With ever-increasing customer expectations, delivering quality experience to your customers is imperative today. Certainly, choosing the right CRM can help you obtain such.
Now, the question is how to choose the right CRM platform for your business. So, yes, this draft is curated around.
If you are reading this blog, certainly, you are somewhere in a growing stage in your business and seeking to effectively manage your existing customers, attract new customers, increase your sales and marketing team’s efficiency level, and continuously drive maximized outcomes.
And this is not merely your sole concern. Businesses of all sizes are relying on CRM systems with the most demanded feature sets such as contact management, interaction tracking, lead scoring, workflow automation, sentiment analysis, and more.
These days most of the growing businesses are taking recourse to CRM software to streamline their customer communication, serve them what they anticipate, and effectively acquire customer acquisition by offering them real-time support through cases & helpdesk modules.
To support the above statement, Gartner reveals- CRM market adoption and growth wherein the CRM software market is expected to grow with double average growth annually by the year 2025.
Another statement by Gartner emphasizes customer service organizations that leverage AI-equipped customer engagement platforms will gain success in increasing their operational efficiency by 2025.
In addition, Gartner demonstrates through a graph how acquiring a new customer base is the top priority in the different industrial domains:
However, there are many other objectives that businesses need to achieve by leveraging CRM depicted in the image below by Gartner:
Now, let’s get back to flow wherein we are discussing choosing the right CRM platform for your business. So, it’s time to enlighten on considerable factors for your business while choosing the right CRM platform:
Factors to Consider While Choosing the Right CRM Platform for Your Business
Identify your business requirements
The very first step is to determine your unique business needs in terms of:
Consider your unique business goals and objectives and determine the features helping to align with these goals.
Which business divisions will be using your CRM? For instance, sales, marketing, and customer support. Total number of CRM user licenses that you need.
What exact pain areas are you facing in your current processes and what challenges do you want to overcome utilizing CRM?
Come up with your budget
Determining your budget is a crucial step as CRM software comes in various price ranges. All you need is to set your CRM budget to address your business’s financial capabilities. Thus, depending on your budget, you can choose and determine your CRM’s functional capabilities required at the initial level.
Determine your customization needs
To support your unique business processes, you need to encompass a unique set of features and functional navigation that can help you optimize your ongoing process flow. However, to support your growing business needs, you need to ask your vendor whether they will provide customization supporting your growing business needs.
Moreover, ask your provider whether their CRM comes with self-configuration options wherein you can add custom fields/lists, turn features on/off, and set up/personalize the dashboards as per individual's need.
Know your integration requirements
Using both the existing system and newly implemented CRM in an isolated manner may not help you achieve efficiency. Here, integration takes a vital place that helps synchronize your data between systems. This also eliminates switching between systems each time when in need.
For instance, if you are using your accounting software or e-commerce software, you need to ask your potential vendor whether these software can be integrated with their CRM or not. Also, ensure your futuristic integration needs.
Consider data security and privacy
If your business is the type wherein you need to perform field activities, or your sales team needs to use your CRM while being in the field, it is essential that the CRM you are looking for should be equipped with mobile device or cross-device compatibility.
However, for core field activities, you may also require a field service management solution. So, do not forget to ensure the integration opportunity between your CRM and FSM solutions for smoother and effective utilization.
End-end user training post deployment
Introducing a new system in your organization without end-user training can lead to a frustrating experience for your sales or marketing team. Thus, ask your CRM provider whether they will take care of end-user training to understand how the newly implemented system will work.
This can help your sales team to instantly start leveraging the newly established system instead of wasting precious time while struggling to learn itself.
Must-have features to be considered
Well, you certainly imbibe different processes that require different a set of features to effectively and smoothly run your business. However, there are some usual yet must-have features that you need to consider initially. So, let's have a quick overview of such essential features:
AI-lead & Opportunity Scoring
It's such a crucial feature that can surprise you with AI-based lead scores and opportunity scores. Leveraging such data, you can identify which leads are more potential leads so that your sales team can focus on those leads first that are more likely to be closed preventing the diversion toward your competitors.
Along with the above-exhibited functionality, the LionO360 system can also empower you with customer grading capability whereby you can know whether the customer is eligible to be considered for follow-up or not.
With a quick view, your sales team can be aware of the missing information or documents of potential customers so that they can efficiently work toward gathering the same.
