8 Functions Your CRM Should Have to Shine in Service & Sales

1. The 8 most important CRM functions in overview
2. Conclusion

"Good customer care is the best sale". This is just one of many sayings that each of us has heard before and that underline how important it is to build strong customer relationships. Because only when customers are satisfied with your care, and you understand and satisfy their needs and desires, will they remain loyal to you in the future and recommend the company.

To achieve this goal, you have to have the right tool at your side. Here's where CRM comes into play. CRM - short for Customer-Relationship-Management - refers to a company's orientation towards the needs of its customers. It consists of activities for maintaining customer relationships, with the aim of increasing customer loyalty. For this purpose, CRM systems, such as monday sales CRM, are used.

CRM is essential for any company that wants to be successful in sales and service. Because with CRM you build strong customer relationships which lead to more leads, sales, and ultimately success.

But what must a CRM system be able to do in order to shine in service and sales? We answer this question in the article and provide you with an overview of the most important CRM functions.

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The 8 most important CRM functions in overview

To build a strong relationship with your customers through successful sales and customer service, you should consider the following functions for your CRM system.

Contact Management

Contact management is one of the essential parts of any CRM system. It helps you to store and organize all information about your customers, such as contact details, demographic information, transaction data, and notes, in a single central database. Throughout the customer journey - from first contact to conversion and beyond – the contact management collects more and more relevant CRM data, either manually or automatically. With contact management, you can ensure that you have the most up-to-date customer information and insights to support your sales goals.

Contact management is an important tool for any company. It helps employees keep track of their contacts and conversations, ensuring a smooth sales process. By organizing contacts through a CRM, companies can better understand their customers and potential customers, and respond better to their needs and develop personalized sales strategies.

Choosing the right CRM for contact management, however, is critical. It should be user-friendly and intuitive, providing easy access to information to reduce manual maintenance. With the right CRM, companies can be confident that they are managing their contacts efficiently and focusing on the most important thing - building strong customer relationships.

Lead Management

One of the key requirements for a CRM system is effective lead management. Lead Management is about converting potential customers, so-called "leads", into actual customers. If this CRM strategy is implemented effectively, it can have a positive impact on a company's revenue.

But not all leads are the same. Depending on their position in the sales pipeline, they have very different needs that should be considered accordingly. A CRM tool that has lead management functions enables you to identify sales opportunities and optimize the sales process by showing you which phase of the sales pipeline a lead is in. This way, you can decide which actions should be taken next for which leads.

Task Management

The path to successful contract completion or good customer service includes many subtasks, such as phone calls, emails, or meetings with potential and existing customers. These can also be coordinated through the CRM.

A good CRM should offer functions that allow tasks and appointments to be scheduled and assigned to certain colleagues. This allows you to track which team member is currently working with which contact and what activities have already been conducted in the past.

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Reporting

Do you want to know which measures work and which don't? In order to collect data and analyze it and measure the performance of your sales and service activities, your CRM should definitely have reporting functions.

The knowledge about the customer behavior on these activities allows companies to constantly optimize procedures, take appropriate measures, and ensure that they are on the right track. In addition to deep insights about prospects and customers, you will gain important insights about the performance of your sales staff through the reports.

Depending on the provider, these reporting functions vary greatly. While some CRM software only provides simple standard reports, others offer the possibility to present extensive reports on various dashboards, which can be individualized by numerous filters and settings. The more accurately the performance of the various activities can be analyzed and the more knowledge you can extract, the more meaningful your sales forecasts will be.

Whether simple standard reports are sufficient for you, or whether you prefer to rely on advanced reports, is up to you. But what should a CRM be able to do for sure? Your system should at least have the ability to create dashboards according to your requirements and to easily export data.

Automation

Using basic CRM functionalities already takes a lot of work off your hands and makes your life easier. To be able to work even more efficiently and save even more time, the CRM system should have automation functions.

Repetitive, simple tasks can be automated through workflows. For this purpose, specific triggers are defined that trigger a single action or an action chain. In marketing, sales, and customer service, there is a wide range of activities that can be automated, but also contact management can be simplified by automations and save tedious manual work.

A marketing automation, for example, ensures that a lead receives a pre-written welcome e-mail after newsletter registration. Sales representatives can have leads automatically assigned to them. Automations of service processes can include the creation of tickets, the assignment of requests to the right employees, and the sending of automatic responses.

Integration Capability

The ability to integrate the CRM with other systems and tools can be incredibly helpful and beneficial. With the right integration, you can automate and simplify processes and workflows, and quickly import data and activities from other systems into the CRM. This is one of the most important functions you should pay attention to when Choosing a CRM System as it can make a big difference in terms of efficiency and productivity.

It depends on the needs of your company which integrations are best suited, and on the CRM system which integrations are even possible. However, the most common and frequent integrations are as follows:

• Calendar: The integration of the calendar into the CRM system can support the management of customer appointments and tasks.

• Online Shop: If your company operates an online shop, it certainly makes sense to link it with the CRM, so that new customers are automatically set up as new contacts.

• E-mail Marketing: If you use an external tool for e-mail marketing, it should be integrated into the CRM system to ensure a complete overview of the information about and interaction with the contacts

• Telephone: By integrating telephone data through telephone and VoIP systems, your phone process is simplified, and better tracking of calls and conversations with customers is ensured.

• Finance: The integration of the financial software used with the CRM system enables companies to merge and manage their financial and customer data, and to make invoicing of customers and monitoring of payments more efficient.

Social Media

Social media is an important channel for interacting with customers and an integral part of modern customer relationships. Social media is so important for some companies that there are now entire social CRMs that specialize in this area.

If your target group and customers are at home in social media, you should consider a CRM system with functions in this area. By integrating your company accounts from any platforms, you can monitor customer behavior in social media, as well as reply to messages and posts. In addition, you can plan postings right from the CRM tool and analyze it afterwards. Even leads generated on social networks can be automatically transferred into the CRM.

One particularly interesting feature is social listening. CRM systems with this function monitor hashtags and conversations around your brand and the industry, allowing companies to identify industry trends at an early stage and proactively respond to complaints.

Mobility

No matter where you are or which device you are using - the ability to access your CRM from any mobile device is a huge CRM advantage. This is particularly valuable for sales representatives, because quick access to your mobile CRM, using HubSpot CRM in field service, can save you time and money. Mobile access helps to maximize efficiency, both from a customer and an employee perspective. By using a mobile CRM tool, you can make optimal use of the time and resources of the CRM. Today it is more important than ever to be able to access your CRM from any mobile device, so you should definitely include this point in your requirements catalog for your optimal CRM tool.

Conclusion

There are various CRM functions that can help you take your sales and service activities to the next level. However, every company is different, and depending on the software provider the functions of the CRM tools differ greatly. So before you choose a CRM software, you should consider how your service and sales team works and check your sales process in detail. Also make sure that the CRM system you choose is user-friendly and can be seamlessly integrated with your existing processes and software solutions. This way, you can get the most out of your CRM to build strong customer relationships.