Customer relationship management software: purchase guide
What is CRM Software?
Definition
Customer Relationship Management or CRM software is an IT tool that is used by marketing and sales departments to centralise customer and prospect information to maximise business revenue. With CRM software, you can manage:
By gaining insights on customer behavior and purchasing patterns, you will be able to offer customers with a relevant solution that addresses their needs. The relevance of marketing and sales actions makes it possible to direct efforts where it is really necessary and thus to maximise conversion rates (conversion from prospect to customer) as well as retention rates (customer renewal).
6 Reasons to Use CRM Software?
Here are 6 reasons why you need CRM software:
- You can use it to be more efficient than competitors and therefore gain market share.
- It can be used to understand your audience and address them in a relevant way
- By centralising customer knowledge, you will be able to implement powerful marketing actions (email marketing, SMS for example)
- Data centralization opens the door to collaborative techniques (sharing information between employees) and to improving personal organisation (note-taking, synchronisation with the agenda)
- New regulations in terms of personal data management (GDPR) make it mandatory to process customer data centrally with the ability to transmit this data immediately to the person concerned or to destroy it at his request.
- Online CRM is the most connected tool on the market, opening up infinite possibilities: customer segmentation, marketing campaigns, automatic invoicing, business intelligence and sales data analysis, company management, etc.
What are the Main Features of CRM software?
The Basic Features of CRM systems
The main features of CRM software include:
- Lead management and opportunities for salespeople (telemarketing)
- Key Account Management (centralisation of prospects and customer data)
- Event Tracking: outgoing emails, incoming calls, information, adding documents, signing a contract, etc.
- Appointment and calendar management
- Management of multichannel marketing campaigns (email marketing, SMS marketing, newsletter, voice messages)
- Dashboards, Analytics and Reporting
CRM software is the most diverse type of customer management software, which explains the hyper choice in this market. CRM software range from advanced contact managers (xRM) to commercial ERPs (such as Everwin or Divalto).
Advanced Features
The following advanced CRM features and services are becoming more and more present in CRM software:
- Support and customer service
- Commercial management and sales management (quote, order form, invoicing)
- Delivery and collection of documents
- Embedded and synchronised messaging with the main messaging system
- Tracking of conversions according to the origins and drivers of leads
- Connection with Customer Data Platforms (CDP) to centralise unstructured data with qualified CRM data
CRM applications will be supported in the next 5 years by BigData, Business Intelligence and the exploitation of public data on the Internet:
- Automatic proposal of products to segments of populations via marketing actions combining marketing automation and emailing.
- Correlation detection
- Listening to social networks (Social CRM as Easiware)
- Automatic enrichment of contact cards
- Anticipating seasonal factors
CRM: Trends and Future Developments
The CRM market is made up of 50% SaaS CRM offers (CRM in the cloud, unlike on-premise CRM).
Finally, the 10 largest CRM software publishers account for 60% of the market. The remaining 40% is made up of about a hundred solutions such as E-deal, Zoho, Efficy, Infocob. Among the market giants are Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, IBM, NetSuite and Sage CRM.
Moreover, most solutions offer free trials or demos to test the functionalities of CRM Marketing software.
With our guides on customer relationship management (CRM), discover how to automate sales and marketing actions to support business development and customer relationship quality (improving customer experience, customer journey, loyalty and customer satisfaction).
How to Choose a CRM Software?
Choosing the ideal CRM software can be complex because it depends on the current context of a company, but also on its evolution. Moreover, it impacts many departments such as Management, Marketing, Sales, Communication, Support, etc. It is therefore essential to make a list of required features with all stakeholders in the CRM project before selecting a CRM tool.
Then, it is important to study the necessary functional scope: prospecting, marketing campaign management, customer support. There are hundreds of CRM software on the market that do either everything or part of the customer relationship.
Finally, price plays a key role in selecting the ideal CRM software for a company. You can now find CRM software with monthly subscriptions per user. This usually costs around 30 €/month/user which, multiplied by the number of employees concerned, can represent a very significant cost.
The Most Popular CRM Software
These include: Sellsy, Eudonet, Ines CRM, Salezeo, GRC Contact, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, MyFeelBack, Koban, Nelis, Salesforce CRM : Sales Cloud, Teamleader, EGGcrm, TigerPro CRM, Magic Business, Incwo, Pipedrive, Smartplace, Vtiger CRM, Zoho CRM, Sage CRM, Everwin CXM, Simple CRM, You don't need a crm, E-Deal CRM