LionO360 also enables you to know your customer sentiments without even opening the whole male or conversation. Such sentiment helps to understand whether the customer interaction is positive, negative, or neutral. Based on this, your sales team can put their efforts toward improving those customers’ experience.
Workflow Automation
If you analyze, you will find there are several similar tasks that your sales & marketing team needs to perform on a repetitive basis. Thus, with workflow automation, you can automate your day-to-day tasks which in turn saves time, minimizes resources, and increases efficiency.
While using LionO360 Cloud CRM, you can create and run workflows whether time-based or event-based depending on your specific requirements. You can also notify people in your organization whenever these workflows run.
For core understanding, let’s have a brief use case. Suppose being a sales manager or business development head, you want to get notified when a new lead is created, edited, or updated every time.
To get such email notifications, you can create an event-based workflow by which you can get notified whenever any lead activity is performed. Here, the email can also be written using an AI email generator using the LionO360 CRM system.
Reporting & analytics
Strengthening people in your organization with reports and analytics features can make an impact on overall work efficiency and productivity.
Moreover, what if you can get custom reports demonstrating your specific business flow and helping everyone in your organization to quickly make smarter decisions?
Yes, with the help of the "Saved Searches" feature of LionO360 CRM, you can acquire custom reports required by different departments in your organization.
So, make sure that the CRM system that you choose should comprise reporting & analytics features.
Cases & Helpdesk
If you want to retain your acquired customer base, it is essential to have a feature i.e. Cases & Helpdesk. This can enable your support and service team to listen to customers' queries and concerns and resolve their tickets in a timely manner.
If we talk about LionO360 CRM, it allows your customers to raise tickets either using the CRM system or leveraging the email-to-ticket functionality. These tickets can be assigned to support individuals to ensure accuracy and efficiency during the support process.
Before Finalizing, Ask for a Demo
So, you are aware of what essential features you must embrace while implementing a new CRM system. Now, the final step is to get the CRM platform demo. This will help you perceive whether the potential CRM will help you reinforce, streamline, and automate your business processes or not.
If you want to select the best CRM platform, many CRM market players offer a free CRM trial before you finally choose and invest. This can help you make the right decision for your business.
Choosing The Right CRM Platform? Choose LionO360 CRM!
LionOBytes offers the best CRM platform in the market which can be customized as per your specific business processes, business goals, or growing business needs. To know more, schedule a demo for our AI-based CRM.
This will help you understand how LionO360 CRM can help you simplify your ongoing processes and support your growing business needs. To know more information or to get a free trial of LionO360 CRM, connect with experts of LionOBytes.
Frequently Asked Questions
When does a business need CRM?
Well, it's good that your customer base is increasing continuously. To manage the increasing contact list, you need a CRM system. It can help you manage customer data and build long-lasting customer relationships.
With a long list of customers, it can also become difficult to respond to them and provide them with instant support. Thus, CRM is also essential to ensure smoother customer service.
With LionO360 CRM, you can manage customers' information, track their data, provide timely support, and stimulate the sales pipeline to close more deals.
How does CRM increase sales efficiency?
CRM system can help you streamline your sales pipeline. With real-time access to each activity and process automation, the sales team can close more deals. By tracking customers’ data or history, they can identify customers’ preferences and personalize their offerings accordingly.
LionO360 CRM comes with functional capabilities such as AI lead scoring and AI opportunity scoring. This helps your sales team to prioritize those leads and opportunities that are more likely to be converted.
Leveraging workflow automation, you can automate marketing activities such as notifying about if a new lead is created, edited, or updated. With the help of built-in generative AI, you can generate promotional emails. Eventually, it helps you increase your sales efficiency.
To learn more about how you can increase sales efficiency using LionO360 CRM, connect with experts at LionOBytes.
How does the CRM system help increase customer satisfaction?
With CRM, you can track your customers’ historical data and preferences. This helps you identify their needs so that you can provide them with a personalized experience. Moreover, with the help of CRM, you can effectively support your existing customers when they need it.
The LionO360 CRM system allows you to respond to your customers' queries or concerns instantly. You can efficiently generate, manage, and track customer tickets and provide them with timely support.
To know more, schedule your free CRM demo now. You can also start with the free LionO360 CRM trial.
Also Read:
Why a CRM Demo is Essential Before You Buy: Maximizing Your Investment
