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Types of CRM
Types of CRM- Building and maintaining great customer relationships is at the core of any good business model. But staying on top of who your customers are and what their relationship with your business is at any given moment is difficult. And that’s true across the board—whether you’re a small business with a hundred customers or a large one with hundreds of thousands.
The best way to address the challenge is with the right tool, in this case a good CRM. But for anyone as yet unfamiliar with the CRM market, there’s a lot to learn. To start, there are three main types of CRMs: collaborative, operational, and analytical. To help you get your bearings, we’ll cover what a CRM is to begin with, how the three types of CRMs differ, and how to select the right product for your company.
What is CRM?
CRM stands for customer relationship management. While the term describes a larger strategy for working with customers, in practice the acronym CRM is most often used to describe the category of products that enables effective customer relationship management.
The most important thing about any CRM is right there in the first word—it’s about customers. A CRM should help you understand your customers better, and use that information to deliver the best possible customer experience (CX).
That’s a goal that’s gotten harder in recent years. Consumers now move between different channels (such as messaging, email, social media, and phone) to communicate with brands. With more ways to research products and make purchases, the buyer’s journey has grown in complexity. And for businesses selling lots of products to multiple audiences, the difficulties of managing it all are even more notable. The CRM category of products grew out of a need to address those challenges.
Why use a CRM?
At a high level, the reason to use a CRM is to improve the customer experience. That’s the simple answer. But CRMs do that by helping in a number of specific ways.
