The best CRM systems compared

What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?

The acronym CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, which in English means customer relationship management. CRM refers to a company's focus on its customers and includes all activities for maintaining lead and customer relationships. This includes customer service, email marketing, or lead generation, among other things. These are followed to achieve specific sales, service, or marketing goals.

What are CRM systems?

When we talk about CRM or CRMs, we usually mean CRM systems. A CRM system simplifies - to put it simply - data from customers and leads in a database.

This makes it easier for the different users in the company to access the data and ensures that information is always up-to-date. The integration of data in one place helps to improve communication with customers and optimize the corresponding business processes and increase their profitability.

CRM software is used in particular in the following areas:

• Marketing

• Customer service

• Contact management

• Sales

• Production management

• Project management

• Social Media

The purpose is always the same: It's about improving business relationships and being more efficient when working with data. Thus, CRM systems are a crucial part of any company's CRM strategy.

Sales departments, in particular, often use CRM software as a central platform to maintain their customer relationships, identify potential new customers, plan and forecast sales, and manage their accounts. Besides central administration and the processing of various interactions with customers, automated customer targeting plays an important role here. CRM systems are often integrated as deeply as possible with systems from other areas of the company, such as marketing and customer support, in order to be able to centrally store all contact points with the customer and thus create a better customer experience.

These are well-known providers of CRM software:

• Salesforce CRM

• Hubspot CRM

• Pipedrive

• CentralStationCRM

• TecArt CRM

• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales

• SAP CRM

• Zoho CRM

• goTom

• Insightly CRM

• SuperOffice CRM

Best CRM Software Comparison 2021

Finding the right software for your CRM measures is not that easy. Besides countless providers, there are also significant differences in terms of pricing and the range of functions. Which CRM system is suitable for your company depends strongly on your company size, your budget, and the functions you need. While simple and relatively inexpensive customer relationship management systems often focus on contact management, complex and more expensive software is usually designed to organize complex marketing and sales processes. A thorough comparison of CRM software is therefore essential for you. On OMR Reviews, you can weigh up which software is tailored to your needs based on the experiences and reviews of users from the OMR community and make your decision based on this.

Why are Customer Relationship Management Software Important?

The customer base is one of the most important assets for any company, which is why customer relationship management cannot be left out of a company's strategy.

There are many reasons to use software in CRM. In particular, growing companies often find it difficult to keep the necessary overview of their customers and potential buyers. Important target group and customer data, the concerns of customers, information about contacts with buyers, their satisfaction, and other extremely important data are often hardly documented.

In fact, it is not uncommon for leads and existing customers to turn their backs on a company because they do not feel adequately cared for. Because today, high-quality goods or flawless services are simply not enough to bind users in the long term. Leads and buyers want to feel understood and value individual communication.

In order to be able to create the corresponding conditions, companies must know their customers well. To do this, it is necessary to capture the data mentioned above and to store it in a central location accessible to all teams.

A CRM system forms the basis for this and is the starting point for building long-term, strong relationships with leads, customers, and clients. The relevant details of the individual contacts stored and displayed in the CRM software provide a broad insight into their needs, problems, and behaviors. Companies can use the insights gained to address these people in a targeted and personal way.

CRM software is usually used by more than one team and therefore offers the opportunity for the individual company divisions to work together more closely. This can have a very positive impact on overall business efficiency.

The essential functions of CRM software at a glance

• Maintenance of master and contact data

• Storage of customer history including contact points and transactions

• Customer segmentation using filters

• Task and project management

• Document management

• Calendar and scheduling

• Structured mapping of the sales process in phases

• Ease the interaction with customers in all phases of the buying cycle through good data basis and automations

• Observation of leads and customers in the sales funnel or the sales pipeline per employee

• Export function for creating reports and reporting

• Easy integration into the company's tech stack through interfaces to other important business software, such as shop- or ERP systems

Who needs a CRM program?

CRM tools are extremely useful in both large companies and smaller businesses. Especially corporations with a lot of contacts cannot efficiently organize these without appropriate CRM software. That's why a CRM is indispensable to respond to the demands of customers. A CRM plays its strengths in a company particularly in marketing, customer service, sales, as well as in HR, supply chain, and partner management.

CRM software in marketing

With the help of CRM systems, the marketing team can trace the complete customer journey. This makes it easier to identify problems and potentials in customer relationship management at an early stage and to derive important tasks for the team members from this. This can improve the relationships with prospective and existing customers of a company. The insights gained from customer contact can then be used as a source of information and inspiration to develop even better marketing campaigns and make accurate forecasts.

With the introduction of a CRM system, a company's own customer base can be segmented. This makes it possible to realize marketing measures for specific target groups. This allows personalization of the CRM, making customers feel personally looked after. In addition, existing customers can be rewarded with exclusive actions for their loyalty. An increased purchase frequency through up- and cross-selling or a higher conversion rate can also be achieved in this way.

A CRM program also offers the possibility to collect customer data on the website. For this purpose, you connect lead acquisition functions, such as registration forms or fields, with the company's CRM software. The resulting centralized data can then be used for customer relationship management in marketing, e.g., for email marketing.

CRM tools in sales

CRM systems also support optimizing a company's sales process. This is achieved through features that allow sales employees to illustrate the sales pipeline. This allows them to identify those deals that require immediate attention or those that promise the most profitable sales opportunities.

