What is a CRM system? 7 main functions of CRM customer relationship management system

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, understood as customer relationship management. To learn specific information about the CRM system, please see the following article

CRM System are tools that help businesses improve customer satisfaction and create loyal customers. Specifically, what is the definition of CRM? What benefits and functions does a CRM system bring to businesses? Viindoo's article below will provide detailed information.

What is a CRM system?

Customer relationship management (CRM) is the management of all activities and interactions of a business with current and potential customers. Simply put, CRM is a combination of all activities from Marketing, Sales to Customer Care. CRM technology helps companies stay connected with customers, streamline processes and improve customer relationships to grow their business and increase profits.

CRM system

CRM system helps businesses manage customer relationships

Nowadays, when people talk about CRM, they are often referring to a CRM system - a software that helps track every interaction between a salesperson and their customers. Such as tracking interactions across sales calls, customer service interactions, marketing emails, etc.

Thus, a CRM system is a collection of platforms, software, tools and people that work together to manage a business's customer relationships, supporting businesses in managing customer data including customer relationships. including demographic information, behavior, interests, and customer interactions with the business. Thanks to that, businesses can easily build automated workflows that allow your marketing team to spend more time more time for strategic tasks, aiming to bring high revenue and profits.

Why do businesses need a customer relationship management system?

Business in the 4.0 technology era has become complicated as user purchasing trends change and businesses constantly invest in technology. To stay ahead of the market, your company needs to focus on analyzing consumer behavior and prioritize building the best customer relationships. This also requires the company to be supported by the right technology. And CRM solution is the suggestion for you.

CRM system

CRM helps businesses manage the progress of customer care work

The benefits that CRM systems bring to businesses are huge when it helps collect information and analyze customer journeys. The system transforms multiple streams of data coming from sales, customer service, marketing, and social media to give you a clear, unified customer profile.

  • For small and medium businesses, you can start your journey with free CRM systems. The system will help SMEs compete equally with larger competitors in the industry thanks to features such as: Managing customer contact information, updating business transactions, payments and reports. ..
  • For large businesses, the CRM system helps sales staff save time and simplify monotonous daily tasks thanks to advanced features such as customer workflow management and customer management. sales by geographic region, detailed analysis, business and marketing automation...
CRM System

Sales transactions will be controlled more effectively

9 main functions of CRM

Manage potential customers 

In addition to data about current customers, CRM also stores information about individuals who have expressed interest in the company's products and services from many channels, including web forms, phone calls, social media platforms, and emails. This function helps you not lose any potential customers. Based on the information collected, you can accurately score and evaluate potential customers. At the same time, businesses can track leads' progress throughout the sales cycle and make appropriate marketing decisions.

Contact management

CRM systems record all customer details, including names, phone numbers, addresses, social media usernames, and customer interactions in a contact database. to build integrated customer profiles. Thanks to that, sales staff save a lot of time and effort spent remembering customer information or searching for them in many databases.

Email management

Email is the most popular communication channel for B2B. With Email management function, CRM allows businesses to send mass emails and track email conversations with customers. At the same time, you can also plan detailed email campaigns and send automatic emails to customers on occasions such as birthdays or anniversaries (Email Drip Marketing).

Marketing

Marketing-related CRM functions primarily revolve around the ability to segment and nurture leads, prepare and execute marketing campaigns, and track and optimize social media marketing campaigns. This functionality will help businesses automate marketing, reduce costs and improve the effectiveness of marketing initiatives.

CRM System

CRM helps businesses optimize the effectiveness of marketing activities

Manage transactions and interact with customers

CRM systems collect information from multiple sales channels, helping to visualize the sales cycle and determine the location of a specific deal in the sales funnel. Through it, you can sort and filter transactions and perform bulk actions, such as sending emails. Managing transactions from multiple channels for each product type helps you compare sales with revenue and decide which deals should move forward and which should be dropped.

Document Management

Document management functionality lets you create, access, edit, and share files with colleagues or customers directly from the CRM system. Besides, you can set permissions to access and edit documents to increase security. Additionally, the CRM system also allows viewing and restoring previous version history of any file.

Automate workflows

With customer workflow automation, you can create smart workflows using logic or rules to automate repetitive tasks during the customer service process, helping employees Salespeople save time, avoid duplicate work, and ensure actions are completed correctly at each stage of the sales process.

Forecast future revenue

Revenue forecasting in CRM is based on current and historical data trends. It allows you to test different hypothetical scenarios to improve sales forecasting (revenue, sales, profits). Thereby, sales staff can determine which potential customers have the highest conversion rate to allocate resources accordingly.

Reporting and analysis

The function of the CRM system not only stops at creating sales, marketing, customer service, and e-commerce reports, but also helps businesses analyze customer data through interaction tracking and feedback. Notably, this feature also allows you to share reports with different teams for collaborative data-driven decision making.

CRM System

CRM helps businesses create insightful reports

5 steps to build a CRM system

Step 1: Determine the goal of building CRM

There are many ways to build a CRM system, but to avoid overstretching resources, you need to clearly define the goal of building your CRM system. Here are some common goals that organizations often set:

  • Enhance customer experience and satisfaction by providing more detailed information about customer preferences and behavior.
  • Manage and nurture potential customers
  • Automate frequently repetitive tasks to free up time for your employees, helping them perform more strategic activities.
  • Increase sales and revenue by streamlining your sales process, tracking leads, and making your marketing efforts more targeted.

