What Are Customer Relationship Management Tools?
Customer Relationship Management tools or CRM tools are a combination of systems, plans and technologies that businesses use for collecting and managing the data and interactions that their business has with their clients, potential clients, purveyors or other businesses identifying and following up on prospective customers.
Customer Relationship Management is really important to improve customer service relationships and support customer retention and accelerating sales growth.
Why Are Customer Relationship Management Tools Important?
Customer Relationship Management tools enable a business to develop relationships with clients, co-workers, associates and vendors. Shaping good relationships and keeping track of prospects and customers is crucial for customer procurement and preservation, which is at the heart of a Customer Relationship Management tools function.
With a Customer Relationship Management tool, you can see everything in one place, a dashboard that tells you a client’s history with your business, the status of their orders, any unfinished customer service issues, and more.
What Is The Best Tool For You?
This is where things get tricky, the best tool depends on your requirement and how you plan to use it. Seeking professional help is recommended. Register on our free product for a completely customized set of tool recommendations and a no-nonsense implementation advice.
Here’s a quick comparison of some of the best Customer Relationship Management tools in the market right now.
HubSpot CRM
HubSpot CRM is a Customer Relationship Management tool that is built to be a program that allows the sales unit to get started quickly without making a significant change in their current workflow. It is an ideal solution for businesses that are starting to acknowledge the value of Customer Relationship Management tools and want to try it out or for enterprises that are not using their existing Customer Relationship Management systems to their max potential.
Pricing
HubSpot CRM is 100% free tool. Forever.
Latest Features:
A More Streamlined CRM Record
Information on your activity timeline is now condensed and collapsable, so you can see more valuable data at once. Smaller highlight cards, collapsing carrots, and new slimmer association cards all mean less scrolling and more time enjoying the good stuff.
CRM Card Customization
Define and decide what properties appear on board and association cards. Your chosen fields will serve as a default, consistently displaying the properties that matter most to you.
Send 1:1 Emails from Custom Object Record Pages
Send one-on-one emails to contacts directly from custom object record pages. When assisting prospects or customers, you may need access to information stored on a custom object record. You can now email from within a custom object, so that you have all the context you need while composing your message.
Here are some pros and cons to guide you
Pros:
The HubSpot Customer Relationship Management tool tracks client interactions automatically and provides valuable insights.
HubSpot Customer Relationship Management tool also is a free tool.
No Customization limits - HubSpot allows you to customize everything to your brand and your specific sales process.
Tracks your interactions with prospects. Whether you make touchpoints via email, social media or phone call, the CRM saves that information in its database.
While you can use the HubSpot CRM alone, you can also easily connect it to the Marketing, Sales and Service Hubs.
Cons:
The HubSpot Customer Relationship Management tool is relatively new.
Organizations with huge sales department might find that HubSpot CRM isn’t advanced enough.
To use the Email Sequences tool, you must be subscribed to Google Suite or Office 365.
Companies with highly complex sales processes might not be able to adapt the CRM to their needs.
HubSpot CRM reporting tools don't offer as much depth as they could, but for a free platform, they provide more than enough value to be worthwhile.
Salesforce CRM
Salesforce is a customizable Customer Relationship Management tool that develops as you do. Produces real-time client activity and data, furthermore provides profound knowledge with dashboards and reports. Connect to multiple business apps to extend your Customer Relationship Management to every field. Or choose Salesforce Essentials for small companies to manage CRM and grow quicker. It’s easy to use and grows with your work. Use your customer's insights to serve them better.
Pricing
Sales Essentials Edition- $25 /user/month
Professional Edition- $75 /user/month*
Enterprise Edition-$150 /user/month*
Unlimited Edition-- $300 /user/month*
Latest Features:
Experience Builder Enhancements
Users can now seamlessly personalize record detail pages using the values of fields on the record. Additionally, users can organize pages and web URLs in alignment with their content folders. Customers may now easily leverage knowledge base articles in CRM-Based Collections with no customization needed.
Grants Management
A flexible, community-driven grantmaking solution that is built off of the world’s #1 CRM and evolves with you as your funding of programs grows.
Inventory Management for Mobile
Empower sales reps with new visits and inventory management from a mobile-first experience. Create and manage new sales visits on the go and see product and inventory data for upcoming visits. Close product gaps faster by proactively requesting transfers and replenishment orders from the Intelligent Sales app for Medical Devices.
