11 greatest benefits of CRM platforms

Creating customer-centric experiences continues to be a key differentiator for businesses. So how can your company make the shift?

To be truly customer-centric, you have to understand the preferences of your customers and the context in which they engage with your organisation. The benefits of CRM software are clear: It keeps all historical data in one place, making it easy to manage customer relationships, gain insights and unite your teams around a singular view of the customer. Let’s dig a little deeper into the top CRM benefits.

What we’ll cover:

• What is CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
• 11 top benefits of CRM

1. More productive sales teams
2. A single view of the customer
3. Actionable analytics and data dashboards
4. Customer-centric automation
5. Proactive customer service interactions
6. Simplified collaboration
7. Increased productivity with AI
8. Integration with your existing business apps
9. Access your information from anywhere
10. Scalability for growth
11. Security you can trust

CRM or customer relationship management, is a system for managing all of your company’s interactions with current and potential customers to improve relationships to grow your business.

Today’s CRM tools foster collaboration, can easily access all of your customer data from multiple sources and use AI to boost productivity — all in one platform. The right CRM can help companies target different audiences, design smart automations based on an individual lead or customer’s activity, proactively work with contacts and manage relationships.

More importantly, every department can now deliver consistent, personalised interactions in the best interest of customers, at scales never before possible.

While features vary by department or industry, here are eleven CRM benefits that can help any business create customer-centric experiences.

One of the most immediate CRM benefits is that it will help your sales team get organised, gain insights and close deals. That’s because a CRM provides a centralised, single source of truth where all customer and prospect information — from initial contact all the way through conversion — is stored and easily accessible. This means sales teams can better understand their customers, track interactions and manage customer data effectively.

When you can easily add customer contact info, call notes, next steps and more into a central place, everyone can quickly identify and prioritise leads with the highest potential to convert. You can even use these insights to project which new ‌leads are likely to become customers, predict future sales and set realistic targets based on data.

Another CRM benefit is the ability to collect and present data in a way that gives everyone in your company a single view of a customer’s interests, purchase history and interactions — all of which can be used to create a more personalised experience.

Data is integral to growing your business. A common challenge around data is that it often comes in from many different sources that don’t work together on their own. A marketing team, for example, may pull info from social media, Google Analytics, business software, apps, CRM technology and off-line channels, each with unique reporting details and naming conventions. Once marketing does find a way to read the information, it might not be the same information other teams need to address their own needs.

CRM can help by getting this data sorted, cleaned, analysed and consolidated into a single, shared view of a customer that can be shared across departments—like sales, marketing, digital commerce, customer service, IT and more. This analysis of a customer’s activity paints a picture that lets each team make decisions based on their own needs and objectives.

Using CRM to create a single, unified view of the customer opens up exciting ways to use data across your business. AI-powered reports can identify where your opportunities are across your entire business, how well you’re interacting with leads and customers, trends in your sales, customer service efforts and opportunities for improvement.

You can run those reports with any number of parameters across different stages in the sales funnel. Historically, marketing works with leads, sales works with opportunities and customer service works with existing customers. But in today’s customer-centric organisations, there’s overlap between them — and opportunities to embrace the varying needs across all consumers.

• Leads — These potential customers have filled in a form or otherwise expressed interest in your company. CRM-created reports, especially those with insights driven by AI, help marketers and sales teams know how to work with leads to convert them into opportunities.
• Opportunities — Leads who make their way further down your sales funnel and have demonstrated that they are close to purchasing through specific actions, like asking for a quote, become opportunities. CRM reports can also help you to see which ads and marketing messaging are most successful at guiding them down the funnel to opportunities and then into sales.
• Sales — Once a person converts and becomes a customer, you can use their data — from pre-sales behaviours to post-purchase habits — to turn them into company loyalists and to find and nurture similar leads.

CRM systems can organise and analyse your customer data, compare it to historical information and provide dashboards that illustrate insights and recommendations. This means you can set up customised dashboards for every individual to see the data that’s most important to their workflows without having to dig, sift, sort or run a report.

A director of marketing can personalise their dashboard to display how many people a particular email was sent to, how many opened it, the click-through rate and more. A director of sales can use the same CRM to personalise a dashboard with how many calls are made per hour and how many resulted in a future meeting or demo.

An integrated CRM system’s analytics can tell you more than where a lead came from. They can show you exactly what gets clicked in a marketing email, how often they contact ‌your sales team, why they contact customer service and more. Actionable data and analytics allows you to communicate with your current audience more effectively while also making it easier to keep in touch to those who have shown interest in the past.

CRMs are continually capturing data and insights about your audience, market and industry, enabling you to create more relevant, personalised messaging and outreach. This is the advantage of dynamic content and automated messaging: the ability to instantly identify and contact people with similar behaviours who take certain steps, removing the need for a person to identify and keep in touch manually.

