What Is a CRM Platform? A Comprehensive Guide to CRM Applications, Setup, and Usage

Technology is changing the entire world to such an extent that modern time is often identified as the age of technology. The business world has also gained a lot from this advent.
One of the effective tools that have changed daily customer care operations remains CRM solutions. If you know how to use CRM software, the benefits can be quite overwhelming. Here is a brief idea of what it is and how it can change the fate of your business.

In simple words, CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management solutions. To comprehend what is a CRM platform in detail, the first thing you need to know is that it is a data-driven, integrated software solution.
Using this software, businesses can handle their customers more efficiently and productively. This solution keeps the information about a company’s prospective customers and current customers in the store at the same time.
Therefore, employees managing the customer care department can access the data easily and conduct their daily operations like, customer interaction and follow-ups, more accurately. In more ways than one, CRM platforms can benefit a business, only if you know how to use CRM effectively.

Now that the question of how does CRM work bothers you, you should know that customer care assistance remains the key motto of these solutions. To begin with, these platforms accumulate and integrate every piece of information and communication (text messages, emails, quotes, calls, purchase history, calls, etc.).
With the help of this data, the software classifies potential and current customers into different categories. Since the data remains stored in one centralized place, employees managing customer handling gets easy access to any information they need.
Now, CRM automates the entire process and signals the employees how and when to communicate or interact with a customer to maximize sales potential. Besides, these solutions also help keep the workflow smooth, streamlined, efficient, and productive.

To understand ‘what is a CRM application’; you first need to understand its components. The multiple tasks CRM does and the various ways it benefits a business need the help of these components.
·      Workflow Automation: Tasks that are necessary but repetitive and time-consuming make the business process slow. CRM automates such tasks and makes the business process more streamlined and efficient.
·      Sales Automation: CRM establishes a productive interlinking between marketing and sales. These two laterals need a close association to benefit the business in the best possible way. CRM platforms integrate sale forecasting and marketing campaign responses, to make the plans work perfectly.
·      HR Management: CRM platforms help manage the entire workforce participating in a business process in the most productive way. As a result, the outputs change favorably and the business grows by leaps and bounds.
·      Lead Management: Routing the lead in the right direction is critical for every business to swell business volume. With CRM platforms, handling lead generation, tracking prospects and following up with them based on categories to which they belong becomes hassle-free and accurate.
·      Pipeline Management: The journey of every customer is different. CRM platforms help figure out the journey stage of each customer based on which the software categorizes each. This helps businesses reach out to the customers with the highest prospect at any time.
·      Marketing: CRM keeps a close watch on every customer’s activity. Therefore, understanding what a customer needs become easier and more explicit. As a result, the marketing team can devise better and more effective plans in the future.
·      Customer Service: When you know your customers better, it becomes easier to handle them and serve them. With CRM software, the customer service department works more productively and satisfactorily.
·      Business Reporting: Business reports include daily operation reports, customer support performance reports, marketing campaign response reports, etc. CRM generates separate reports for all relevant domains and makes decision-making hassle-free and low-risk for business owners and managers.
If you are looking for the answer to the question of what are CRM applications, these components can help you get an overview.

The benefits of using CRM platforms for your business remain multi-fold. Here is a list of advantages that you are likely to experience once you integrate the advanced CRM system with your website.

·      Centralized Database: One of the best features of CRM platforms remains the maintenance of a centralized database that anyone with access permission can access at any time.
This way all executives associated with the customer management team can get in touch with the required data without wasting time. Therefore, the business process becomes more efficient and faster. Integration of data from all departments remains the most interesting and beneficial thing about CRM software.
·      Customer Management: When it comes to the basics of CRM integration benefits, hassle-free and error-free customer management remains the foremost.
The software integrates every piece of information about all the customers of the business and keeps a categorized track of them. For internal communications as well as business-to-customer interactions, the availability of customer information data in one place remains an excellent solution.
·      Automated Data Entry: But, how does a CRM work and how it helps businesses in real-time? One of the ways it aids remains through automation. Gone are the days when your customer support team had to log every piece of information about every single customer manually.
This indeed used to be a long and hectic process susceptible to errors. However, CRM has made the entire data entry process, automated. This means thievery piece of customer information gets registered within a very short time and without any mistakes.
·      Follow-Up Alerts: Now that you know what is CRM application, it becomes easy to comprehend how it helps in customer handling. One of the many effective ways to keep in touch with customers remains timely follow-ups.
When done manually, executives often miss out on important customer or client follow-up calls or emails. It was the sheer volume of the list that used to baffle them. With CRM, following up with customers has become effortless.
CRM platforms keep the executives updated about every client or customer follow-up date through their unique alert feature. Therefore, the representatives do not miss out on any follow-up and the rate of conversion soars high.
·      Categorization of Customers: Every business dealing with customers directly has different types of customers interested in their products and services. For instance, if you sell garments, there will always be some customers leasing who would be challenging no matter the diversity of your collection.
On the other hand, some customers take only a few minutes to choose what they need even when the collection is quite limited. Some prefer buying during the discount seasons and some when new collections arrive.
When you categorize all your customers into different segments based on their purchasing history, managing them becomes easier and more effective. Approaching a customer interested in discounts during zero discount seasons would be a waste of time.
A categorized customer list helps you approach the right customer at the right time increasing your chances of registering sales. Customer categorization is one of the CRM basics and works in favor of business revenue.
·      Contact Data Organization: CRM platforms also help to organize the contact details of the customers. This is one of the excellent features of CRM solutions which ensure that you can find an old customer as effortlessly as a new one.
When your marketing team devised an email marketing plan or any other, you can take the help of this contact list to reach your customers easily.
·      Sale Performance Forecasting: CRM helps create a data-backed sale report which helps in generating a business forecast with a low risk of misappropriation. Business forecasting always involves a certain percentage of uncertainty factor in it.
With previous sales reports supporting the forecasting mechanism, the risks become lower than ever. This helps the business plan its year-on-year expansion and growth more strategically and confidently.
·      Smooth Team Communication: With features like centralized data for all sales, inquiries, and more, team communication becomes hassle-free. When multiple executives contact a customer, everyone should be aware of the updates of the last interaction.
CRM makes sure that no miscommunication takes place during such rep-customer interactions by keeping records of every conversation or communication. 
·      Scalable: CRM is a scalable solution that adjusts itself with the changing volume of a business. After installing CRM, your business volume is sure to rise. When the business grows, the intensity of customer interactions increases, the list of contacts becomes longer, and overall business activities also go up.
CRM, being a scalable platform, can handle this additional workload effortlessly. It simply adapts to the changing requirements without engendering any technical glitches or business downtime.
In short, after integrating CRM, the overall administrative efficiency of a business increases. This helps in growth, expansion, brand establishment, market penetration, and more. CRM platforms make sure that nothing untoward occurs related to customer management.
For any business, small or big, customers remain the lifeline. Therefore, CRM integration is beneficial and necessary to keep customer management impeccable.