Why your business needs CRM: 5 challenges to solve with CRM system integration

Do you know that CRM software takes a major size of the global software market? At the moment, it has a value of $120 billion! Helping improve customer service, optimize various processes, and boost sales, CRM system integration is the issue of high concern for those companies that still don’t use it. By the way, 91% of organizations with 11+ employees use CRM software, says a research report by BuyerZone.

In this article, we’ll go through the main advantages of a CRM system for your business. You will also learn how it can solve your specific challenges. Let’s get started!

Table of contents

Insights into CRM Statistics

1. ROI on a properly implemented CRM system can vary between $2.50 to $5.60 for every dollar spent (by Inc, 2019).
2. The CRM software market value is predicted to reach $82 billion by 2025 and grow at 12% annually.
3. According to statistics provided by Salesforce, the use of a CRM software system can help increase sales by up to 29%, sales productivity by up to 34%, and accuracy of sales forecasting—by 42%.
4. 13% of organizations said that investing in CRM software solutions is one of the main sales priorities (HubSpot State of Inbound, 2018).
5. According to the Startup Sales Stack Report 2017, a CRM system is one of the most crucial aspects of sales following lead generation and lead engagement.
6. In accordance with the Sales Operations Optimization Study 2018 by CSO Insights, 48% of sales teams use CRM software to enhance sales operations.
7. The HubSpot State of Inbound report for 2018 found out that the number 1 challenge to CRM system integration is manual data entry.

Top 10 advantages of using a CRM system for business

CRM system integration can offer businesses plenty of advantages, from sales automation to improved customer experience. When developed and used properly, a CRM solution can help your company:

1. Organize and manage customer interactions across all the company’s departments, from the first customer request to the end of service.
2. Collect and keep all the information in one safe place and make it easy to access it to ensure superior support of the existing and potential clients.
3. Make customer segmentation by different parameters like age, demographics, the standard of wages, and identify groups of both highest and lowest potential.
4. Provide personalized customer experience and increase satisfaction due to improved targeting.
5. Increase sales and referrals from current customers due to improved customer loyalty and proactive request management.
6. Monitor the work of employees (e.g., sales and marketing managers) and ensure a high quality of customer service.
7. Keep track of all sales and marketing activities within your company.
8. Automate the work of sales and marketing departments.
9. Improve marketing campaigns due to enabling real-time analytics across the entire lead generation process as well as tracking marketing spending and ROI.
10. Systematically collect and measure customer feedback and evolve services/products and create sales/marketing strategies accordingly.

When various operations are tracked and automated, personalized experience is provided, and data analytics is enabled, you have both customer satisfaction and conversion rate increased. The integration of a CRM software system will allow you to not only reduce costs but also minimize manual work and generate more leads.

What companies will benefit from CRM system integration

As you can see, CRM software is mainly used for sales, marketing, data and activity management, and request processing. So, CRM applications can cover the needs of any organization that deals with customers including:

1. Banking and financial organizations
2. Travel agencies
3. Retail companies
4. Insurance companies
5. Trading companies
6. Educational institutions
7. eLearning schools
8. Pharmacies
9. Cleaning companies
10. Healthcare organizations
11. Digital marketing agencies
12. Communication providers
13. And a lot more

5 Main challenges to solve with the use of a CRM system

If you still don’t have a CRM software system integrated into your business processes, here is a list of challenges that it can help solve. You should take a look even if you’ve already adopted a CRM solution as you may need to extend it in the future.

1. Customer analysis and segmentation

Knowing your customers and their needs is a starting place of getting more leads, increasing a conversion rate, and improving customer satisfaction. A CRM software system will allow you to keep customer data in one place, categorize it, manage it by changing task/user status, and segment your audience.

This way, you will get the ability to easier identify their needs and preferences, track purchasing and call histories, improve targeting, find out rejection reasons, and more. You will also be able to divide your customers into groups and define the life-time value of each group.

Therefore, a CRM system can provide your employees with instant access to customer information with its automatic updates. Besides, with CRM they can create detailed customer profiles and thus find the best approach to each person.

When your audience or audiences are defined and there is an understanding of their needs, you can make them personalized offers. This will enable you to either boost sales or increase customer loyalty.

2. Data storage and organization

Companies often have problems with data kept in different places and data access that can include both the time-consuming data search process and lack of data access permissions.

CRM software is a great solution for storing various information in one place and providing simple and quick data access. Thanks to having different cards and task or user statuses, a CRM system enables to easily organize and visualize your data.

However, what data are we talking about? This can be any types of information as everything depends on your processes and business specifics. Generally, here we mean such data as a user name, contacts, date of the first reference, dates of purchases, their name and cost, rejection reason, job position, level of wages, credit history, contract reference number, etc.

Having all the necessary information at hand, your managers will get the ability to pay more time and attention to more important tasks. As a consequence, their productivity will significantly increase.

3. Reduced manual processes

Manual data input, keeping records in Google spreadsheets or Microsoft Office, long data search, lack of instant notifications and manual checking of task statuses… Sounds familiar? If so, you should think about CRM system integration.

The use of a CRM solution will enable your employees to minimize such manual processes. Instead, they will get the ability to focus on other important tasks. Meanwhile, the level of control over data and activities will be increased and the level of customer service—improved thanks to automatic notifications and work automation.

4. Lead tracking and management

Obviously, sales are lower when there is a lack of an efficient lead generation system. A CRM software solution is irreplaceable for lead tracking and management.

By using it, you will receive a 360-degree view of each customer, from the moment of the first application to the end of service. You can also use a lead scoring and tracking system to estimate the potential of each lead as well as set up notifications on when to call or email. This will let you generate more leads and increase revenue.

5. Activity tracking and management

How to make sure that your employees work well and your customer service is quality? How to monitor processes within the departments? Where to view the history of customer interactions? The integration of a CRM system is the answer to all of these questions.

The plus is that you will get the ability to monitor the activities of your specialists, view different schedules, track tasks and their completion, as well as trace communications with customers. Thanks to the monitoring system, your company will maintain high quality much easier and will have more satisfied clients.

Our experience in building a custom CRM

The creation of a comprehensive CRM solution for a school of programming was one of our most interesting and complex projects. The customer needed to receive a centralized system for financial accounting, lead tracking, and payment monitoring. The goal was to automate internal business processes, integrate user analytics, and reduce manual operations.

Our team developed an all-in-one CRM solution that enabled the customer to increase sales and Romi, improve financial management, analyze user behaviour, and much more. Find out how we implemented this cool CRM project in its case study.