CRM features for your business

If you’re a company that’s growing – or wants to grow – you need an effective way to deal with your customers and to do business with them.

When you have just 10 customers, it’s easy to keep track of them. It’s easy to manage sales, address complaints, make follow-up calls and more. But what happens when you get 100, 1000 or 10,000 customers? Will it still be easy to keep track of them?

We don’t think so.

When your company grows and expands – you need a proper system to manage your growing customer base. And the best software for this purpose is a CRM. With it, you can:

• Keep a digital record of all your prospects and your customers in rich detail. Get a comprehensive look as to who they are, which stage is your company’s relationship with them and how valuable they are to your business.
• Automate your sales and marketing process so each customer gets the same high quality experience dealing with your company. Assign tasks to your agents and monitor the progress of the activities going on in your business.
• Systematize (and upgrade) your customer support service by using the built-in email marketing and advanced ticketing system. Quickly process enquiries and complaints – and review every single interaction your customer had with your company.

And this is just the start. With a CRM, you can accomplish so much more.

To give you can idea just what a CRM software is capable of doing for you, in this article, we’d like to show you the top 10 best features of a CRM software. Each feature will help you improve your business in one way or the other.

Let’s get started.

At the beginning of this article, we said that CRM software helps you keep track of your customers. Well, it does much more. Not only can you store the contact information of your customers, you can also store the contact info of your leads and prospects.

Not only can you add the basic stuff like their name, age, email address, phone number etc., Some CRMs can also create your own custom fields and add information such as their income ($50k, $75k, $125k), their relationship with your company (first-time buyer, prospect, repeat customer) and any other thing you can think of.

And that’s still not all.

Once your contact list grows, you can segment them into different lists based on where they are located, what they do, how important they are – and any other metric you have defined.

Every contact that gets added to your CRM is there for a reason. Either they’re a prospect interested in a demo of your product, a repeat buyer looking to hear back from you, a first time customer waiting for their sales call – or someone else.

With a CRM, you don’t have to remember what do you have to do with all your contacts in your database. You can simply assign a case to it.

Cases are activities and events associated with a contact which are initiated to fulfill some goal or purpose.

Each case can be broken down into stages, which act as milestones necessary to get a case completed. Stages are especially useful because they allow you to lay down the exact steps a person has to follow when handling the case. This lets you automate the whole case-handling process, no matter if it’s related to sales, customer support or any other business activity.

In your business, each contact – and its accompanying case – needs be handled differently. For example, support agents are responsible for handling complaints while sales agents are responsible for attending follow up calls.

And when you have hundreds of cases, you need to make sure it’s assigned to the right person. Sometimes different sales processes need to be routed to different sales persons.

A CRM makes doing this an easy process.

Right at the moment when you create a case, you can choose whom you want to assign it to. And if your case has multiple subcases or tasks, you can choose which person will work on them as well.

But if you don’t want to choose a person for every case, and simply want the right person in the right department to handle it, you can assign a case to a whole user group as well. Your CRM will randomly select one person from that user group itself for the case.

Once you’ve assigned the right cases to the right people, you can easily view their progress. You can see how far a case has progressed, what kind of emails were exchanged in dealing with the case and which case was completed successfully (or wasn’t).

Your CRM software comes with in-built email capabilities. The importance of this cannot be understated. This means that not only does a CRM help you manage contacts and assign cases, it also lets you deal with the cases right within the CRM software.

And because of this feature, you won’t have to subscribe to an addition email service, and more importantly, can manage all your communication with your contacts right within the CRM software.

You can view the email communication your agents had with your customers for a case. Also, your agents themselves can view the past conversations their assigned customer had with your company previously.

This makes it easy and efficient to perform customer support and sales activity- and brings clarity as to how the cases are being handled.

Similar cases have similar steps. A product demo will be the same for everyone, so will a welcome email for a first time customer. Recognizing this fact, Solastis CRM software lets you create a ‘task template’ for a specific type of case or subcase.

You can then integrate a task template everytime a similar case is created so you don’t have to write down tasks for cases repeatedly.

Moreover, you can add questions under tasks which the people assigned have to answer. Plus, you can flag cases for review anytime you want as well.

This automation will free you from overseeing cases and allow you to focus on doing other important things for your business.

But whenever you want, you can track what stage a case is in and measure the performance of your employees by looking at how much time it took them to complete a case.

Reports and dashboard is your way of seeing what’s truly going on in your business. That’s because it virtually lets you extract any data you want for reporting. Dashboards can provide visual display of activities in your organization.

For example, dashboards lets you see which cases were completed last week, how many sales you made the previous month, which follow up calls failed to convert the lead into a customer and much much more.

A picture speaks a thousand words. This is true even in the world of business, where graphs and charts tell the story better than numbers alone ever could.

The point is that your CRM can give you detailed information about the results of your cases. It can show you what your revenue looks like, how many sales you made successfully, how many leads you got in the previous month and other important data.

This can prove to be extremely useful as you can use these reports and analytics to find weak spots, areas for improvements and opportunities to increase your sales.

If you’ve paid attention to the features, you’ll notice many of these focus heavily on collecting data for your business – and as such, this data is sensitive information that should be kept out of the hands of unwanted people.

Not to worry.

In our CRM, you control every single aspect of your data. You can give access (or block) anyone within your company from accessing information such as your list of contacts, cases and messages.

And to level it up, you can whitelist specific IPs. What this means is that the people who have access to your CRM can only access it through specific computers i.e. their office PCs.

Last but not least, suppose you were using a different, less effective system to manage your contacts. Or that your current CRM doesn’t just offer the features you want from it. In that case, most modern CRMs let you easily migrate data from other CRMs, CSV files and excel spreadsheets.

If you look at the features above, and truly understand the benefits each feature can bring you, it’s hard to say no to a CRM.

After all, isn’t this what most companies dream of?

An all-in-one software that stores your contacts, allows you to manage your employees, protects your data and more importantly, helps you skyrocket your sales and revenue?

If you’re a growing company that wants the above, then yes, you should definitely invest in a CRM!