Introduction
Working with customers can be an onerous task. Keeping up with contacts, correctly diagnosing problems and ensuring satisfaction can take a heavy toll on the customer representative.
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is a technology that helps businesses streamline their communications with potential and existing customers. It gives companies a complete view, which helps them serve customers better.
CRM tools can track all interactions with customers, their purchase histories, preferences, and inquiries. Customer Relations Managers can pull together the most up-to-date customer data and provide insights that make teams like sales, marketing, service, and commerce more productive and efficient.
However, if your CRM doesn’t have the features you need, you’ll never be able to manage a successful sales pipeline. As CRM technology has advanced, the number of available CRM features has grown as well.
What essential features you should look for in a CRM before purchasing one are discussed below.
Top Features
Third-party integration: Customer Relations tasks often require third-party integrations like social media, email marketing, e-commerce, web conferencing and productivity tools. Facebook, Google Ads, your website, MS Excel and other software are essential lead generating avenues. The best CRM software offers a marketplace of third-party apps that can be connected easily to your CRM.
Customisation: Custom software is built using the unique requirements of your business. So instead of workflows being built around the tool, the software supports the business workflows. Customisable dashboards and reports let you focus on what truly matters – whether it’s tracking the performance of your sales team, analyzing customer data or monitoring specific KPIs ( Key Performance Indicators )
Lead and contact management: This is arguably the most important feature a CRM can have. Leads and contacts are directly correlated to sales conversions. CRM should be able to automatically capture leads from various sources, like social media, your website, and third-party integrations. Then there should be appropriate distribution to sales representatives, who can nourish the lead, and provide final reports. All this should be assisted by a good and efficient CRM.
Telesales management: Telesales involve using the phone to pursue leads. This also includes WhatsApp messaging. Leading CRMs often have an in-built business phone dialer as part of their core feature set. Features like auto-dialer, call recordings, call-notes, follow-ups, and one-click email/SMS are also helpful. By integrating these telephony features, telesales management is made convenient.
Campaign management: A good CRM allows you to manage your sales campaigns from a single dashboard. This allows you to segregate targeted strategies for diverse customer groups for better outcomes. The CRM can also create reports for the status of each campaign.
WhatsApp integration: The reach of Whatsapp with the masses is incredible. This makes it an amazing tool for sales and must be integrated into a CRM. From here you can send out one-click messages, sync your messages to a common data store, carry out drip-marketing and use customer service chatbots.
Mobile CRM: Customer salesmen are often on the road to carry out their responsibilities. They should therefore have a mobile version of the CRM to be able to check updates and information. So it is very important to have all the major functionalities on their mobile phones.
Automation: Automating menial tasks allows your employees to devote their time and focus to more complex tasks. Repetitive tasks like updating details, setting reminders or sending follow-up messages consume valuable time which could have been better spent closing deals. Thus automation is a very essential feature to have.
Team management: Any business has a certain hierarchy in the organization. A good CRM fixes use permissions for an employee to bring structure to the organization. It also allows you to monitor the performance of the junior subordinates.
Performance reports: The best CRM software will include sales reporting and analytics that you can use to make informed business decisions. Performance reports are essential because they give you a clearer picture of how well your sales and customer service teams are performing. This can include sales reports, agents reports and leaderboard reports.
Conclusion
CRM tools are indispensable for all businesses aiming to enhance their customer relationships. The market is full of powerful top-rated CRM software solutions that offer diverse functionality and features.
When selecting the right CRM software for your business, it is important to understand the essential features you need. In this article, we explored these features that can elevate your sales processes.
Some of these features included contact management, telesales, campaign management, task automation and third-party integrations. Ultimately, choosing the right CRM can streamline your processes, boost customer satisfaction, and thus drive exponential sales !