CRM Software
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Compare the Top CRM Software of 2021
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CRM Software Guide
CRM software, short for customer relationship management, streamlines the management, tracking, and interactions with current and potential customers in order to improve business relationships and opportunities. Compare the best CRM software currently available using the table below.
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1
Odoo
Odoo
Odoo is a fully integrated, customizable, open-source software packed with hundreds of expertly designed business applications. Odoo’s intuitive database is able to meet a majority of business needs, such as: CRM, Sales, Project, Manufacturing, Inventory, and Accounting, just to name a few. Odoo is an all-in-one software solution designed to meet the needs of companies, regardless of their size (or budget). The unbeatable, seamless nature of Odoo helps businesses become more efficient by reducing redundant manual processes, which helps companies save countless hours of labor. Every module is interconnected to provide a fully-integrated experience from app to app, and users can automate many processes that would’ve otherwise required manual inputs into multiple applications. Odoo keeps all business functions in one place, allowing teams to collaborate with other departments from one unified platform in the most efficient way possible.
Starting Price: $12.00/month/user -
2
NetSuite
NetSuite
One unified business management suite, encompassing ERP/Financials, CRM and ecommerce for more than 20,000 customers. Adaptability has never been more important. We give you the visibility and control to make the right decisions, now. Scale up, spin off, adopt new business models, NetSuite’s flexibility lets you do it all, quickly and easily. With every NetSuite upgrade, your configurations and customization migrate seamlessly. Your core business system now becomes your customer-facing commerce system with a customizable, customer-specific, pixel perfect experience. Real-time analytics is the NetSuite user interface. Users know what they should be doing and how they’re helping the business, with vital business data displayed from right within the system.
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3
vtenext
vtenext
vtenext – the CRM for Digital Innovation Transform and Innovate your company with vtenext. It allows you to engage your customers into your business processes using a specific technology. It can also be used to manage processes generated by internal customers. The most important advantages of adopting vtenext are: - Improving the Return On Investments (ROI) - Facilitating internal communication by breaking down internal barriers - Having a 360° knowledge of the customers - Designing, automation and digitalization of internal and external processes - Acquiring a Lean management method - And many more!
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4
Pipeliner CRM
Pipelinersales Corp.
Pipeliner has revolutionized CRM with our unique visual interface, no-code workflow automation engine, and instant, dynamic insights and reporting. There is no other CRM that provides both salespeople and sales management with so many ways of displaying and analyzing sales data while also delivering intelligent, system-generated insights. Plus, thanks to our automation engine and ease of integration with other systems (such as email, ERP, Marketing), Pipeliner eliminates many of the manual and routine tasks that other systems force on both salespeople and sales managers. The Pipeliner CRM experience is so different from traditional CRM which is why we drive the highest adoption rates, lower Total Cost of Ownership, and rapid Return On Investment. Plus with fast onboarding and how easy it is to learn to use and/or administer the system, there is little to no business interruption when deploying.
Starting Price: $65 -
5
EngageBay
EngageBay
EngageBay is a simple, affordable, integrated, all-in-one marketing, sales and service automation platform with a free CRM, built to grow small businesses and startups. The marketing automation suite helps you save time, nurture your audience and automate routine, manual tasks. With the free CRM and sales automation, you can organize all your email contacts, track deals, and the sales pipeline to grow your sales. Further, you can build meaningful customer relationships that stay for life. And finally, with the free live chat and helpdesk features, provide real-time assistance to convert visitors to happy customers. Track, prioritize, and solve customer support tickets in minutes.
Starting Price: $8.99 per user per month -
6
Less Annoying CRM
Less Annoying CRM
Less Annoying CRM is a basic contact chief developed from the beginning private companies. Deal with your contacts, drives, notes, logbook, to-do's and that's only the tip of the iceberg, all from one straightforward web application. Our item is established on three center standards: straightforwardness, reasonableness, and exceptional client benefit. All clients get a boundless free 30-day trial to thoroughly test each part of the CRM, and client benefit is constantly free through the telephone and email if clients have questions.
