecycle.
Sales Automation:
Sales automation helps an organization to automate sales process. Main purpose of sales automation is to set standard within organization to acquire new customers and deal with existing customers. It organizes information in such a way that the business can meet customers’ needs and increase sales more efficiently and effectively. It includes various CRM sales modules like lead management, contact management, Quote-to-Order management, sales forecasting.
Marketing Automation:
Main purpose of marketing automation is to find out the best way to offer products and approach potential customers. Major module in marketing automation is campaign management. It enables business to decide effective channel/s (like emails, phone calls, face to face meeting, ads on social media) to reach up to potentials customers.
Service Automation:
Service automation enables business to retain customers by providing best quality of service and building strong relationship. It includes issue management to fix customers’ problems, customer call management to handle incoming/outgoing calls, service label management to monitor quality of service based on key performance indicators.
2. Analytical CRM
Analytical CRM helps top management, marketing, sales and support personnel to determine the better way to serve customers. Data analysis is the main function of this type of CRM application. It analyzes customer data, coming from various touch points, to get better insights about current status of an organization. It helps top management to take better decision, marketing executives to understand the campaign effectiveness, sales executives to increase sales and support personnel to improve quality of support and build strong customer relationship.
Features of Analytical CRM:
- Gather customer’s information, coming from different channels and analyze data in a structured way
- Help organization to set business methodology in Sales, Marketing and Support to improve customer relationship and loyalty
- Improve the CRM system effectiveness and analyze key performance indicators, set by business
3. Collaborative CRM
Collaborative CRM, sometimes called as Strategic CRM, enables an organization to share customers’ information among various business units like sales team, marketing team, technical and support team. For example, feedback from a support team could be useful for marketing team to approach targeted customers with specific products or services. In real world, each business unit works as an independent group and rarely shares customers’ data with other teams that often causes business losses. Collaborative CRM helps to unite all groups to aim only one goal – use all information to improve the quality of customer service to gain loyalty and acquire new customers to increase sales.
Different types of CRM applications have different features and advantages. So before implementing CRM system, it is very much important for a business to decide future goal and strategy. If you want to choose the best CRM for your business, read our article on ‘How to choose the best CRM software for your business‘.
Do you have any question? Please feel free to comment below.
Keep in touch, follow TechOneStop on Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn / Goolge+.