General

 

The CRM applications can help improve your performances in a great manner. They can help you keep customers close and increase their loyalty towards your brand. It is a new way of managing things, created to keep up with the pace and incredible diversity of products and services on the market. Today, the demands of customer increased, and with traditional customer management you won’t be able to remain in the top of preferences. It time you adopt a different strategy, like the one offered by CRM applications, if you want to keep your present customers and gain new ones. Providing superior customer care is something that will keep you apart from the rest of your competition, ensuring that clients will always pick you.

The purpose of a CRM application is to offer high-quality customer experiences, far much better than what your competition is offering while maintaining the costs low. Thus, you will keep clients satisfied, making them wish to return, without draining your budget. The platform such applications offer are made to support all CRM processes, making sure that your clients are treated in the best way possible, and that costs are kept under control. You can now focus on investing in the development of your company since you will start earning more and more customers, having to face an increase in demand. But first, you will need to ensure a correct implementation of a CRM application within your company.

The applications will have tools that will offer the best environment for operating an efficient business customer relationship management. The purpose is to provide answers and solutions to the customer in real-time, increasing the effectiveness of your entire customer management system. Supporting the back-end processes and improving workflow management, a CRM application will be able to take care immediately of customers’ requests in a robust manner. The customer will not be postponed or told what he will like to hear, just to extend the period in which his case will be solved. Everything will be managed in the best way possible and the shortest time, out of the desire to give the customer the attention he deserves. All the actions proposed by CRM will always be in close coordination with your business’s goals, this is how you will slowly head towards success.

How can a CRM application improve your company’s CRM processes? By offering each customer a personalized experience, understanding and anticipating his behavior. It maintains healthy interactions within the service chain, making sure everything works exactly as it should. The time-to-value ratios will be much more efficient, by offering valuable data that can help take the best solutions in the shortest time. Thus, a problem will not linger, doing more damage, because it will be solved fast and efficiently. The business’s performance will also be monitored, all the time and in real-time, helping constant development and the creation of better and more efficient strategies, which will be up to the customer’s requirements. So a CRM application is definitely something you should have in mind if you want to achieve higher performances.

 

CRM is short for Customer Relationship Management. A CRM system’s main purpose is for collecting data that studies interactions among the company and its customers. This data has many sources such as the company website, customer support logs, and databases, feedback reviews, and social media channels. The company uses the generated data to improve its operation concerning products, find answers to the customer’s concerns, and improve its growth and expansion.

CRM is an important feature for all companies, but it is crucial for small businesses and rapidly growing startups that are at the beginning of their growth process. The reason behind that is that their growth and expansion depend mainly on how many new customers they can attract and manage to keep them as well.

For example, if you are starting a new restaurant, you need to know what is the opinion of your customers in the food, what are the online reviews saying and if they think they will visit the place again or recommend it to a friend. This data is very important to make your service better and gain your customer’s confidence. According to different requirements of your company, there are different options for effective CRM software. In this article, we will recommend a bunch of those showing each one’s pros and cons.

1.Salesforce

Salesforce is a comprehensive solution with all what you need in a single CRM software. Salesforce is usually a perfect known choice for large companies and enterprises, but they issued a Salesforce small business edition.

This edition allows small startups to use the tools and resources of the main software with less price. Their platform is user friendly and easy to use. They offer important features that can not be missed such as contact and opportunity management, workflow automation, sales forecasting, and lead generation.

Multiple options are available at salesforce that makes it suitable for large and small businesses as well.

Last February, they acquired Everage which is a customer data platform to improve its real-time personalization capabilities. This merger will allow Salesforce to develop more intelligent and predictive features using AI technology. This will make the program easier and more comfortable for the users. In May 2020, they added more features to help the companies through the COVID pandemic. This update will help the businesses with the reopen in the next few months.

The new features will help assist the social distancing policy and help the business owners control the number of employees in the office at the same time.

 

2.Agile CRM.

 

Presenting an interesting set of features and a wide range of automation abilities, they are surely the best CRM system choice for small businesses. The basic plan for Agile has a competitive price of 9$/month for one user. It offers a lot of important features for marketing teams as well as the sales ones. It gives you the choice to store data for up to 10,000 companies or clients.

They support tracking emails by a two-way integration system which are lead scoring and custom deal milestones.

If used by a marketing team, it offers builder tools needed by many services, this includes emails, forms, different templates for emails, and landing pages for websites. They also added a feature to do marketing tasks automatically and evaluate social media data.

 3.ZOHO CRM.

This software is easy to use and inexpensive. Zoho software can be implemented easily and offers a chunk of features and functionality for a fraction of the price of the competitors. Some may argue that Zoho has fewer customization options than other CRM competitors, but there are many ways to overcome this and make Zoho a perfect fit for your needs.

The software itself is an example of a modern, intuitive, and clean program. Their CRM module is flawless. They have also added tens of different extra features that can be added by a  click-to-install extension and downloaded from the Zoho Marketplace. This process of editing Zoho is so simple that most businesses can build a tailored CRM without needing a developer.