Starting Price: $15.00/month/user -
7
GoldMine CRM
Ivanti
GoldMine has removed the headaches of many CRM platforms. Because our interface is so common, your employees will feel right at home. Less time training means more time doing. Don’t “rent� your CRM System when you can OWN it and save BIG. Most companies save up to 70%. With one easy payment, its yours…forever! Take control, save money and have peace of mind you will never get “shut off�. CRM becomes much more powerful when you combine it with other powerful apps. Our cloud option will give you universal access with one login. Here are some popular Add-On applications. It’s your data and you need to keep it protected. We understand that. That’s why we have partnered with leading hosting providers who back up your data, protect it from intrusion and are compliant with certain data storage practices.
Starting Price: $60 per user per month -
8
vcita
vcita
vcita is an all-in-one business management app built for small to mid-sized businesses. vcita boasts a wide range of features that helps SMBs streamline daily tasks and operations and improve how they interact with clients, fueling growth and success. Top features include client and calendar management, billing and invoicing, online scheduling, lead capturing, and email campaigns. vcita also integrates with dozens of platforms, including Facebook, PayPal, Quickbooks, and more.
Starting Price: $12.00/month/user -
9
BNTouch Mortgage CRM
BNTouch Mortgage CRM
BNTouch Mortgage CRM is a fully integrated Digital Mortgage system, CRM, marketing, and POS tool offering a comprehensive mortgage business growth platform for loan officers and mortgage companies. Features Include: - Email and SMS Marketing Automation - Lead Distribution and Management - 35+ Proprietary Mortgage Tools - Digital 1003 Application - Pre-Built Marketing Content - Customized Video Marketing - Curated Social Media Content - Integrated with LOS, Outlook, Zapier, and Others - And Much More Call Us Today! +1 888 971 1117
Starting Price: $69 -
10
Shape Software
Shape Software
Shape CRM helps you manage your business on one easy to use platform. Shape's cloud-based software offers dozens of tools designed to manage and automate your online marketing and promotions via email and SMS, capture and service leads from online sources, organize sales pipelines, nurture prospects and customers, create and send professional online documents, accept online payments, run custom reporting, and automate everyday admin tasks. Shape is the most flexible CRM ever!
Starting Price: $99.00/month/user -
11
InfoFlo
Carmel Vision
Infoflo is an easy to use CRM that is perfect for managing customer relationships and includes the most robust Outlook sync on the market! It is a fully integrated contact, relationship, email, calendar, document, sales, task management solution and VoIP. It includes a Quick Books, Outlook and Google Sync. InfoFlo includes FREE Life-Time and is an affordable $99 ONE-TIME cost per user
Starting Price: $99.00/one-time/user -
12
GreenRope
GreenRope
GreenRope is the all-in-one CRM that accelerates growth by increasing awareness, generating leads, and driving conversions. Leverage advanced automation, predictive analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) with an intuitive, easy-to-use interface. Convert more and build long-lasting relationships with GreenRope's many features built to help you communicate with your leads and clients. From email marketing and social media to advanced marketing automation and more, all the tools you need to engage your contacts are right at your fingertips. It's now easier than ever to keep in touch and stay top-of-mind.
Starting Price: $149.00/month -
13
Hubb
Hubb
Recently named a leader in Forrester's B2B Marketing Events Management Solutions, Hubb is re-inventing the way the world experiences events. The Hubb Platform creates virtual, onsite and hybrid events that bring brands to life. We help drive business growth by streamlining time consuming processes, mining profitable insights, boosting engagement and improving ROE. By collecting, managing and marketing event data more efficiently, Hubb powers high-impact, immersive and personalized experiences for attendees, speakers, sponsors and even your executives. Built by event-management veterans for event professionals, the Hubb Platform gives event planners unprecedented control and agility to create experiential designs that brings their brand to life.
Starting Price: $20,000 per event -
14
GoToWebinar
LogMeIn
GoToWebinar erases the headache and hassle from webinars. No matter your goal or skill level, you’ll quickly see why so many love the GoToWebinar platform. Go from preparing a webinar to presenting in fewer steps – and have a lot of fun along the way.
Starting Price: $89 per month -
15
Boomset
Boomset
Boomset provides an end-to-end solution for in-person, virtual and hybrid events. The award-winning live event functionality - like digital entry management and on-demand printing - fully supports the virtual solution. The virtual web and mobile platform includes features like live streaming and prerecorded concurrent sessions, virtual exhibitor management with lead capture, and attendee engagement via 1-to-1 video calls, live chat, polling, gamification, and Q&A. Coupled with our best-in-class customer support, Boomset makes event management simple for organizers for all types of events, anywhere in the world.
