In the constantly growing competitive market, large-scale corporations are aware of the importance of Customer Relation Management. There is a clear agenda behind this concept: improve business relationships with customers. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a technology that provides solutions to manage your company’s interactions with existing and potential customers. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications helps to acquire new customers and increase ROI.
Why is CRM Software Important for Businesses?
Enterprises invest millions in CRM systems to gain a competitive edge in the market. It helps to manage your day-to-day operations efficiently with the help of CRM software. Instead of coping with spreadsheets, CRM applications let you keep accurate records of phone calls, emails, meetings, and correspondences. The Sales and marketing teams can share this information with colleagues to plan ahead of time. Furthermore, it helps to provide clients with the necessary support and service.
According to Gartner’s prediction, the global CRM market will grow at 13.7% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) by the end of 2021.
Top 3 CRM Trends in 2021
In today’s digital world, customers expect an individualized experience. To meet the customer’s expectations, you must know the demands of your target audience and ways to deliver on those needs. The businesses have evolved on a vast level in 2021 following the changing trends after covid-19. However, to provide sustainable CRM systems, you must know which directions to follow.
Let’s have a brief overview of the top 3 CRM trends primarily used in 2021.
- Workflow Automation: The world of CRM is catching up on the idea of self-help. The trend of virtual assistants in 2021 is not exclusively designed to ask questions but to engage customers, gather details, and offer bespoke and constructive answers. The integration of AI with CRM will enable companies to give quick responses to customers.
Workflow automation helps businesses to offer high-end customer service while minimizing operational costs.
- IoT Technologies: In 2019, 83% of the Enterprises adopted IoT technologies, whereas the industry expects to have over 64 billion IoT devices globally. This trend in the CRM system will help to monitor clients in a better way.
- Flexible APIs: Application Programming Interfaces (API) is the key ingredient to customer Intelligence in CRM applications. API combines all platforms in a unified space. Flexible APIs build a valued record of customer preferences while generating effective strategies. It is one of the leading technologies that facilitate cloud-based CRM applications to fetch in response to sales and marketing requirements.
Top 3 CRM Software
CRM software plays a vital role in the success of a business. It provides everyone from sales, customer services, marketing, recruiting, business development to any business domain a sound strategy to manage the external connections and contacts that drive success.
Besides the primary responsibility of the CRM system, the businesses can integrate additional features as per the requirements. Here are the top 5 software to help you find the best solution for your business.
1. Really Simple Systems
Really simple systems CRM is designed for B2B operations of small and medium enterprises. This software will help your business to manage everything related to sales and marketing tasks.
What do Really Simple Systems offer?
This system offers a 14 day trial with a professional plan and activated marketing tool. This version of the software will help users work efficiently and manage and track leads and customers.
Its integrated marketing tool will help users to gain leads and contacts from websites. Moreover, the users will figure marketing campaigns and send newsletters to contacts straight from the CRM system.
2. PipeDrive
Pipe Drive is exclusively a sales management CRM tool. It provides no optional module for marketing, project management, and other domains. It claims to be specially built for small teams with lengthy sales processes.
What Does PipeDrive offer?
PipeDrive CRM system’s ‘Gold’ Plan allows your team to work with email tracking, creating a product log, workflow automation, and custom permissions across your sales team. The main features of this CRM system include:
- An easy to use and manageable sales track
- A mobile app, which makes this tool convenient to use on any device
- Sales recording
3. Zoho
Zoho is one of the more prominent names in the CRM market. It is associated with the Zoho suite of business management tools. It has a clients base of businesses of all sizes.
What does Zoho CRM include?
Zoho CRM offers the Enterprise plan to its customers, which comprises multi-portal users, territory management features, and custom modules and buttons. This CRM application scans business cards and lets you import the data from social media platforms. One drawback of Zoho is that it provides only 1 GB storage and charges extra for each 5GBs you need monthly.
The Future of CRM
The CRM has already given Enterprises the ability to provide personalized customer experience. Hence, CRM technologies will continue to take over the market as the best source of customer data integration. According to Mckinsey & company’s study, customer relationship management will continue to outgrow other businesses. CRM applications will help to acquire new customers and increase ROI.