Here are some pros and cons to guide you
Pros:
Customisation-Salesforce CRM has a wide range of report analysis widgets
Cloud-Based model- Carry your company as you go, allows remote access of your data.
Advertising Studio is an inbuilt tool in Salesforce CRM, Digital advertising option on platforms like Facebook, Google, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube.
Customization. Fields can be customized to help an organization create a CRM that is tailored to their particular industry and company.
Cons:
This is an expensive tool.
Complex reporting — it is a little difficult to generate reports.
It's a bit complicated and no description of features and integration often lacks with other platforms.
ZOHO CRM
Zoho CRM empowers small to large-sized organizations with a complete customer relationship lifecycle management solution for managing organization-wide Sales, Marketing, Customer Support & Service and Inventory Management in a single business system.
Pricing
Free Edition (CRM for entrepreneurs) - Forever free upto 3 Users.
Standard Edition (Sales tracking for Small Businesses) - $12/user/month (billed annually).
Professional Edition (Complete CRM for any SME) - $20/user/month (billed annually).
Enterprise Edition (CRM for multi-level organizations) - $35/user/month (billed annually).
Latest Features:
Assign record owner through Workflow
A record can be ascribed to an owner via workflow rule when the defined condition is satisfied. Records can be assigned to users, roles, users who create or modify records, or to those mentioned in the Assignment rule criteria.
Updates in the Latest Email Status filter options
The Latest Email Status advanced filter will display a new option called "Responded", where records of all recipients who replied to the email will be captured. Also, "Opened and Not replied" is now renamed to "Opened and Not responded".
Redefine record detail page with Canvas Detail View
Recreate the CRM record detail page with no-code, easy-to-use design studio that compliments your business, industry, culture, and methods.
Here are some pros and cons to guide you
Pros:
The Zoho Customer Relationship Management tool is very instinctive and easy to use.
Zoho Customer Relationship Management tool features Third-party integration for headliners like Facebook and Google etc, are amazingly simple to add and configure.
Zoho Customer Relationship Management tool has a dedicated Mobile application to allow you to track your leads on the go.
An important point is how easy it is to use Zoho CRM and its tools in parallel, once they are synchronized together it enhances the way of working, plus the customer service offers excellent documentation and is a vital guide to make the best use of each of the tools.
Cons:
Zoho CRM’s Free plan offers limited features, which only small businesses can make do with.
Zoho CRM does not support importing of contacts from social media sites.
Zoho CRM is only suitable for small business and cant handle complex business tasks.
The biggest problem is having so many functions that may play against you, as it makes the interface too dense and I feel that by not being focused on making the project as functional as possible, I have found tools that still have bugs to improve.
Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a customer relationship management tool that is adored by sales crews of all sizes. Pipedrive was developed by the sales team and hardcore developers, Pipedrive organizes business’ leads in a way that provides a unique overview of your sales and allows you to concentrate on the deals that you want to prioritize. With 90,000+ paying customers spanning across 155 countries.
Pricing
SILVER US$ 12.50 Per user per month, billed annually
GOLD US$ 24.20 Per user per month, billed annually
PLATINUM US$ 49.17 Per user per month, billed annually
Latest Features:
Workflow automation update
You can now create a workflow with sequences of automated actions based on a single trigger and add custom due dates to activities.
Updated integrations with Google Meet, QuickBooks and Xero
users could already set up and schedule video calls from inside Pipedrive on Zoom and Microsoft Teams, but now they can do the same on Google Meet. If you’ve set up the integration, you should be able to select Google Meet from a dropdown in our Scheduler feature.
You can now check your source data right from the dashboard view
There’s no need to go to the detail view if you want to check your source data while you’re viewing a dashboard.
Here are some pros and cons to guide you
Pros:
Pipedrive Customer Relationship Management tool is very instinctive and visually pleasing to look at.
Pipedrive Customer Relationship Management tool is very intuitive and has no learning curve attached to it.
Tracking and reporting features are really helpful.
A great automation system that allows for tasks and emails to be sent when a stage changes.
Cons:
Limited 3rd party integrations.
A sales-Team oriented tool.
No custom reports.
When many deals are in a pipeline, it is often visually overwhelming to pull out the most important deals.