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16
Hubilo
Hubilo
Hubilo is a market leader in the Virtual and Hybrid event platform space. Hubilo is helping organisations across the world reimagine the future of events and navigate an emerging event landscape. Hubilo makes it possible for organisations to provide an engaging & interactive event experience to their global audience and transform the way people connect, interact and host events. Hubilo will become the central system of records for the event industry and unlock massive insights and value from their event by tracking interactions and engagement metrics across attendees, sponsors, organisers, and speakers.Founded in early 2020 and headquartered in San Francisco, Hubilo is a fast-growing SaaS company and is backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Balderton Capital, and several renowned angel investors.Hubilo is trusted by a growing list of global brands like United Nations, Roche, Informa Markets, Tech in Asia, Fortune, AWS, Siemens, Cognizant, Veritas Technologies, GITEX, & several others.
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17
Smartlook
Smartlook
Smartlook is a qualitative analytics solution for websites and mobile apps helping over 300,000 businesses of all sizes and industries answer the "whys" behind their users' actions. Eliminate the guesswork and discover real, actionable reasons. With a unique feature set, Smartlook finally gives you a way to understand user behavior at the micro level. Always-on visitor recordings show you what every last visitor does on your website or app, while automatic event tracking lets you know how (and how often) your visitors do specific things. You can then build conversion funnels to see your conversion rates as well as uncover why people are churning. Heatmaps for websites give you mass data about where most people click, scroll, hover, and otherwise interact with your pages. Ranked within the Top 100 Software Products in the 2019 G2 Crowd Awards, Smartlook services customers like O2, Miele, Hyundai, and Kiwi.com. It can also record games developed in the Unity engine.
Starting Price: $31 per month -
18
Influitive
Influitive
Influitive allows you to build a community of advocates and invite your customers, developers, partners, and employees to complete challenges, referrals, product reviews, social media posts, and more. As they complete these personalized challenges—which can be targeted to groups or individuals—they automatically earn points, badges, and levels to redeem professional perks and privileges. Easily visualize and report on all activities completed and the ROI of those activities, while integrating with your CRM and marketing automation platform to guide members through the entire customer journey.
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19
Community.com
Community
Community is a trusted conversational marketing channel that connects Leaders—entrepreneurs, small businesses, media companies, and brands—to their Members, all via SMS text messaging. Community has seen more than 3 billion texts exchanged between its Leaders and their Members, with clickthrough rates of 59% and open rates of 95%. Texting with your audience converts into action, impact, brand loyalty, repeat sales, and more. Why? Your audience is looking for a connection with humans, not bots—we are focused on privacy and value trust, for you and your audience. Anything you can send in a text message you can send through Community. Share photos, videos, audio notes, gifs, emojis, links, and text. Our features allow you to segment by age, location, interest, and more. See why thousands of artists, entrepreneurs, small businesses, and brands use Community to text with their audience. Reserve your number today.
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20
ONLYOFFICE
Ascensio System SIA
ONLYOFFICE Docs is a secure online office suite that you get a vast range of collaborative features. Co-edit documents, spreadsheets, and presentations with your team in real-time: two co-editing modes (real-time and paragraph-locking), commenting, built-in chat, tracking changes, version history, document comparison. It can be integrated in existing platforms or used as a built-in component. ONLYOFFICE Workspace lets you deploy a web-office on your own server. It comprises ONLYOFFICE Docs and comprehensive business tools: Mail, CRM, document and project management, calendar, chat, blogs, forums, polls, etc. Community Edition is the best choice for teams up to 20 users, available free of charge. Enterprise Edition is intended for bigger businesses who need enhanced security options and professional support. ONLYOFFICE cloud service is a cost-efficient business solution with online editors and collaboration platform in the cloud, accessible from anywhere and from any device.
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21
NationBuilder
NationBuilder
The NationBuilder platform powers thousands of campaign, advocacy, and fundraising initiatives around the world. Engage your supporters, volunteers, and donors when it matters most using one intuitive system. This includes a fully integrated website and supporter database, streamlined fundraising, and advanced email and texting. Bring your supporters to life with dynamic profiles that update with every interaction. Trusted by more than 9,000 customers in 112 countries.
