19 CRM Features That Will Benefit Your Business

The right customer relationship management (CRM) tool can transform your business by giving your company a complete view of your customers’ data to help serve them better. As CRM software has advanced, CRM features have grown too. Today's leading CRM systems incorporate agentic AI capabilities that improve every aspect of customer relationship management, from automating routine tasks to providing predictive insights that guide strategic decisions — all of whichis great news for businesses that want to provide better customer experiences. Here, we’ll examine the essential CRM features that can benefit your business across all teams, helping you become an agentic enterprise.

What we’ll cover:

List of CRM features

1. Contact management
2. Single source of truth
3. AI (artificial intelligence)
4. Reports, dashboards, and analytics
5. Cloud-based CRM
6. Mobile CRM
7. Collaboration tools
8. Automation, workflows, and approvals
9. Scalability, flexibility, and customization
10. Sales forecasting
11. Sales opportunity management
12. Product level quotes and order management
13. Omni-channel support
14. Customer self-service
15. Field service management
16. Campaign management
17. Engagement orchestration
18. Security
19. Third-party integrations

Modern CRM systems offer comprehensive suites of features designed to support every aspect of customer relationships, including AI integration. AI CRM marks a fundamental shift in and offer significant advantages and abilities to analyze patterns in customer data, automate repetitive tasks, offering intelligent recommendations, and more.

Here are key CRM features to look for, with particular attention to how AI enhancement transforms traditional functionality:

Contact management is a core CRM function that helps businesses access and organize important information about their current and potential customers. This can include email addresses submitted online, phone numbers gathered in meetings, or websites and social media profiles available online. It’s also a way to track leads as they become customers and beyond.

Contact management can also provide calendar and follow-up reminders as well as the ability for anyone to see detailed notes on interactions a customer had with the service team. With a complete picture of up-to-date information and activity, teams have more context around each customer.

When customer data is siloed in different places, it can be hard to keep up with the latest information and deliver personalized experiences.

A CRM eliminates this challenge by housing all customers, sales, service, marketing, and analytics details in one place. CRM brings that information together in a unified customer profile, unlocking trapped data and letting any team member quickly access the information they need. That means sales teams can see when a customer interacts with a marketing campaign, or if they have a service case open.

AI enhances this capability by continuously cleaning and enriching data, identifying inconsistencies, and automatically merging duplicate records. Predictive analytics helps identify data gaps and suggests information to collect for better customer insights.

AI CRM has changed the way businesses serve customers by boosting productivity and providing actionable insights. Generative AI creates customized sales emails, knowledge articles for service teams, product descriptions in multiple languages, marketing campaigns tailored to specific audiences, and more. Agentic AI systems can perform autonomous actions for users, such as scheduling meetings, updating records, and replying to routine inquiries. However, the success of AI in CRM depends on the quality of the data it uses. A platform like Data 360 securely unites and understands your customer data, then uses your customer behavior to identify trends and make suggestions.

Before you can act on customer data, you first need to understand it. CRM reports and dashboards provide a clear view of important information and analytics, displaying what’s needed to improve customer relationships and boost sales. Advanced reporting and analytics features turn raw customer data into actionable business insights through customizable dashboards and automated reports.

AI enhances analytics by identifying trends that might not be immediately obvious and predicting future outcomes. When you add platforms like Tableau to analytics capabilities, you can use machine learning to go even deeper to identify trends and use them to grow your business.

Modern customer relationship management systems are often called cloud CRMs because they work on remote servers. Cloud CRM is an example of SaaS (software as a service) software, which enables seamless remote access by its users, providing accessibility, scalability, and automatic updates without the need for on-premises infrastructure. All of this reduces startup and long-term costs, and enables real-time team collaboration and ensures data is backed up and secure.

A major benefit of using a cloud-based CRM is that whether your employees are in the office, on the road, or checking in from home, they can access their customer information from anywhere. Mobile CRM lets you view all your insights, data, and customer profiles from any device

Collaboration tools enable teams to work together seamlessly within a CRM environment. For example, Slack integrates with CRM platforms to provide real-time communication, file sharing, and project coordination. Slack can interact with nearly every available CRM system, making it a flexible solution. Collaboration is made even easier with Slack’s AI features , which can summarize conversations, suggest relevant documents, and automate routine team communications. With conversational AI, employees can use the same language they would use with a co-worker to ask their CRM questions, access CRM data, and take action — all in one place.

Companies that can automate repetitive tasks not only increase productivity, but free up their employees to focus on higher-value projects. AI automations let CRMs perform specific tasks in response to an action that has taken place. For example, CRMs can send an app notification if a customer looks at a product but doesn’t purchase, or follow up on an unanswered email after a pre-determined amount of time. The best CRMs have automation that feels human, sending customized notes or check-ins at an established cadence.

CRMs can help companies create workflows and automate tasks that keep teams moving forward. For instance, weekly reminders can be sent to employees, reminding them to fill out items like status sheets or update customer notes. They can also provide submission form workflows for employees to submit when submitting cross-team requests for needs like IT help or legal review.

CRMs come with a wide range of features. The right CRM will allow your organization to pick the ones that matter most to you, with the flexibility to add or subtract features as your needs evolve and scale.

