These processes run behind the scenes and leads, and customers cannot see the capture and analysis of their data and interactions with the company.

Analytical CRM is an essential part of your front-end activities as it accumulates various data from customers across the entire lifecycle such as:

• Financial Data
• Sales Data
• Marketing Data
• Customer Data

This helps you to gain a deeper understanding of your customers and market trends as it helps you with sales forecasting, predicting trends, optimizing your stock inventory to ensure you are ready for any uptimes and downtimes, and more.

And all these result in better marketing campaigns outcomes, aligning sales and marketing activities, and increasing customer satisfaction.

Advantage of Analytical CRM system

• Increased customer satisfaction
• Improves outcomes of marketing activities and campaigns
• Increased sales
• Improved upsells and cross-sales
• Improve business readiness for upcoming trends
• Increase business resilience
• Improve decision making

Choose Analytical CRM System If:

An Analytical CRM system is an essential part of your business to become a data-driven company. Analytical CRM system helps companies to create insights in real-time so they can make smarter and faster decisions.

Analytical CRM systems like Dynamics 365 CRM applications are using advanced Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies to understand your data and create insights that can improve your business outcomes.

However, the drawback of an Analytical CRM system is that it can be more costly than Operational or Collaborative CRMs as they are more complicated.

Type #4: Strategic CRM Systems

And the last type of CRM system is the strategic CRM system.

A Strategic CRM system is focusing on a company’s set of activities and tasks that together form company strategy in order to acquire customers, improve customer lifetime value and improve business and customer strategy. Strategic CRM encompasses the strategy development process and the value creation process.

It helps to improve interactions between the company and customers and customize it based on a set of actions, deal value, and other important aspects.

It also allows you to recognize the differences between customers and their economic value to your company, the relationships, and expectations from your business.

For example, important information such as a long-term view of revenues from customers needs to be taken into account when dealing with customers and what’s the value of the customer.

It helps to track the commitment of the customer and act on that. Strategic CRM systems focus on enhancing the information about the customers in order to improve interactions, drive better business outcomes and maintain strong relationships.

Advantage of Strategic CRM system

• Deliver more personalized and valuable interactions with important customers.
• Increase the lifetime value of customers.
• Improve strategic approach with customers
• Improve decision making with advanced information
• Recognized economic value of customers

Choose Strategic CRM System If:

A Strategic CRM system helps you to scale your business processes and gives you more data about your customers. This ensures your company employees are following the best practices and delivering the best outcomes.

A Strategic CRM system is implemented by companies with larger sales, marketing, and/or customer service teams when business processes become harder to manage and harder to scale.

At one point as your company grows, your sales process and customers will need to be managed with efficiency. A Strategic CRM system is a more advanced system used by companies used with complex sales processes and they need to track as much information about customers in order to make the right decision.

CRM System for Different Departments

Often advanced and modern CRM systems provided by leaders in the industry such as Microsoft, Oracle and Salesforce offer modular CRM systems that are made to accommodate certain needs of your business, often they focus on certain departments.

Taking a modular approach to CRM in the cloud allows you to focus on your organization’s most pressing pain points, giving you critical insight into the areas of your business that are in most need of optimization—yielding the greatest return from your investments.

Modular CRM applications that work together seamlessly can unify financial and business operations across finance, manufacturing, retail, supply chain, warehouse, inventory, and transportation management, giving you the critical insight, you need to drive your business forward with the flexibility to grow and scale at the pace that’s right for your organization.

So here you have the four most common types of modular CRM systems:

CRM for Sales

One of the most common modular CRM systems is Sales CRM to improve sales processes and increase scalability. Since prospecting to closing deals your sales need to follow company processes to ensure they deliver a standardized approach that yields the best outcomes.

It also helps to automate all your manual tasks, so your salespeople can focus on selling and building strong relationships.

CRM for Sales also helps identify the best deals with the highest possibility to close in the pipeline and identify salespeople to keep them on top of the game. Also, it can provide other reminders to nurture and move leads closer to purchase decisions.

The main advantages of Sales CRM are:

• Simplify sales
• Centralize sales operations
• Improved customer data accuracy
• Identify bottlenecks in the sales process
• Shorten the sales cycle
• Increase sales outcomes
• Increase time on selling and decrease time on administrative tasks

CRM for Marketing

Another very common CRM module is marketing CRM.

Marketing CRM helps you to engage with customers one on one, at scale, to build meaningful relationships and grow your business and orchestrate personalized journeys across all touchpoints to strengthen relationships and earn loyalty.

It helps the marketing department to manage critical marketing activities across different channels to deliver consistent messaging, help potential customers to find information, active buyer enablement, and manage all marketing campaigns whether online or offline.

The main advantages of Marketing CRM are:

• Engage customers at scale in real-time.
• Improve marketing campaigns outcomes.
• Increase customer loyalty.
• Personalize customer experiences.
• Automate repetitive and manual tasks.
• Build customer trust.

CRM for Customer Service

Customer service is becoming one of the main factors when customers are making purchase decisions, as 64% of people find customer experience more important than price when making a purchase.

And it shows that companies do not only compete in product development and pricing but also how they take care of their customers after the purchase.

And if your company wants to better serve its customers, you need to have a dedicated tool for customer service.

CRM for customer service is another common CRM module that CRM vendors are offering to help you elevate your customer experiences.

By giving your customer service team features specifically designed to provide seamless and personalized customer service such as knowledge base, support chatbot, online live chat, email, phone, and social media support, you effectively accommodate your customers’ needs in on their preferred communication channel.

Because nothing is more frustrating for customers than getting in touch with a customer service representative using ways they are not comfortable with.

CRM for customer service helps your representative manage multiple channels at once, respond fast and efficiently and provide answers to customer questions. It also helps to educate your customer representatives or easily transfer the inquiry to the appropriate customer service agent.

The main advantages of Customer Service CRM are:

• Manage omnichannel communications
• Easily provide self-service options
• Personalize customer engagements
• Increase agents’ productivity
• Automate FAQ to using AI and chatbots

CRM for Field Service

CRM for field service helps organizations deliver onsite service to customer locations. The application combines workflow automation, scheduling algorithms, and mobility to set up mobile workers for success when they’re onsite with customers fixing issues.

The main advantage of Field Service CRM are:

• Improve first-time fix rate
• Complete more service calls per technician per week
• Manage follow-up work and take advantage of upselling and cross-sell opportunities
• Reduce travel time, mileage, and vehicle wear and tear
• Organize and track resolution of customer issues
• Communicate an accurate arrival time to customers
• Provide accurate account and equipment history to the field technician
• Keep customers updated with the status of their service call and when it’s resolved
• Schedule onsite visits when it’s convenient for the customer
• Avoid equipment downtime through preventative maintenance