Starting Price: $29.00/month -
22
Exercise.com
Exercise.com
Exercise.com is a fitness business software platform that includes everything you need to manage your fitness studio, gym, personal training business, or wellness center through our custom-branded web and mobile apps designed specifically for fitness businesses. Use our fitness business software to conduct digital health and fitness assessments, deliver workouts online or in-person to individuals or groups, schedule and manage staff, analyze business reports, process payments, and more.
Starting Price: $125.00/month -
23
CheckMarket
CheckMarket
Enterprise survey software with users in 150 countries. Conduct insightful surveys and gain actionable feedback! Monitor customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX) and engagement. Close the loop with shareable reports, dashboards, alerts and follow-up tools like text analysis, benchmarks, dynamic text,.. Collecting data is just the first step. The real value lies in the efficiency of reporting. We provide you with real-time reporting so you can spot trends earlier, and get the information deep into your organization in order to improve processes. After you are done building an insightful report, share it with others. Create different share links, each with different filters, depending on what you want viewers to see all based on your own operational data, hierarchy and organization. Integrate with Slack, Zendesk, API, CRM & more. Includes unlimited users and works in 49 languages. Clients include L'Oreal, Toyota, Allegiance Bank, Sony, the Government of Canada,...
Starting Price: $995 per year -
24
ReachOut Suite
Fingent
ReachOut Suite is a cloud-based end-to-end field service management software built for service companies to optimize and coordinate their entire field operations. Easy to use and packed with features, ReachOut lets field service managers and technicians perform their jobs faster and more efficiently. Digitize field service operations with smart mobile-optimized forms. Gather data swiftly and accurately for conducting inspections or audits. Record customer requests using tickets, easily schedule jobs and work orders, dispatch technicians via the shortest routes, track work progress in real-time, generate professional-looking invoices on the spot & more with ReachOut.
Starting Price: $12.00/month/user -
25
Buildertrend
Buildertrend
Buildertrend is the No. 1 cloud-based construction management software used by homebuilders, remodelers and specialty contractors. The award-winning tool helps construction professionals complete more projects while reducing delays, eliminating communication errors and increasing customer satisfaction. Since 2006, more than one million users across more than 100 countries have chosen Buildertrend as their preferred platform for real-time collaboration throughout each stage of the construction process.
Starting Price: $99.00/month
What is CRM Software?
Today’s technology is enabling small to midsize businesses to operate more efficiently, thereby saving on expenses and time. Among the most beneficial of these new developments is customer relationship management (CRM) software. CRM software enables businesses to manage existing customers, potential clients, sales opportunities, and contacts from a single solution. CRM software can organize and analyze vast amounts of data with lightning speed, improve workflow, and boost customer relationships to new levels. It all adds up to more streamlined business management and effective customer relationships.
Handling relationships with customers and contacts in these ways was unachievable before these advances in technology without preparing extensive spreadsheets and devoting considerable time, energy and staff resources to do so.
A key to the effectiveness of CRM software is in gathering extensive and detailed information about customers and potential clients, followed by organizing, recording and effectively using that information. CRM software retains information not just on customers’ basic details, but also on each contact or lead that a company maintains, whether by telephone or email. It monitors their interests and their purchasing habits. It provides the tools for following up, cross selling, developing marketing campaigns and strategies, and tracking invoices more effectively. Some CRM solutions can even go so far as to prompt sales reps to email or telephone customers at around the time at which they have called the company.
The applications also can scan web traffic and social media to identify potential clients based on such aspects as their interests and hobbies. Instead of an employee trying to remember details on customers or searching for it in randomly gathered papers scattered on an office desk or hidden in computer folders with meaningless names, the software retains this information in a central place. Not only is it retained, but it is well ordered in an efficient and logical way. So, for example, the software will automatically send a gift card or message to customers or contacts on their birthdays. New or improved products or services can be broadcast immediately on their release.
CRM software goes even further than organizing information on customers and contacts and maintaining relationships with them. It provides the ability to aim messages to specific demographic groups, such as millennials and seniors. Information also can be directed to specific geographic areas, such as a city, county or state, quickly and efficiently without having to develop spreadsheets to do so or having an employee going through the information and select those who should be served with the information. In addition, CRM software enables employees to set and measure sales targets, track customer interactions, develop effective marketing techniques, and even to scan internet traffic and social media for potential leads.
