People often confuse customer relationship management (CRM) software with contact management.
Although these systems overlap in some areas, CRM software offers more advanced tools than what a contact management system provides.
For instance, CRMs integrate sales and marketing tasks while automatically creating in-depth reports.
Let’s look at the differences in contact and customer relationship management features!
Contact Management Features
First, I’ll review popular contact management features, which include the following:
- Managing contacts
- Saving essential information
- Tracking activities
- Organizing contact data
Let’s take a look at each of these features more in-depth!
Manage Contacts
Contact management tools help your business manage your contacts, whether you have ten or 100!
These systems create an easy-to-use platform, allowing employees to search for customer profiles whenever they need.
Unorganized contact data leads to lost sales and poor customer service!
Fortunately, these problems are very easily avoided when an advanced system seamlessly stores and organizes contact details.
Saves Simple Details
Contact management systems are equipped to save simple yet critical details about customers and prospects.
For instance, these details can include essential contact information such as:
- Name
- Address
- Phone number
- Social media profiles
In addition, a contact management solution may also record the history of interactions, including:
- Emails
- Phone calls
- Meetings
- Purchases made
Saving and tracking simple details may not seem important initially, but it can be the difference between loyal and disappointed customers!
Activity Tracking
Contact management systems can also track a multitude of customer interactions.
These can include communications like:
- Emails sent and received
- Phone calls made and received
- Meetings scheduled
- Customer purchases
Specialized contact management software may track customer habits or tendencies, such as frequent queries, complaints, or product preferences.
Tracking these activities ensures your sales team has more than enough customer information to personalize sales pitches!
Contact Organization
Lastly, contact management tools organize your company’s contacts.
Typically, these systems allow you to organize your contacts in whatever way works best (by last name, first name, etc.)
Organized information has several advantages, including the following:
- Customer service teams offer better support
- Fewer frustrated employees
- Centralized location for contact information
- Reduce or eliminate data silos
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Features
Now it’s time to learn about customer relationship management software and the types of features these systems have!
Tracking Customer Interactions
CRM systems track customer interactions, allowing sales and marketing teams to create in-depth customer profiles.
As a result of these customer profiles, your teams can secure more sales because you can create personalized ads and sales pitches that resonate with your target audience.
CRMs track interactions on social media, email marketing campaigns, purchase histories, website activity, and customer service inquiries.
CRM software organizes all this customer data and provides recommendations for using these interactions.
Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is another impressive feature available in CRM systems.
This feature allows businesses to assign a specific value to each lead based on various factors, such as:
- Interaction with the brand
- Purchasing history
- Likelihood of them becoming a customer
By utilizing CRM’s lead scoring feature, businesses can prioritize their leads, focusing more on their target audience and less on unlikely prospects.
Sales Force Automation
CRM systems boast a feature known as sales force automation, which is designed to streamline and optimize various parts of the sales process.
For example, some aspects small businesses can automate include the following:
- Lead capturing and tracking
- Order processing
- Sales forecasting
- Lead distribution
- Customer follow-up messages
Sales processes should move as quickly as possible. Automation ensures your employees don’t deal with mundane, repetitive tasks.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is another popular feature found in CRM systems.
This feature allows businesses to customize their marketing campaigns and automate them as much as possible.
Automation makes tasks such as the following smooth and effortless:
- Email campaigns
- Social media posts
- Web analytics
- Targeted advertising
- Lead nurturing
Marketing automation can help you build customer relationships, increasing sales and loyal customers!
Analytics and Reporting
Lastly, a CRM system offers robust analytics and reporting capabilities.
These tools allow businesses to do the following:
- Curate detailed reports about customers’ buying behavior
- Trend analysis
- Employee productivity
- Sales performance
- Customer feedback surveys
In-depth analytics help businesses identify weaknesses in their processes so they can make necessary changes.
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