What Is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software?

Customer relationship management software, or CRM for short, is a critical tool that helps organisations to manage interactions with customers and clients in service-related industries. Typically, customer relationship management software includes features for managing customers and clients such as sales process automation, contact management, and sales pipeline reporting. Customer relationship management can be used for both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) relationships.

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CRM Solutions Today

CRM solutions provide companies with the tools to win new business, increase client retention, and provide better customer service to existing clients. While most CRM solutions aim to achieve similar goals, there are differences in deployment models, usability, and tools for relationship management.

Deployment Models

There are two types of deployment models – on-premise and web-based crm (also commonly referred to as cloud-based) solutions. On-premise solutions require companies to purchase and host their solutions in-house. Oftentimes, companies must employ expensive IT teams in order to manage and troubleshoot on-premise software, and they’re forced to maintain software as it becomes outdated because the upgrade process is expensive and time-consuming. However, modern CRM technologies have adopted a web-based, or browser-based, deployment model. With these solutions, companies never have to download or install any software. Rather, the web-based CRM vendor hosts data remotely from a server. Web-based customer relationship management software can be accessed from any browser, providing companies the flexibility to choose the software that works best for their business and allowing CRM vendors to quickly and easily deploy system updates and new features.

Usability

Statistics show that nearly 70% of CRM implementations fail. This alarming rate can be largely attributed to customer relationship software’s lacking focus on usability. Many database-centric solutions require employees to input data manually or change workflows to conform to the one-size-fits-all settings of their CRM. A CRM provides no value to companies and their stakeholders if employees do not adopt it. Modern CRM vendors are prioritising usability by building mobile-first software systems with intuitive and configurable interfaces that automatically capture data to save employees countless error-prone hours of data entry.

Relationship Management

While the process of automating sales tasks has largely been addressed, many customer relationship management software vendors seem to have forgotten the relationship management part of the equation. Customer relationships are not a one and done sales-driven interaction. True relationship management considers the entire customer lifecycle, which can span multiple years, many different departments within an organisation, and numerous periodic interactions. When looking for customer relationship management software, it’s important to consider if the CRM truly satisfies relationship management requirements such as real-time insight on relationship strength, conversation activity over time, and even individual customer preferences (e.g. the best time to call).

The New, Modern CRM Software

Bullhorn CRM is a web-based and modern CRM built for professional services-based companies of all sizes. Bullhorn built its CRM to be a unique relationship management platform that’s intuitive, proactive, and mobile so that employees can work the way they want to – wherever, whenever. Built specifically to speed adoption, Bullhorn customer relationship management software eliminates manual data entry tasks by passively and automatically capturing all inbound and outbound email communication, transforming these siloed interactions into addressable insights.

Ready to win new business and deliver incredible customer experiences? Start a conversation with Bullhorn CRM today.