How to improve your customer relationship management through colaborative crm?
Customer relationship management is a critically important activity for any company. Therefore, it is essential to manage customer relationship management processes as well as possible.
Are you aware that there are as many as 4 types of CRM? Do you know what they are and what differentiates them?
In this article we deal with collaborative CRM: what is it and what are its peculiarities?
What is meant by collaborative CRM?
Definition
CRM is a very broad concept concerning the company and its vision as a whole.
CRM, at a general level, designates the set of strategies and tactics inherent in managing customer relationships, with the goal of maintaining, acquiring and increasing their value.
Going into specifics, collaborative CRM aims to improve internal communication within the company. All stakeholders should be able to immediately access and share all the information they hold related to customers.
☝ The product-oriented approach is now considered outdated by most business and corporate strategy experts.
The differences between operational, analytical, collaborative, and strategic CRM
We have seen the characteristics of collaborative CRM. At this point, however, one might ask what differences exist with the other 3 existing types.
Strategic CRM promotes a business strategy aimed at retaining and acquiring highly profitable customers. To do so, an entirely customer-centered corporate culture must be pursued.
Analytical CRM intervenes as a result of the data generated by operational CRM. Its goal is to analyze and transform this information so that it has an increasingly sophisticated understanding of customers.
Operational CRM deals with processes aimed at automating, standardizing and improving direct company-customer contacts.
It applies primarily to marketing, sales and customer service. Here are some activities pertaining to operational CRM:
- processes for automating after-sales support tasks,
- management of promotional and communication campaigns,
- automation of sales force activities, etc.
Collaborative CRM: what is its importance?
The introduction of the Internet into our lives has brought a huge change at the level of social interactions. People have an increasing tendency to share and interact with others through all the channels made available by the digital community, becoming more and more interconnected.
For this reason, a company cannot neglect the role of digital communication in the success of its business. Collaborative CRM must be able to collaborate closely with social platforms: analyzing customer profiles, collecting documents, comments and reviews. Collaborative CRM systems will be able to move to more intimate and personalized analysis of their customers and their next targets.
Social platforms have expanded the spectrum of information that can be gathered about customers. Today, one can capture data on people's preferences and ratings, learn about their likes and dislikes, and use this data to create more personalized marketing campaigns.
Choosing to establish a media channel combined with the collaborative CRM we mentioned earlier allows for a comprehensive view on a customer's identikit and potential customers through the addition of data from social media and the web.
If a customer decides to get in touch with a customer through social platforms such as Twitter, Instagram or Facebook, thanks to collaborative crm, the company will have a faster and more efficient response time through targeted responses to meet customer needs. All these activities will be handled with the ease of a phone call or email.
How to choose the right software?
Good collaborative Crm software must be able to unite all the company's internal communication tools and connect them with external ones. The ultimate goal is that to get to greater market segmentation in order to make a true customer sketch. In this way, a true personalized experience can be offered to each individual customer.
In this case, technological transformation and the use of new communication systems must be taken into consideration when choosing the right software. In fact, the social platforms that customers use every day are a mine of information that should not be underestimated.
Regardless of your managerial direction in customer management, there are certain features that a collaborative CRM software must have:
- easy to use;
- Compatibility with other crm software already in use;
- high level of security;
- monitor and control all activities performed by each customer;
- realize statistics on sales.
The SaaS revolution: innovation at your fingertips
SaaS, which stands for Software as a Service, is an entirely cloud-based software distribution model. Its gradual emergence has enabled it to supplant traditional on premise software, which required initial installation, complex manual maintenance, and had generally higher costs.
With SaaS, on the other hand, software can be accessed simply through a Web browser (and by having a good Internet connection). This revolution has greatly democratized access to enterprise CRMs: by paying a simple monthly fee, small and medium-sized businesses can now equip themselves with high-tech software tools.
Software to deal with collaborative CRM
Among the best-known and most widely used SaaS CRMs is Microsoft Dynamics, a solution that takes interactive features in the enterprise-customer relationship to the highest level. Although it is best known for its functionality in CRM, the software actually allows companies to manage their entire business processes.
On our business software comparator, you can find a large number of specific software for the Italian market.
What about you, were you unlike the differences between the various types of CRM? Are you familiar with these processes? What are your impressions on the subject? If you want, you can exchange with us by commenting below.
Article translated from Italian