FAQs about CRM

What are the main types of CRM software?

There are three primary types of CRM software. These are operational, analytical and collaborative. 

  • Operational: this type of CRM tool helps to streamline marketing, sales and services through automation. Mundane tasks are automated so that team members can focus on more urgent and high-value tasks. 
  • Analytical: this may consist of data warehousing, data mining and online analytical processing (OLAP) tools. In short, analytical CRM software helps businesses gain insights into their customers, sales and other data to make more informed and business-focused decisions. 

Collaborative: also known as “strategic” CRM, collaborative CRM software involves interaction and channel management. It looks at which clients have made what types of interactions with a business and which channels the client used to reach the organisation.

 

How can franchises benefit from CRM solutions?

CRM for franchises comes with multiple benefits. These include both internal and external advantages. 

On the internal side, franchisees will be able to:

  • Improve their lead and contacts management
  • Understand their clients better
  • Segment the customer base in better ways
  • Manage more effective marketing campaigns
  • Provide improved customer support
  • Boost client loyalty
  • Speed up and improve customer service
  • Strengthen collaboration and communication between teams
  • Foster greater levels of accountability
  • Generate better reporting and analytics
  • Observe the full customer life cycle
  • Get access to detailed analytics
  • Acquire automated sales reports and forecasting

On the external side of the coin, a CRM for franchises can help to:

  • Identify trends and insights about customers 
  • Automate menial tasks, saving time and resources
  • Gain greater efficiencies in data management
  • Improve the customer experience and satisfaction
  • Increase sales
  • Cross-sell and up-sell products and services
  • Identify profitable and unprofitable customers
  • Improve interactions with customers
  • Maintain a strong market reputation
  • Reduce costs of supporting customers
  • Increase total efficiency 
  • Reduce the total cost of sales
  • Improve business productivity and efficiency
 

What are the drawbacks of CRM technology?

Although implementing a CRM system in a business seems like the perfect solution, there are some challenges that may arise from doing so. On the surface, some of the disadvantages of CRM could include prohibitive costs and costly premium upgrades; customisation issues; the IT infrastructure required to support the CRM system; certain hardware and software requirements; and the need to train and upskill team members.

Apart from these challenges, others may also arise when a CRM system is not properly managed. Some of the consequences of this include the CRM becoming nothing more than a “glorified database” for storing customer data. If data sets are not connected, distributed and organised, this can lead to cumbersome processes for finding information and keeping track of it. Having a single dashboard or interface can help as it will have the potential to avoid duplicating customer data, which can also ultimately lead to longer wait times during calls, improper tech support, etc.

 

How do you know if your business needs a CRM?

Although CRM systems were previously the domain of multinational corporations, today, they’re useful for SMEs as well. Your business will require a CRM in the event that you:

  • Deal with multiple prospects and you struggle to keep track of them
  • If your prospects have multiple points of contact, meaning their data is scattered in numerous locations
  • Your business has a sales team but your sales cycles are long or you don’t have a quick overview of their progress
  • You run marketing campaigns and need to be more efficient and productive
  • If you find yourself losing track of data and wasting time searching for it
  • You don’t have cloud or remote access to your data, which can be inhibiting in terms of time wasted
  • Your business process are quite inflexible, causing you to have difficulties in scaling
  • Your customer or sales reports are not actionable and cumbersome and time-consuming to create

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