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Top features to look for in your CRM solution

In leading a successful customer-centered business, a well-organized customer relationship management solution (CRM) is crucial in creating a better workflow and relationships with your customer base.   

Understanding that customer relationship management is, in some way, very straightforward. However, its complexity often makes it challenging to comprehend and implement efficiently. With the ever-growing number of CRM solutions, finding the one with the right customer relationship management features can be challenging. 

What is customer relationship management?

In short, customer relationship management is the set of business processes and strategies for managing interactions. It integrates organizational processes across marketing, sales, and customer service with functionalities that strategically serve key initiatives across different departments.   

Therefore, CRM as a business strategy should be focused on defining the right approach to manage customer/prospect interactions and seizing emerging market opportunities. 

Appropriately implemented, CRM can be a critical factor in creating opportunities and searching for a way to improve the value proposition for customers.

What is a customer relationship management (CRM) solution?

A great CRM solution with the right customer relationship management features allows your business to provide support and manage customer interactions through reliable systems and processes. It also integrates organizational functions across marketing, sales, and customer service. The right functionalities and customer relationship management features can strategically serve key initiatives across departments.   

Frequently, organizations make the mistake of considering CRM like a digital magic wand that will organize and align all their customer interactions ensuring the company's success. Often, that is why many customer relationship management (CRM) solutions fail or do not deliver planned results.   

Suppose your CRM solution covers a broader span of business areas. In that case, it is going to be easier to integrate the solution within the entire landscape of IT architecture and business processes.    

We suggest you consider these 7 customer relationship management features when choosing the right CRM solution that is right for you.  

Top 7 customer relationship management features

1. Omnichannel communication

All customers have preferences for clear communication, and businesses have realized that by denying customers their preferences, they risk losing them to their competitors. Omnichannel communication enables you to use the communication channel of your choice: mobile, voice, email, SMS, chat, social, etc. 

Until recently, most companies relied on a multi-channel approach in handling their business. In the past, CRMs were built to handle the customer service needs of companies at the time. Today, however, both customers and companies are changing rapidly in the digital age. For instance, with an omnichannel approach, you have the same core functionality, but all of your channels are unified under one system and in one unique interface. Moreover, this can have a dramatic effect on providing a seamless experience to customers. Providing reliable solutions and handling them is a great way to improve your customer satisfaction metrics.   

Customer interaction management can also be beneficial for collecting and analyzing information such as past purchases and interaction history.    

In conclusion, omnichannel joins all of these channels, ensuring the best client service and improving their experience. 

2. Contact management

In short, contact management is the process of recording contacts' details and tracking their interactions with a business. An organized system of storing and monitoring contacts allows you to find accurate customer information and personalize your communication quickly. It will also make your customer communication less chaotic and enable you to improve sales and service levels.  

With the right contact management, you will have access to a single, unified view of the customer and vital data.   

Such can be especially helpful if you have many contacts to organize or multiple people that need access to the information. 

3. Lead management

Leads are crucial for ensuring your company has a consistent revenue stream. Therefore, lead management refers to turning your business leads into paying customers. The right CRM software can make it relatively easy to contact your prospects, qualifying them based on their needs and contact information. It helps to identify which leads are the most likely to convert. Therefore, lead management using CRM software can make almost any sales team better at converting leads into deals.

4. CRM workflow automation

CRM workflow automation is an embedded intelligence that streamline business processes and replaces manual, repetitive tasks. Good customer relationship management software contains all your company's prospects who are navigating different sales process stages. During each sales process step, your business should engage with prospects to get them to the next stage until they convert. CRM workflow automation can help in various ways; from automating manual support processes and documents to customer service. 

5. Customer data analytics 

CRM analytics, also known as customer analytics, refers to the integration and analysis of all available data. It is followed by creating insights to improve the management of your customer interactions.   

As a result, deep customer analytics further delivers advanced customer insight, allowing informed managerial decisions that will outpace the competition. 

6. AI and machine learning

During lead qualification processes, AI-powered CRM tools can automate most analyzing needs. By embedding technologies like predictive analytics, IoT, machine learning, etc., lead's requirements and inform sales teams to improve their performance.    

Using AI can help enhance prospect and customer experiences. Above all, it helps sales teams quickly and accurately make high-level decisions.  

In conclusion, AI algorithms within CRMs help sales reps by automating segmentation; offering the best product for a customer, purchase history, and other attributes. 

7. CRM integration layer

It would be best to have a key CRM integration with your sales and marketing automation. These tend to be used to help keep track of your lead generations and discover upsell and cross-sell possibilities.    

As mentioned, CRM software is getting smarter by each day. Therefore, integrating CRM systems with the rest of the IT landscape is crucial. These can include ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), core systems, website, email/calendar platform, e-signatures, etc.

How can Live help?

During over 20 years of market presence, CRM solutions have undergone an impressive adoption and growth rate in the last couple of years. Valued at USD 40.2 billion in 2019, the global market size of CRM digital solutions is predicted to expand at a CAGR of 14.2% until 2027. The average return on investment for CRM is $8.71 for every dollar spent.    

In business, relationships are everything – it's the primary source of your organization's value creation. ASEE's experts and its Live product family for customer and employee relationship management help organizations mature customer service processes, automate engagement, improve customer experience, and increase the scope of digital operations regardless of the industry or size. Therefore, high integrability enables an organization to smoothly integrate LIVE into their existing IT architecture and ensure full process automation.   

Find out more information on how Live product family can support and enhance your customer relationship strategy.

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