Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Do you want to optimize your commercial systems and marketing operations to improve your customers’ experience, build loyalty and develop your sales? AB Consultant’s experts advise and support you in deploying the CRM customer relationship management solution that suits you.

Accelerate your sales, detect opportunities, automate your prospecting actions, coordinate a multi-channel customer journey, measure performance, increase the profitability of marketing actions, etc.

Customer relationship management solutions

Customer relationship management solutions, commonly known as CRM solutions, are integral tools for businesses seeking to enhance customer interactions, streamline processes, and drive growth.

How to improve your customer relationship management by using a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform?

The more your business grows, the more the number of customers or prospects to contact or relaunch increases. Sending your offers, tracking your orders, knowing your customers’ expectations, these are all files and data to manage and update. Centralizing the management of your customer relationship on a single tool is the whole point of CRM, called in French CRM software (customer relationship management).

Many SME’s still have their client file on an Excel file. However, much more effective solutions exist! Yesterday reserved for large companies, customer relationship management software is now adapting to the needs of VSEs/SMEs. They improve business management by simplifying and automating a large number of tasks.

Our Missions

Our CRM consultant works in a web or marketing agency specializing in CRM tools. They are using analysis tools, carries out consumer studies and identifies their needs. We can advise you on your approach to users and propose strategies to optimize the customer relationship.

Our action plans for customer follow-up, assesses your satisfaction and continually seeks to optimize the relationship with your company. We are able to design a CRM project in its entirety.

Main missions:

• Analysis of customer behavior: implementation of tracking solutions to analyze customer navigation
• Management of loyalty campaigns, from their implementation to their evaluation
• Proposal of solutions for optimizing the customer relationship of companies
• Implementation and monitoring of solutions validated by the company
• Training of teams in CRM, loyalty strategies, etc.
• Reporting on the impact of the strategies put in place (new customers, margins achieved, etc.)
• We can also intervene at the IT/CRM level. In this context, it has a more technical role:
  • Participation in the choice of tools
  • Definition of CRM specifications and flows
  • Work on the construction and segmentation of databases
  • Supervision of the definition of reporting tables

What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software?

CRM software, the most commonly used abbreviation, is a platform that:

• centralizes all information concerning your company’s customers and prospects: contact details, purchases, expectations and centers of interest, telephone or email exchanges, visits to your website and social networks, trips to events or in stores;
• gives you all this data on dashboards that simplify your analysis and allow you to identify sales opportunities;
• automates repetitive tasks such as creating quotes, sending invoices, customer reminders, sending bulk emails;
• sends targeted and personalized messages to contacts or groups of contacts;
• facilitates and harmonizes interactions between departments that share the same data (marketing, sales, production, customer service).

Why use a CRM solution for managing your customer relationship?

CRM software offers many features that change the way you work. It has many advantages.

A CRM offers better knowledge of the customer!

The CRM keeps the history of all the exchanges that have taken place between the company and its customers (emails, visits to the company’s website or social networks, SMS, telephone calls, etc.), and lists all the data it has on them (characteristics, orders placed, etc.).

From this data, the tool establishes a precise mapping of your customers’ profiles, which allows you to feed your exchanges according to their interests, and to establish differentiated groups of contacts (for example by age category, sex, nature of the contact established with them on social networks, your website, in store, etc.).

Segmenting your customer database into subgroups allows you to better target your sending offers or your invitations: you only reach people you already know may be interested, and avoid annoying others.

The four pillars of a CRM

Any CRM, in order to best fulfill its functions within a company, is fundamentally built on the basis of the following four key points:

• Communication: to exchange in the most harmonious way possible with customers, and this, via the most appropriate means of communication;
• Practicability: to simplify the collection and organization of data in order to facilitate their use and future processing;
• Collaboration: for better sharing of information between the various players in the customer relationship chain;
• Analytics: for the efficient processing and analysis of data in order to provide the best possible solutions to the company.

CRMs operate on the basis of these four main pillars. However, companies are characterized by different scales and different expectations, CRMs have had to evolve to be able to adapt or specialize according to the needs of companies.

The different types of CRM: Categorization

To navigate with the different types of CRM that exist today, it is necessary to proceed to a categorization. This makes it possible to distinguish three main categories of CRM, depending on:

Functionality

It allows CRMs to be grouped according to their specificities. A distinction is made between operational CRMs which automate tasks, analytical CRMs which collect and analyze data and social CRMs which, coupled with social networks, aim to provide data in real time. These features are not to be confused with the pillars mentioned above;

Ownership

This categorization makes it possible to classify CRMs according to whether they are free of all rights or proprietary, that is to say under license and paying for use;

The installation

It makes it possible to distinguish between internal CRMs, installed directly on the company’s computers and servers, and external ones that operate online or in the Cloud.

Among the different types of CRM used in companies, Cloud solutions are increasingly popular. They come in the form of Software As A Service (SaaS), a service only on demand, offered as a subscription. Click here to learn more about SaaS.

CRM in the business world

Different types of CRM are accessible in the business world. The choice of a CRM is often based on the size of the company. Thus, VSEs generally opt for open source or free solutions like SuiteCRM, ZohoCRM, Sugar CRM or Highrise.

As for SMEs and large companies, they lean more towards internal or Cloud solutions such as Salesforce, Salesforce, Oracle or Microsoft Dynamics 365.

As for the most popular SaaS solutions, we find Hubspot and Salesforce.

For a company looking for a CRM solution to manage its activities, the essential to know is thus presented. The different types of CRM allow any type of business to benefit from the advantages of this modern solution.

Photo credit (main picture): geralt via Pixabay

Salesforce vs Hubspot

HubSpot

Salesforce

Oracle

Microsoft Dynamics 365

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