As a result, staff can be freed up to concentrate on the more personal face-to-face aspects of marketing and sales without having to spend their time on inputting vast amounts of information, assessing results, and maintaining regular communications with customers. The result is enhanced sales ability, greater productivity, and more satisfied customers.
Many CRM systems have been developed and a large number are available. Sorting through the various CRM software can run up costs and eat up time. But it is essential that the programs chosen are the most appropriate to a company’s needs. Here are guidelines to help a business make the right selection.
CRM Costs and Features
Clearly small and mid-sized companies will want to take into account the cost of CRM software. But there is more to the software than the cost itself. The price needs to be balanced against the benefits of the features that are incorporated in the software. The features required by a company depend on the nature of the business that it conducts. Some features will be of little or no use to a particular company, while others will be of significant advantage to it.
In addition to checking out the benefits, a company might want to consider some of the newer CRM software that offer affordable entry points. As the company grows and it becomes acquainted with the software, more features can be added. A company can choose whether the new features are worth the additional costs in terms of the returns it might receive from them. A company will also want to take into account hidden costs, such as the degree of training that is required to ensure that staff are using the software effectively. More complex software might mean spending considerable time on teaching staff to use it more efficiently. Ideally, the time taken to becoming fully acquainted with the software should be as short as possible and should be measured in days rather than weeks. Clearly a smaller business simply cannot afford to have staff spend large amounts of time becoming acquainted with the new CRM system.
To help answer these questions, it might be advisable to check the support documentation with the application. Just how complex a program is it? What kinds of problems will employees face as they implement it? Another method to determining a software’s cost effectiveness is to try out the application to determine just how long it will take for your staff to be up and running on it. Most customer relationship management software suites come with a free evaluation period. Use this time to import information into the CRM system, including accounts, and assign tasks to employees. Evaluate whether the software is effective for your company’s needs or whether it actually creates more work. You might also record how extensively you need to pore over the documentation that comes with it or how many times you need to call support for help. If one application fails the test, try another until you are satisfied with the return on investment it brings with it.
Another factor in evaluating software is whether the new CRM software will integrate with the systems that are currently being used by your company. Will it be necessary to buy new hardware or switch to new operating systems? Also, effective use of the software might require new smart phones or tablets, incurring additional costs. Even though CRM software is relatively new on the market, the rapid advancement of today’s technology has meant that the applications have become more varied and bring with them more options in addition to the basic benefits. Newer versions enable the software to be implemented in a Software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. Others offer the choice of storing information on the cloud rather than on your own computers or servers. Such a choice can save on costs, lessen complexity, and provide additional security. Another consideration is integrating the CRM software with your telephone system, enabling you to gather information from calls and conversations.
Here’s another aspect to consider. Industry-leading CRM software suites tend to integrate with third-party providers. Those providers operate many of the tools that you will be using. This adds to the costs of the overall application. It also means you might find yourself dealing with different support systems and you cannot always be sure that the varied applications work effectively alongside each other. Careful evaluation of each CRM will pay dividends in the long run. Rather than simply buying a CRM system that provides you with all the bells and whistles that today’s systems provide, it is wise to check carefully into the individual benefit of each, using the factors outlined here as a guide.
Ease of Use of CRM Systems
In addition to the cost and the features, a major consideration when selecting CRM software is to ensure that it is going to be relatively uncomplicated for you and your employees to use. Ideally, after an initial learning phase, staff should find it reasonably intuitive. To test a program’s usability, make sure you consult your employees on it. After all, they are the ones who will be tasked with using it. What might look simple on an initial examination of the program might prove difficult when it comes to actually using the program itself. The way the program works might take an inordinate time to learn.
Employees might find that menus are difficult to find or to use, are too many to go through for relatively simple tasks, or are far from intuitive. They might even find that gaining the information they need involves going through so many hoops that it takes more time than if they had done it themselves without using the program. Having discovered how one aspect of the program works they should be able to apply those basic principles to other aspects of the program. They might be frustrated to find that, for example, the menus work in one way on one aspect of the program, but work in another way on a different aspect.
Make sure, too, that the employees try out the CRM software in a variety of situations. In some cases, the tasks they are called upon to employ using the software might actually make their jobs harder. They might find, too, that they never use many of the features for which you are paying. CRM software also should be able to alert a user to any major errors, such as entering data in the wrong place. One way to determine usability is to learn the application yourself and then to teach someone how to operate it. Read the support documentation, scan through the FAQs, if any are available, as well as any user blogs you might come across. If — on completing all these tasks — you find it painstaking or even frustrating to teach someone the system, or if you find you cannot understand the system well enough yourself to teach someone to use it, alarm bells should sound.