In addition, the team can plan and process calls, follow-ups, and meetings based on data, record and edit notes, send invoices, view older customer documents, and more - all through the company's CRM system. CRM programs, on the other hand, offer sales managers the opportunity to generate sales reports and forecasts and keep an eye on the team's performance.

CRM software in customer service

CRM tools mainly serve a company's customer service to store customer preferences and track all associated processes. For example, if a customer indicates that they no longer wish to receive weekly email updates, this can be quickly noted in the CRM system using a corresponding checkbox and no more messages will be sent.

Customer service can and should view and actively manage all interactions that occur during and after a buying process in the CRM system. Important news is promptly passed on between service, sales, and marketing team, so that everyone benefits from current customer information.

No matter where customers come into contact with the company, they are always served very precisely related to their respective conditions through the use of the CRM tool. And they reward this in turn through sales and company loyalty, which is why it is worth investing in CRM.

CRM systems in human resources management

The use of CRM systems in human resources management shows a large number of benefits: A CRM can accelerate the hiring process, better control the need for training and employees, and better manage employees. A CRM tool can also be used for employee and applicant communication.

CRM software in partner and supply chain management

Just as in sales, a CRM solution in partner and supply chain management can be used as a note and meeting tool. CRM systems allow company employees, for example, to schedule appointments or monitor and evaluate the performance of suppliers and partners.

What are the individual benefits of CRM tools?

Some important benefits of CRM programs have already been touched on here and there. Due to the certainly large impact of the correct use of a CRM solution, the following gives a more detailed look at the most important benefits.

Cooperation thanks to CRM system

If data from different business areas are combined in one place, all teams can significantly increase their efficiency. This pays off especially for large companies, but can also be useful for small companies. Contact information from prospects, for example, obtained via lead generation features, can be segmented in the CRM system. Depending on the subsequent marketing support measures taken, sales can see when they can continue processing the contacts. Support also benefits from this centrally accessible information.

Each department that interacts with customers in any form ideally has the same knowledge of the individual contact's conditions, so that their needs or challenges can be perfectly addressed at any phase of the buying process and beyond. This cross-departmental achievement is a big problem in many companies. CRM systems can bridge the important gap between the different areas of the company.

Efficient pipeline management through CRM tools

A CRM system gives the possibility to illustrate a company's sales pipeline. The sales department can thus precisely identify which deals require immediate attention, where interest has waned among the contacts and which perhaps need a further push.

Through constant monitoring of transactions via CRM system that pass through the pipeline, problem areas can be identified and corrected. In the long term, this ensures that the pipeline is never "clogged."

Furthermore, marketing and sales are better connected through CRM programs - as already mentioned earlier - so that the sales pipeline always has high-quality leads.

Maximum efficiency through automations in CRM programs

In most companies, processes have to be performed every day, many of which are redundant tasks or are done overlapping by several people. A CRM system can help automate these operations, saving time and resources.

Furthermore, such economization ensures a more uniform customer experience. Prospects, for example, are no longer accidentally addressed several times on the same subject. In particular, planning follow-ups, deploying email campaigns, and assigning contacts to specific salespeople benefit.

Building long-term customer relationships through CRM system and good dialogue

In today's technology-driven world, customers expect much more than just receiving a product or service of high quality at a reasonable price. They want to feel understood. To achieve this, companies should know their buyers intimately and address them as personally as possible.

With the help of a CRM system, the customer journey of every single prospect can be recorded from beginning to end. All relevant data, such as preferences, challenges, media affinities, purchases already made, problem cases, etc., should be deposited centrally accessible there. This means that all departments concerned always know exactly what the situation is and can react accordingly. The result is more satisfied customers and, at best, long-term strong business relationships.

Better customer experience thanks to information exchange in the CRM system

It can certainly happen that customers - whether due to the company or not - have a problem with a product. Of course, this problem needs to be solved as precisely as possible. The use of a CRM tool provides a common basis for several teams to work on the solution. While the technical support fixes the problem, customer service takes over the information work for the improvement and offers additional support at the same time. Afterward, marketing has the opportunity to deploy information specifically tailored to the case. Ideally, the customer experience is not only not damaged by such a well-solved problem case, but even strengthened.

CRM tools lead to increased revenue

So CRM programs are able to significantly improve buyer satisfaction and customer retention at several levels. Customers who are completely satisfied and remain loyal to a company in the long term always practically automatically mean higher revenues.

The latter also result from the fact that CRM tools can save a lot of time and resources. Important business processes can be automated by the programs and the cooperation between the different departments can be significantly improved.

How much does a CRM system cost?

There are several factors that go into the cost of a CRM system. These include both the acquisition costs and ongoing costs.

Acquisition costs

Acquisition costs typically include setup costs, i.e., the costs incurred when the CRM system needs to be integrated into the existing tech stack of the company. Training costs are incurred at least with complex CRM systems when the different teams, e.g., from sales or marketing, need to be trained in the software.

Ongoing costs

The ongoing costs mainly arise from the subscription costs of the CRM systems. Companies generally pay these subscription costs monthly or annually and either per user (per-user) or per contact (per-contact) to the provider of the CRM system. The price for payment per user (per-user) is usually between 30€ and 150€ per user per month. For CRMs where the subscription costs are calculated per contact (per-contact), we are mostly talking about complete or all-in-one solutions. There, companies pay per user, who is managed in the CRM. This results in cost savings for companies that have a large number of employees.

Free CRM Software

There are also free versions of CRM systems that either have a small range of functions or need to be upgraded for the full range of functions.