Zoho is a comprehensive CRM option for all businesses, especially small ones. It has a fair price and excellent customer support.

Last March, due to the coronavirus pandemic Zoho allowed its employees to work from home. They also updated their tools to help companies operate remotely. They launched a remote suite that had 11 apps including apps like Meeting, Office Suite, Cliq, Assist, Lens, Show, WorkDrive, and Sprints. They are available for free up to July 1.

In June, Zoho issued a new CRM software ‘Begin’ that is mainly working on small businesses. It helps them to manage their customers and their relationships in simple terms and features. It just takes 30 minutes to be ready and shows many options and customizable features. It has a telephone partition that allows more communications with customers.

4.HubSpot CRM.

HubSpot gives small businesses and tiny contractors an easy entry to the CRM software world. They have a great free version that might show enough effectiveness and functionality to increase the company’s performance, regulations, and processes without any cost at all.

It has an online library that gives users a great number of scientific resources. This library includes template generators, learning guides, email signature generators, and marketing plan template generators.

All users will have a wide variety of options that will allow them to improve their business a lot without spending any money on research and development.

Among all the companies we talked about in this article, HubSpot offers the best free plan. This is a great thing to startups and very small businesses that can not afford a paid CRM software. However, HubSpot has one of the best comprehensive libraries that will get you all you need.

Last April, They published a content management system to their software. This recent CMS hub helps users to develop and change their websites. Their CMS is always protected with a web firewall 24/7 monitoring threats. They also support many languages.

They also have many themes and modules for websites to tailor your website. The CMS hub will only be accessible in HubSpot enterprise and paid plans.

5.Drip (eCommerce).

Drip is a lot more than one of the best email marketing suppliers on the market. It is also a great and powerful ERCM (eCommerce). It does an amazing job providing numerous functions for email marketing and it also helps make an automatic system for your sales by using workflows.

Drip is not just an amazing CRM software that connects with your email marketing services, but it can also handle the email marketing for your company. This service offers a unique option that makes your customer workflow automatic that allows certain actions such as split testing workflows.

This tool is very simple and easy to use despite being very powerful and active. This marketing software is complete and automotive. It is also a great choice for beginners. It also has a modern and user-friendly interface.

A few of Drip’s best effective features are:

1.Workflow builder to automate workflows in intuitive and visual ways.

2.Text sending.

3.10 built-in reports on the WordPress dashboard with export features.

4. Testing features to find out how your customers interact with the messages you send.

5. Connects you with the Facebook Ads system and custom audience.

6. Facebook and Instagram user base can be tapped easily by the lead generation workflow.

Drip’s plan is for 49$/month as a start for an infinite number of emails and 2500 subscribers.

“What exactly are they looking for?”

In order to be a successful one, a business needs to touch its customers in a way no other business can. Customers are the primary stakeholders in any and all businesses. Why so?

1. Organizations are extremely dependent upon their customers. In case they fail to develop customer loyalty and satisfaction, it is very likely they will lose their customers, which translates into failure.
2. … Because without customers, the organization would not have come into being.
3. The main purpose of the organization is to fulfill the needs of the customers and satisfy them.
4. The customers make it possible to for the organization to achieve its aims and objectives.

Thus, the ultimate success lies in listening and responding to the customers’ needs. Therefore, the importance of Customer Relationship Management cannot be stressed enough. It is essentially an important part of the overall business management.

Following are the steps that possibly all organizations must go through in order to build fruitful customer relationships:

• Determine which of the customers’ needs and/or goals coincide with those of the organization.
• Establish and maintain a bond with customers through effective communication
• Develop positive feelings between the organization and the customers so that they know who to turn to.

However, during the course, the organization must not deviate from another one of their primary objectives – making a profit and moving forward. And on the other hand, customers want great quality for a reasonable price. Therefore, these two somewhat contradicting points must be very intelligently managed and a balance must be created.

The CRM can influence the organization in many ways – for starters, the main focus of the organization moves from their product to their customers (which, is pretty much the same thing but a little more specific). Additionally, this means restructuring the offer to cater to the customers’ needs, and not what the organization can make/offer.

It goes without saying that an organization’s success is governed by two things – customer satisfaction and making profits (as previously indicated). These two have an interdependent relationship – providing a better service to your customers than your competitors is likely to bring handsome profits. What makes CRM so effective? CRM is known to not only improve the service to customers, it also should also reduce costs, wastage, and objections and complaints. Moreover, a good CRM will also reduce staff stress significantly, this is a result of the reduction in attrition.

Through CRM, instant and extensive market research becomes possible since you are now open communicating with your customers, which helps you study the patterns in the market, much better than any market survey could give you.

It is obvious how great CRM also helps you develop your business: customers stick to you for all their needs; customer mix-up rates go down, recommendations to recent customers from increasing numbers of satisfied customers to help make them take decisions; and overall the organization’s service flows and teams function more competently and more merrily.