Even if you find the CRM software relatively straightforward to use, it is nevertheless likely that at some point in the future you might need to call the support line for help. While evaluating the application, therefore, it is a good idea to call the support line when you get even slightly stuck to check out how valuable it is. Check out how long the wait time is, which hours they are available in your time zone, and ask numerous questions.
Not only will this enable you to become more familiar with the program, but you will be able to check out the availability and quality of the support that is provided.
CRM Marketing and Communications Features
Concentrate on those features of the CRM software that you will use and drill down on their practical use for your company. Try not to be blindsided by social media apps that are fashionable and said to be catching on. Chances are that email will continue to remain for the foreseeable future the best way you can communicate with your customers. Almost everyone has email on their desktop, laptop, tablet or phone, which they check regularly. Many of the new social media applications, however, are unavailable on desktops and laptops.
Another benefit of email is that it can convey information, including logos, graphics and pictures more effectively than apps such as Twitter or even Facebook. A well designed email can be appealing and inviting in a way that other apps are not. In short, you should understand the way in which the CRM software you choose will interact with customers and contacts over email. The application you choose should ensure that information contained in email messages is automatically captured and does not have to be manually gathered. Of course, this does not mean you should ignore mobile apps. They are a vital part of communicating today, but they are quite different than those applications that operate on desktops and laptops. So you should evaluate them as a separate entity.
Viewed from a different perspective, an important new feature that is being added to CRM software today is the ability for an employee to communicate on a mobile device with the data that is stored centrally, either on your servers or on the cloud. This ability should be as effective as if the employee were sitting in the office working on a desktop.
These applications mean that, by using a remote mobile device, such as a smart phone or tablet, staff will be able access all the CRM tools wherever they are in the world as long as they have access to the Internet and whenever they want to do so, even outside regular business hours. Sometimes the communication methods are different when working from a mobile device than they are when using a desktop computer. Switching from one to another can be a learning experience for employees. But for some companies, depending on the nature of their business, it is important that their employees need to be able to communicate in this way. For many, specially those who are constantly on the road, such communication is vital to them. If this is the case with your company, therefore, make sure that they have the ability to plug in to your CRM software from wherever they are using their mobile devices.
Using a CRM for Sales Engagement and Marketing
One of the advantages that CRM software is bringing with it is the ability to introduce automation to relationships with customers. In the past, sales representatives, or anyone who had a direct relationship with customers, needed carefully to record tasks to be performed. Examples would be following up a set time after a sales negotiation or at the ending of a trial test of a product or service. Questions might need to be answered, too.
Not only that, but emails would have to be written to each client, ensuring that they are provided with the correct information. Now CRM software performs many of these tasks automatically. In doing so it sharply lessens the prospect of contacts falling through the cracks as a result of neglecting to follow up in time or overlooking to keep track of them in a timely manner. It also can produce customized email templates for each situation or for special offers, making it unnecessary to write each email individually.
Such features are valuable when following up on leads. The reason: In many businesses, potential customers fail to respond to an initial sales attempt. They might set it aside with the intent to decide later. Following up becomes as important to closing the sale as the first lead generation was.
In some cases, potential clients ask questions about a product. Should they fail to receive an answer in a reasonable amount of time, they will move on and consider other products. Using CRM software, particularly when it is linked to a mobile app, staff will be prompted to respond quickly to questions. In the case of existing customers, too, it is often vital to respond as quickly as possible to problems or questions users might have.
Another example would be in the case of, say, a webinar that a company is planning to hold. CRM software can automatically remind those who have signed up for the webinar, delete those who might cancel before it is held, and follow up on those who took part to determine their feedback. Should a client cancel an account, CRM software will automatically try to assess the reason for the cancellation and gather feedback that the disillusioned customer might have. Customer experience can be tracked via CRM. Such applications could also try to persuade customers to return should the problem they faced be resolved. In all cases, speed is of the essence. Here, the fast reaction time provided by CRM software can play a significant role.