After identifying and prioritizing your custom CRM development goals, you can consider choosing the most suitable type of CRM system (collaborative CRM, analytical CRM, operational CRM).

Step 2: Decide on features for CRM development

Although there are many different types of CRM, there are some features that a CRM system must have. They come standard across solutions and are needed to perform functions such as data organization and contact collection. These must-have features include:

  • Contact management
  • Track interactions
  • Service and transaction management
  • Manage potential customers
  • Automate tasks
  • Marketing
  • Reporting and analysis

These are all the main functions of a CRM. Depending on your goals and usage needs, your CRM may have different characteristics from the features listed above.

Step 3: Find a development partner

Once you've figured out the features you need to build a CRM, the next step is to find a trusted technology partner to set up the system. You can outsource or develop in-house. However, please note that outsourcing involves hiring outside experts, individual freelancers or a dedicated team, so the ability to control the development will be low and you need to establish a trusting relationship. Trust your outsourcing partner. As for internal development, the price will be higher and you will face the challenge of attracting and retaining talent.

Step 4: Set up the system

Creating a UI/UX design for a custom CRM system comes with unique challenges and tasks. To ensure your CRM interface truly supports user productivity, you will need to consider defining the roles and responsibilities of different users within the CRM system, creating user personas, usage and Optimize existing data, prioritize data that users need to access regularly.

Step 5: Analyze and improve the system

As you move from planning and design to actual coding, it will inevitably be difficult to avoid mistakes. Therefore, you need to analyze data and test the system to make suggestions for improvement. You can set up a small group of users to test the system to provide feedback for improvements. After making complete adjustments, the system can be put into use for all personnel

Evaluate types of CRM customer management systems

CRM comes in three main types:

  • Collaborative CRM: Intended to improve teamwork and communication by creating a transparent data sharing environment. A collaboration platform is typically equipped with collective discussion, file sharing, and activity streaming functionality. You might consider building a collaborative CRM for internal purposes or external groups.
  • Analytical CRM: Aims to support planning. The system provides detailed information, statistics and analytical data. Therefore, analytical CRM must be able to collect and process various data from multiple sources and present it in real time.
  • Operational CRM: This type focuses on automating and streamlining business processes. The purpose of use is to increase work efficiency. The system often helps process leads, generate automated messages to customers across multiple channels, and send follow-up notifications in bulk.

Note: You can combine multiple CRM types in the same system or choose specific features for your own system.

Companies use CRM successfully

CRM is an important tool to help build and maintain customer relationships. Therefore, it is not difficult for you to come across CRM systems in large corporations and businesses. For example, Salesforce, Amazon, Microsoft, Airbnb, Zappos and Coca-Cola... have also taken advantage of the benefits of CRM to personalize customer experience and improve satisfaction in customer care services.

For example:

Coca Cola uses CRM to understand customers and improve relationships. Coca Cola's CRM system includes analytical, collaborative, operational, geographic, and sales intelligence approaches. Its goal is to create value for customers and the company over time.

Or McDonald's uses CRM principles to build and maintain meaningful relationships with customers. The company uses data-driven insights to personalize customer experiences and tailor offerings to preferences.

As for Amazon, this company mainly uses proprietary CRM systems designed specifically to meet its unique needs. These systems are integrated into Amazon Web Services (AWS), providing the infrastructure for customer data management, order processing, and personalized recommendations.

Reputable CRM system provider today

Thus, it can be seen that the CRM system plays a very important role in business, marketing and customer relationship management. The analytical data the system provides will help you make more accurate decisions and strategies. So the question of interest now is: "Which is a reputable CRM system provider today?" Viindoo Technology Joint Stock Company is the place you can trust. 

With more than 10 years of researching business management solutions, Viindoo clearly understands the difficulties that businesses often encounter when implementing CRM systems. Therefore, Viindoo products are designed to focus on helping businesses solve these challenges, optimize management, improve user experience and enhance business performance.

Viindoo CRM is customer management software that supports businesses in managing relationships with customers well. The software helps businesses manage all information such as: personal characteristics, transaction history, payment information.

Some impressive features of Viindoo CRM include:

  • Manage throughout the sales process
  • Support updating and synthesizing customer information
  • Plan and process customer care
  • Manage the customer care process
  • Support analysis and reporting on sales performance
  • Easy integration with other modules

You can experience our CRM system completely free. If you are still hesitant, you can also schedule a consultation via hotline 02257309838 to receive support from Viindoo.

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Viindoo CRM - Accelerate your business growth and deliver exceptional service experiences. 

Try it for free with unlimited features.

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In general, CRM systems help businesses manage sales well, automate customer care and management processes, thereby increasing business efficiency. There have been many large companies that have successfully applied customer management systems, so why don't you try? Let's start learning and building the system today to increase the competitiveness of your business.

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What is a CRM system? 7 main functions of CRM customer relationship management system
Jun Nguyen July 18, 2024

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