The same applies to the number of employees who use CRM. It’s essential to choose a CRM that lets you add seats as you grow rather than locking you in to a number. You may be looking the best CRM for small business today, but make sure that same CRM can adapt as your needs change.

Sales forecasting assists with lead qualification and offers a better view of sales in relation to a team’s established goals. This also gives managers visibility into how individuals are performing so they can identify challenges and opportunities. AI improves sales forecasting accuracy by analyzing patterns across multiple variables, including seasonal trends, individual sales rep performance, and market conditions.

Also called pipeline management, sales opportunity management supports organizations in tracking opportunities throughout their lifecycle. This lets them optimize their interactions with potential buyers. Tools like Sales Cloud help companies capture and manage leads, organize sales across territories, track performance, and identify the next best steps using predictive AI.

CRMs help businesses keep an active inventory of their products and provide consistent quotes across engagements. With tools like Revenue Cloud, sales teams can reduce operational costs and quickly send quotes that reflect company policies. CRMs with these features can help sellers with guided selling and configuration process flows. They can also increase deal size by recommending compatible upgrades and add-ons. At the same time, they can also reduce churn by sending automated renewal quotes and midterm change notifications to existing customers.

Customers have become accustomed to having the same experience with a brand across various channels, such as phone, chat, social media, and email. A CRM with omnichannel support, like Service Cloud, provides customer reps with a comprehensive view of a customer’s history across all channels. This means reps can use knowledge of past purchases and service calls to deliver an informed and elevated experience and even identify potential upsell opportunities.

CRMs that assist customers through self-service tools are a win-win, empowering customers to find answers and resolve issues on their own using knowledge bases, chatbots, and automated systems. AI enhances self-service through intelligent chatbots that understand natural language, offer personalized recommendations, and escalate complex issues to human reps when needed. These systems learn from interactions to better handle customer inquiries. As more customers prefer a self-service resolution for simple issues, CRM with agentic AI can help move this forward. In fact, by 2027, it’s expected 50% of service cases will be handled by AI, according to the State of Service report.

Field service management coordinates on-site service delivery through scheduling, routing, inventory management, and mobile workforce coordination. One of the benefits of a mobile CRM is that it’s always available to employees on the go. This is particularly useful to field service reps who work remotely. CRM field service tools make sure your employees have all the information they need before making a service call. This includes AI-powered briefs that pull in everything they need to know about past customer interactions, issue history, and contract details on what falls within the scope of their visit.

These features can also provide easy-to-access knowledge bases for troubleshooting issues as well as auto-generated post-call reports that are accurate and comprehensive. With the help of CRM and AI, teams can optimize their service call scheduling and dispatches and even forecast and plan needs based on their data.

A CRM should make marketing your products easier and more effective. With tools like Marketing Cloud, teams can plan, execute, and measure marketing campaigns across multiple channels and customer segments from a single interface. AI transforms campaign management by automatically generating content, optimizing send times, segmenting audiences based on data and previous behaviors, and creating targeted campaigns based on performance metrics.

Engagement marketing, also called journey orchestration, creates cohesive customer journeys and automates experiences across multiple touchpoints. This ensures consistent and personalized interactions throughout the customer lifecycle. AI can generate email subject lines and body copy that are customized to each recipient. It can also determine the right time and frequency to reach out and include the product recommendations that are most likely to capture their interest.

CRMs are trusted with sensitive customer data and proprietary company information, so it’s essential that they are safeguarded against data leaks. Data security safeguards your business information through encryption, access controls, and compliance features. Trusted AI enhances CRM security by detecting unusual access patterns, identifying potential threats, and automatically applying security measures. Role-based access controls ensure team members only see information relevant to their roles, while AI-powered monitoring watches for suspicious activity. This all helps your business maintain customer trust and comply with local regulations.

We already know that when customer data can flow between teams, businesses can provide better customer experiences. CRM integration capabilities and third-party integration tools like MuleSoft connect your CRM with other business systems. This includes email platforms, accounting software, marketing tools, ERP, HR, and industry-specific applications. When customer data can flow between teams, businesses can provide better customer experiences. This applies to external apps just as much as it does to the apps that are used within your CRM.

AI identifies integration opportunities and ensures data consistency across all connected platforms. This creates a unified technology ecosystem that eliminates data silos and consolidates all customer data into one view that’s accessible to all teams.

Selecting the right CRM features for your business requires careful consideration of your current needs and future growth plans. Start by identifying your primary business challenges and how CRM features can address them. Think about factors like team size, industry requirements, integration needs, and budget constraints.

When comparing CRM options, focus on AI capabilities and how they enhance core features. CRMs with built-in AI functionality offer advantages in user experience, insight generation, and creating new opportunities.

Consider the total cost of ownership, including implementation, training, and ongoing maintenance. Look for CRM systems that can grow with your business and meet changing needs. Lastly, assess vendor support and the platform's history of reliability and innovation.

As the #1 CRM, Salesforce provides comprehensive features enhanced by advanced AI capabilities through Agentforce, helping businesses strengthen customer relationships and drive growth through intelligent automation and insights.

Looking to learn more about CRM? Take our free CRM course and build your skills.