These tasks can be undertaken by some CRM software using advanced methods of artificial intelligence, saving time and boosting productivity. A number of CRM applications include the ability to synchronize various email accounts into a central portal. They also can initiate email marketing campaigns and can include the ability to conduct chat sessions.
Third-party Integrations
An essential element in selecting CRM software is to separate the features that will be provided by the software itself and those that will be delivered through a third-party provider. In doing so, you will need to determine the degree to which these add-ons will operate within the parameters of the system you already are using.
You almost certainly will want to connect email services provided by the application itself or add ons with the existing email apps you are using. If they will not do so, are you ready to switch to an app they will support? The same is true of a calendar or possibly newsletter management software. In some cases the application might indicate that it is compatible with apps you already use. They might describe this as “native integration,” meaning that the company has an application that you can select, download and use. Problem solved. But if the company does not provide such integration, you will have to do some detective work yourself.
A possibility is to have your IT staff (if you have such) investigate and see whether they can build integration with the software for you. You might decide that the software itself will be compatible with what you have, but you need to follow this up with assessing each of the third-party providers — if such exist — individually.
CRM Reporting and Analytics
A critical aspect of CRM software is its ability to provide you with reports and analyses. They will help you not only to determine the results of what you have been able to achieve using the software, but will enable you better to determine how you should proceed in the future. To assess an application’s reporting ability, check on features that can be customized according to your business. In this way you can assess how your workers have been performing and how customers have been responding. You should be able to produce reports on net sales, demographics on your customers, and track profits in real time.
Ideally, these reports should be exportable. You should be able to save them and print them out if necessary. In addition, using any tool you prefer, you should be able to convert the data into graphic displays of various sorts, such as charts and dashboards. You can then present them to shareholders, partners or others interested in some way in the running of your company. The data will come alive and be more meaningful. An additional benefit will be to combine statistics so that the ratio of, say, email messages to actual sales can be determined.
Security Considerations
In today’s world of hackers and loopholes in systems, security has become a paramount concern to most consumers. Failure adequately to protect customers information can be damaging to your reputation. It becomes essential, therefore, to asses a CRM software on its security. A relatively new aspect of security is the storing of data on the cloud. At one level, such storage is considerably more secure than anything saved on your hard drives, where it is vulnerable to theft, fire and other damage. But you need to feel satisfied with the security being provided by the program you are using, particularly where almost all the data is being stored in that way. After all, you are recording information on customers, some of which might be sensitive.
You can test the level of security provided by a CRM software provider in several ways.
One is to research the company providing the software. Check whether it has fallen foul to security failures and how they responded to them, if there were any. Another is to find out where your data will reside, who is ultimately responsible for its security, and what will happen if there is a problem. Among other ways to test the security is to check whether your CRM software fails to adequately record when users change their passwords. Another is to find out whether you can specify each user’s access controls. You can also check on how well the CRM software relates to your existing IT security software.
What's the Best CRM Software?
Check on how others have evaluated and tested CRM software. Some will rate the best applications available, whereas others will evaluate them based on the features that they provide and yet others will examine them on cost. Go through the assessments carefully, checking those that crop up regularly on top-10 lists.
For example, some will provide a list of free CRM software, such as Hubspot CRM, Inslightly, Zoho and Freshsales. Others will rate online CRM apps, such as OnePage, Airtable, SugarCRM, and Act! CRM. Yet others will provide a list of CRM software for small businesses, such as Pipeline, Infusionsoft, Salesforce, and AgileCRM.
Then there are categories of CRM software for real estate agents, for corporations, for sales people, for insurance agents…. you name it.
It is important to remember, however, that, even in select categories, each CRM has its own strengths and its own weaknesses. Some might specialize in outstanding email services, but if your business uses little email, the CRM might not be for you. Others are great for sales people, but if you have only a limited number of clients, you might need a different kind of CRM application.
Some might be free up to a certain level. If your business expands, you might need to start paying for the software and it’s best to check out what that might be.
Use the criteria outlined above to find the CRM software that will work best for you. Having looked into the pros and cons, try one out if possible before committing to it.
Once you have selected a CRM application and it works for you, chances are you will be opened to a whole new world of managing customer relationships. You will be left wondering why you had not jumped on board much earlier. But then, of course, a lot of this technology is new and was not available until a few years ago.
If commercial CRM software isn't what you're looking for, be sure to check out the free open source CRM software section.