How much do you know about CRM?

In order to choose the right CRM solution for your business, you have to determine what type of CRM system you need. Do you need a system that will support your sales and marketing departments (front-office) or one that will be used for IT, operations and human resources management (back-office)? Should it focus on data management, processes or operations? Although there are many different types of CRM applications, they can all be sorted in three basic categories: collaborative, operational and analytical CRM.

Collaborative CRM systems are used to collect information from various sources and departments, including sales, marketing and technical support, for the purpose of creating comprehensive customer profiles and improving results. These systems match the available content to sales, marketing and other operations and provide users with the customer data that are most relevant in each case. Furthermore, they reduce the cost of customer interactions by utilizing technology, such as interactive voice response, email and online chat. Finally, they enable the integration of call center functionality into a variety of interaction media.

Operational CRM systems are primarily oriented to front-office supported business operations. They are customer-centric, as they support operations directly related to customers, and they mostly focus on automating marketing, sales and services, campaign management, FAQs and community systems (reviews, discussion boards, etc.), thus enabling businesses to reduce their operational cost and target a specific audience through customized campaigns.

Analytical CRM systems provide useful insight by analyzing and interpreting customer data. Unlike the above two CRM categories, analytical CRM systems are not customer-oriented. They use data mining to discover and store valuable information from a number of sources, and then analyze this information in order to determine possible relations and/or trends. They can also offer customer, service, marketing or sales analytics, and they are the perfect choice if you’re looking to study customer behaviors and preferences in order to identify cross-selling and/or up-selling opportunities for your products and/or services. With an analytical CRM system, you can also evaluate customer relations and satisfaction, so that you can foresee any potential issues, and use the prediction models and scenarios in order to make accurate and prompt decisions.