Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions have a lot of benefits for the growth of the business. Online CRM software with the right features helps you to understand customers more on their needs, customer experience, and services.
Apart from that cloud CRM software also helps you to boost sales, and allows you to analyze the current demand of your product or service in the market, analyze the real-time performance with reports generated, enable you to determine the path to improve the sales, and lead management to acquire more leads and retain existing leads.
CRM also helps to nurture leads and earn customer loyalty with better customer service. It is crucial to understand the important features of cloud CRM software and how it will benefit the business to grow with challenges faced in their business journey.
Let’s look into the important features of cloud CRM software that you have to consider while buying a CRM Software or while upgrading it.
1. Real-Time Data
Cloud CRM stores the data in the cloud by pulling real-time data from devices, applications, and even appliances. This real-time data helps you to make informed decisions on the business process. The easy accessibility of CRM allows you to get real-time data instantly anywhere around the clock through various devices. This helps to update the business process instantly even when employees are in the field.
2. Automation
Automation in every field enables you to make your work easier. This is the essential feature of CRM for the current trend to compete with the competitors. It is necessary to act smart to win your business. Automation enables you to work smart and reduce your manual work at large. This helps you to increase sales productivity and spend more time on improving your sales strategies.
Online CRM software with this automation feature will assign the right leads to the right sales representative with preferred location, language, needs of customers, and more.
This automation in CRM software also helps to set up alerts, follow up the leads, or for pending payments. It enables sales representatives to have a clear view of the sales process to enhance sales performance.
Online CRM software or cloud-based CRM automatically tracks and records the communication with leads in the centralized database this helps salespeople to understand the lead stages.
Further cloud-based CRM streamlines the sales process by managing the sales process, order processing, order tracking, inventory management, customer service management, complaint management, and more.
Essential features of Sales Force Automation CRM Software
- Streamline salesforce
- Sales productivity
- Sales pipeline forecast
- Target vs. Achievement analysis
- Manage contacts
- Real-time information
3. Customization
Different businesses have different needs, so it is best to choose the best CRM that suits your business. Customization is an important feature of CRM that helps to choose the essential features required for your business in your basic package. Some CRM also allows you to create custom reports. CRM also enables you to customize with plugins, extensions, and add-ons to expand your software capabilities of CRM.
Some CRM also providers offer more advanced options of APIs which allows you to tailor the software features to your business needs. This also allows you to integrate the software with the existing business applications. This enables you to streamline your business process to the great extent.
4. Third-party Integration
It is a crucial feature of CRM software that helps to integrate your third-party software business applications with the CRM. Cloud-based CRM is easy to integrate with other applications than premise CRM.
It also allows you to connect your CRM with social media software and take your business on social media. This also helps you understand your customer’s views on your products and services.
CRM applications can be integrated with Outlook, Gmail, Mailchimp, or Other email applications that can easily build email lists and launch email marketing campaigns through CRM and you do not have to switch between different applications. With integration It allows you to synchronize sales and order information, this reduces the manual data entry at large.
5. Customer Service
Best customer service is most important for the growth of the business. Best CRM software allows you to provide excellent customer service. Best customer service provides the best customer experience and earns customers’ loyalty. CRM application stores the history of interactions with the customer in the cloud. This helps to provide the right service or answer the queries of the customers when they are in need without delay. This enables the sales reps and customer support to perform best and retain the customers for the long run.
Read more: Sales and Service go hand in hand
6. Tracking Employee Performance
It is a great feature of the best CRM software to track the performance of your sales reps and their daily activity. This helps the management to take the right steps to enhance the performance of the employee. This feature tracks the employee tasks, hours, meetings, goals, sales numbers, and more.
This allows the managers to identify the potential employees and create incentives or reward them at the right time. This also helps them to track employees who are struggling and helps them to improve their performance and enhance the overall productivity of their business.
7. Lead Management
Lead management is the foremost thing to consider to grow your business. CRM with a lead management feature helps you to identify the potential leads and prioritize them. Lead management helps you determine the lead stages and nurture them effectively to convert them into customers.
It provides detailed information on the lead down the sales funnel. This provides the complete details of the lead process and helps you understand where the process requires improvement to increase sales productivity.
Read more : Lead Stages – a Deep Dive Into What It Is and Why It’s Important
8. Sales Forecasting
Sales forecasting is another crucial feature of CRM software to be considered. A best CRM predicts the future of sales for your business based on the data stored. Sales forecasting enables you to plan for your future business accordingly. Sales forecasting shows you the right path for the market changes to mitigate your business risks.
This helps understand how the requirement for your product or services changes with the customer over time. This helps you in the future development of products or services for the need of the customers.
9. CRM Analytics
CRM analytics provides data with insights into your business process. This helps you to make the right decisions at the right time to enhance your business. With the CRM tool, you can prepare customer segments that are easy and simple to understand. This helps to get better insights into customer flow into your business. CRM analytics also allows you to determine ROI (Return On Investment).
10. Reports
The best CRM tool provides detailed reports on the sales process and marketing efforts. It is the standard feature of CRM applications. This report helps you to analyze the performance of the sales and determine ways of improvement. Essential reports that help you analyze the sales performance and provide better insights for the improvement are as follows,
- Sales Pipeline report
- Product-wise sales report
- Revenue
- Leads status
- Sales forecasts
- Sales activities
- Sales funnel
- Alert on pending payments against schedule time and many more.
11. Tracking through Sales Funnel
Keeping an eye by monitoring the growth of sales opportunities is one of the main features of a CRM system that ensures the progress of the number of leads and upcoming customers. Taking a look for the most part, a CRM software offers the ability to outlook the pipeline to view at what stages of the sales process the lead is currently. In such a way your sales team members can have a clear idea of where such leads are and connect with the person at the right stage of the sales pipeline. Either one can opt for the built-in options that are available in your readymade CRMs, or you can create a distinctive customized sales pipeline to match your unique requirements.
12. Updated Dashboard
A facility of updated dashboards supports marketing and sales team members view certain data on a daily operation. A great idea is to opt for the dashboards that display the data in a visually appealing and simple format. Also, from the dashboards one can view how many further deals your team has in their sales funnel and at which stages, and what pending tasks they require to complete in time.
13. Manage Document
Improving efficiency by this feature that allows you to create, access, edit, and share files with customers directly from the CRM software system. With the help of the document management feature that supports you to organize the operation as people you require will have access to certain information. One can upgrade the security by setting a document access. Along with that one can access the history of your file, add and edit if any, which makes document management one of the pivotal features of a CRM software system.
Conclusion
CRM systems have a myriad of features that helps you streamline your business process and do the sales activity effectively. Some of the standard CRM features that you have to look into while buying a CRM system are discussed here. CRM is cost-effective over the period of time while considering the numerous benefits for the growth of the business with a better customer experience.