Freshdesk
Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer relationship management tool which simplifies customer conversations across multiple platforms like chat, phone, social media and email. With instinctive tools that focus on efficiency and teamwork, it makes it easy for crews of all sizes to ensure a great support experience for customers.
Pricing
Sprout Free for UNLIMITED agents
Blossom $19 / agent / month billed annually $25 /agent month-to-month
Garden $35 / agent / month billed annually $44 /agent month-to-month
Estate $49 / agent / month billed annually $59 /agent month-to-month
Forest $89 / agent / month billed annually $99 /agent month-to-month
Latest Features:
Out of office scheduler
The out of office scheduler allows agents to schedule the days during which they aren't available. You can ensure tickets are not assigned to agents on leave and customer responses are re-routed to available agents.
Agent Shifts
Handle agent shifts easily and delight customers no matter when they contact you
Knowledge base analytics
Monitor your knowledge base performance and uncover key insights to optimize your content creation process
Here are some pros and cons to guide you
Pros:
Freshdesk’s clean, simple and minimalistic design, makes it easy to use for the user.
Provides customer support, through multiple channels, such as messages, email and telephone.
Tracking and reporting features are really helpful- helps track issues until resolution.
Freshdesk has a very high level of interoperability with customer relationship management platforms, so that through its API it is possible to incorporate sales functions or work with customers, so that the management is a little apart from technical assistance without problems.
Cons:
No option to customize the dashboard
The mobile app interface is not intuitive and is very slow.
Very little customization can be done for automated notifications.
Freshdesk is maintained with a role-based work system that offers different levels of accessibility to certain employees, but this does not show enough stability, because those employees constantly have difficulties accessing information or authenticating themselves on the platform.
Insightly
Insightly is an insightful, customer relationship management tool with inbuilt integrations with headliners like Office 365, Gmail, MailChimp, etc. With about 1.5 million users from around the world from a variety of sectors, small to medium businesses use Insightly to manage opportunities, link customer relationships, deliver projects, build quotes, and more.
Pricing
Plus $29 / user, per month (billed annually)
Professional $49 / user, per month (billed annually)
Enterprise $99 / user, per month (billed annually)
Latest Features:
Dynamic customization features that allow users to better engage customers in the context of their individual roles.
It enables customized data capture, data display and data validation based on how users, teams and organizations handle customer and business information.
New user experience improves speed, familiarity, simplicity
Small business customers will benefit from three important updates: a modified interface based on other popular applications to encourage intuitive, immediate productivity; a cleaner, simpler design that prioritizes the most‐used features and a 65 percent increase in speed relative to the previous design.
Here are some pros and cons to guide you
Pros:
Insightly is a very powerful tool as it includes both customer relationship management and project management into the same application.
Direct integration with Google apps, to ease your workload.
Offers a free version.
I can automatically subscribe my leads to the email list through the web forms provided by Insightly.
Cons:
The dashboard is visually not very pleasing to look at.
A rather pricey solution.
No contact synchronization for Office 365.
Although its price may seem a bit expensive, it is pretty affordable compared to other programs and much more for what it offers.
Scoro
Scoro is a customer relationship management tool that is a one-stop solution for businesses and allows them to handle projects and manage their business which allows them to execute their tasks from one place. In addition to which Scoro also provides all the tools needed to manage a business: contact database, task scheduling and tracking, collaboration & CRM, real-time dashboards, advanced reporting and much more.
Pricing
Standard -$ 899
PRO-$ 1699
Custom-$3399
Latest Features:
Manage your leads in a pipeline view and easily drag-and-drop them from one stage to the next.
Get an instant overview of each client, including contact details, quotes, communication history, linked projects, etc.
Get the tools to manage your sales process, projects, calendar, invoices, and more.
Here are some pros and cons to guide you
Pros:
Scoro is a easy to use software.
The calendar works really well and helps you keep track of your schedule with reminders.
The smart e-mail feature keeps the important information outsourced from the company mailbox.
Data and the small things. Planning, time tracking and management, even budget management gives you the chance to step back and see the big picture rather than using one platform to analyze time, then another to see budget.
Cons:
Its difficult to find contacts.
Some of the reports are extremely limited - contain limited information.
No contact synchronization for Office 365.
Would like to have sales tunnel option included in its standard version.
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