What are different types of CRM software?

 By Pranjali Manore

As we all know, CRM software is now the biggest software market globally as companies are competing to win clients.  

 

Gartner's study reveals that the CRM software market is now worth a quarter of worldwide enterprise application software revenue, totalling $193.6 billion in 2018. The research also predicts that customer relationship management value will continue to grow, even up until 2025. 

 

The most important advantage of this software is that it comes in many forms, irrespective of your companies' size, whether big or small and how much you're willing to invest, you can find a tool for you. 

 

In the previous blogs, I have talked about CRM and its benefits to cover CRM types in general. 

 

There are five different types of CM software. Let's take a closer look at it. 

 

1.     Operational: 

Operational CRMs provide your marketing, sales, and customer service departments the practicability to better support your existing and potential customers. 

As you can structure data about your contacts within the tool and set systematic procedures, the tool can be used for automation, including: 

 

• Sales Automation 
• Marketing automation
• Service Automation

 

This way, different departments can function together on nurturing and closing deals for your company. Your company's operation improves when every piece of information is in one tool. Simultaneously, there's less chance of "losing" a deal or miscommunication between departments. 

 

2.     Analytical CRM:

Analytical CRMs help companies better utilize the information they gather about customers; this can include customer preferences, channels, points of contact, interest, and many more. The thing is that operational CRMs attribute customers to the sales funnel, whereas analytical CRMs help understand them. 

Data mining components can gather more information, including trends, and help recognize patterns in data sets based on the contact data. This way, companies can use the data they already collect to make better business decisions.  

 

3.     Collaboratives CRM:

Collaborative CRM allows different teams at organizations to share information about customers. With collaborative CRMs, you can enhance information exchange between departments like sales and marketing and support teams. These departments often work separately, which makes addressing customer's inquiries more difficult to find. In collaborative CRMs, you can easily manage relationships with your customers.

 

4.     Campaign management CRMs

Campaign management CRMs very often can be described either as analytical or operational CRMs. The reason is they kind-of blend the features allowing for collecting customer data and insights to run marketing or sales campaigns.

 

However, it is important to distinguish this kind of CRM solution if your goal is particularly using the contact information to manage, plan, and analyze better campaigns. 

Even running campaigns from a CRM can be made by integrating popular tools with different email campaign providers. 

 

5.     Strategic CRMs 

 Strategic CRM focuses on customers (sometimes included in the collaborative CRMs definition). For instance, collecting information about customers and their interactions and your business may improve their relationship with them.  

Strategic CRM not only gives you insights right away but instead adjusts or tailors the way you communicate with customers in the long run. It is a helpful solution if you're in a business where the focus is on long-term relationships instead of quick sales and short campaigns. 

 

Ending....

Whether a CRM is operational, analytical, or collaborative, it plays a crucial role in contributing through its key features and benefits to managing the customer lifecycle. Some systems will specialize in one of these CRM types, but many include capability across all three. And the system that's best for you depends on your company's specific situation.