How to improve your customer relationship management through colaborative crm?
Customer relationship management is a crucial activity for every company. Therefore, it is crucial to manage customer relationship management processes in the best possible way.
Are you aware that there are four 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 Collaborative CRM?
Definition
CRM is a very broad concept, which concerns 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 aim of maintaining, acquiring and increasing their value.
More specifically, collaborative CRM aims to improve internal communication within the company. All stakeholders must be able to immediately access and share all the information they hold about customers.
☝ The product-oriented approach is now considered outdated by most business and strategy experts.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 there are with the other 3 existing types.
Strategic CRM promotes a business strategy aimed at retaining and acquiring highly profitable customers. To do this, a fully customer-centred corporate culture must be pursued.
Analytical CRM acts on data generated by operational CRM. Its objective is to analyse and transform this information so as to have an increasingly sophisticated knowledge of customers.
Operational CRM deals with processes aimed at automating, standardising and improving direct company-customer contacts.
It essentially applies 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 about 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 for the success of its business. Collaborative CRM must be able to work closely with social platforms: analysing customer profiles, collecting documents, comments and reviews. Collaborative CRM systems will be able to move to more intimate and personalised analysis of their customers and their next targets.
Social platforms have broadened the spectrum of information that can be gathered about customers. Today, one can capture data on people's preferences and ratings, learn about their tastes and use this data to create more personalised marketing campaigns.
The decision to set up a media channel in combination with the collaborative CRM we mentioned earlier allows for a global view of a customer and potential customers by adding 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 an email.
How to choose the right software?
A good collaborative CRM software must be able to unite all internal communication tools within the company and connect them with external ones. The ultimate goal is to achieve greater market segmentation in order to be able to make a true customer identikit. In this way, a truly customised experience can be offered to each individual customer.
In this case, the technological transformation and the use of new communication systems must be taken into account when choosing the right software. Indeed, 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 carried out by each customer;
- realise sales statistics.
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 made it possible to supplant traditional on premise software, which required initial installation, complex manual maintenance, and had generally higher costs.
With SaaS, on the other hand, it is possible to access software simply via a web browser (and with a good Internet connection). This revolution has considerably democratised access to corporate CRM: by paying a simple monthly fee, small and medium-sized enterprises can now equip themselves with high-tech software tools.
Collaborative CRM software
Among the best-known and most widely used SaaS CRMs is Microsoft Dynamics, a solution that takes interactive functionality to the highest level in the enterprise-customer relationship. Although it is best known for its CRM functionality, 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.
And you, were you aware of the differences between the various types of CRM? Are you familiar with these processes? What are your impressions on the subject? If you wish, you can exchange with us by commenting below.
Article translated from Italian