Automation is a benefit of CRM that lets you set up a series of steps, such as sending emails or notifications, set into motion by specific actions. These “drip campaigns” can be used throughout the sales funnel.

For example, on a tour company's website, if someone builds a customised itinerary for a trip to Thailand, you can start them on a drip campaign about travel to Southeast Asia. Automation also allows for people to be removed from a drip campaign based on their actions. So, if that person books the trip, they will be automatically removed, avoiding redundant emails and confusion.

Automation is about more than just emails. Sales teams can use them to save time logging sales data and to auto-generate quotes or proposals. For customer service, automation removes the need for time-consuming manual processes like collecting background information, which can frustrate both the customer and the employee. And through the power of AI and automation, chatbots are freeing up service agents by answering simple questions for customers and routeing more nuanced ones to the right expert agents.

While automation is one of the benefits of CRM for customer service teams, it’s just the start. The more you know about a customer’s history, preferences and interests, the simpler it is to meet their needs and proactively solve problems.

With relevant data available in their dashboards and within cases, there’s no need for service agents to dig for information, allowing them to get right down to what matters. Your employees can quickly find and present solutions, maintain notes and even take on the seller role by recommending new or complementary products. Not only does this save time, but makes potential and current customers feel valued. They can see that your employees are proactive and knowledgeable — all of which can improve your bottom line through higher customer satisfaction and reduced time to resolution.

Your CRM serves as a record of conversations, interactions, needs, notes and contact information that is accessible to every teammate — an incredible advantage to building customer-centric experiences. Additionally, some CRM platforms have built-in collaboration and communication tools, like Slack. Collaboration tools can allow many people work on one file simultaneously or to follow the progress of a document, such as a sales quote, allowing faster response times to customer requests.

Everyone with access to your CRM can work together through this shared record. So when a salesperson speaks with a customer and learns more about them, they can add notes to their record, which can then be seen throughout your organisation. This makes sure the rest of the team is working with the latest details and to the best of their ability and that marketing, sales, commerce and customer service work together seamlessly, instead of worrying about siloed information.

When AI comes built in to your CRM, your teams can accomplish even more. That’s because AI can spot trends that you may not — such as which customers are most likely to buy or what issues may arise that your service team can proactively address.

Generative AI can also be a game-changer for your teams. It speeds up tasks like drafting sales emails, crafting marketing messages or writing and localising product descriptions. With generative AI, these tasks can be done in a matter of seconds, making everyone's job easier and freeing them up to more productive work.

AI can also help you to make more accurate predictions, like forecasting quarterly sales targets, ecommerce sales or alerting you to the best time to send a marketing email.

Chances are that your business already uses many different apps. In fact, the average company uses over a thousand. Unfortunately, 70% of them don’t talk to each other. A big CRM benefit is the ability to integrate all of those apps so that you can work across them. CRMs should be able to seamlessly integrate with systems like ERP, supply chain and more. The ability to do so will help you to interact with customers better and make sure that your internal apps make it simple for your employees, as well.

When you choose a cloud-based software, the benefits of CRM get even better. An online CRM based in the cloud gives your team the opportunity to access your information at any time, from anywhere, on any device. Whether a team member wants to update customer notes while visiting their office, check-in from home on how a marketing campaign is performing or look up customer history on their phone - it’s all possible.

Another huge plus is that when your CRM software lives in the cloud, there’s no downtime for installation and software updates. That means your IT team never has to worry about taking a team or employee off-line for time-consuming downloads or to work the weekend for installations. All of your updates are automatic.

Using a CRM will help your business grow. A benefit of CRMs is that the right one will be able to grow along with you. Cloud-based CRMs are easily scaleable, giving you the flexibility to add or remove features and users as you need to. You can start small. Then, as your business grows, add on without having to change or reconfigure your systems. Choosing the right CRM now, means you won’t have to find a new one later.

Trust is at the core of customer-centric businesses. In fact, at Salesforce, trust is our #1 value . Customers trust businesses with their data, so it's important that their data is protected and treated with care. While CRMs make it easy to share data across teams, they also make sure that it doesn’t get shared with anyone else. The right CRMs have powerful security features to protect data from unauthorised access.

CRMs that prioritise security, such as Salesforce CRM, are built on multitenant cloud architectures. No matter which product or feature you use, the same core technical resources and security for all of our customers. Security is an ongoing responsibility, which is why it is important that updates are automatically rolled out to all customers multiple times a year, ensuring their data is kept safe without any additional action on their end.

The are many benefits to using a CRM, but they all come from the ability to remove siloes between teams, giving everyone the ability to work together. Data organised and presented by a CRM platform leads to a better understanding of customers, which leads to better customer experiences. With CRM, you can manage customer relationships more effectively and build a more customer-centric business.