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What Features Do SMEs Need In a CRM?
Saphyte Team 4 min read
Updated:
The year 2020 has been a challenging year for many businesses. SMEs and startups have been affected by the economic downturn. Businesses have shut their doors to the public and a lot of employees have lost their jobs. Consumption and spending have continuously decreased which makes it harder for businesses to market their products and services.
With all these in mind, is it still possible for businesses to survive this year? The answer is yes.
And the key is the adoption of technologies that would allow businesses to maintain good relationships with their customers.
In this article, you will know in detail what this technology is, how it would help your business survive the crisis, and what features to look for in this technology.
So let’s get started.
CRM: a technological advancement
Many years ago, businesses resort to online spreadsheets (or even pen and paper) to record and organize data and present it in a way that is useful to the business. But today, businesses enjoy the convenience of CRM software. CRM systems often feature automation functions that allow its users to perform workflows in a few clicks.
For example, users can automatically send emails to target recipients over a period of time using the CRM’s email marketing feature, without having to manually send these emails on the scheduled dates.
CRMs can also automatically migrate information gathered from websites through forms filled out by website visitors. With the CRM, users can perform lead scoring, phone calls, or whatever is needed to convince potential customers to buy the business’s products and services.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM), from the words themselves, is concerned with improving customer relationships. The goal of CRM is to use customer data to personalize customer interaction and guarantee customer satisfaction at the end of the day. This is to shorten the sales cycle and increase the chance of a repeat purchase in the future.
CRM is therefore used by many businesses to improve their sales and profit, which will be used for further investments to grow the business and expand its reach.
CRMs during the pandemic
The pandemic has pushed the world to a pause, testing the resilience of businesses. But global economic recovery is on the horizon, and experts and think tanks are optimistic about global growth in 2021.
Continuous marketing, therefore, is important even during the pandemic. Communicating with your audience is imperative for you to survive, and this can only be done using a well-prepared marketing plan. Informing your customers of how you’re adjusting to the changes and how you’re bringing about some form of normalcy can give you an edge over your competitors.
Customer relationship management (CRM) systems play a large role in businesses, especially in retail, real estate, trading, and insurance companies. As the most common business strategy post-pandemic will focus on email marketing, phone calls, and customer support, your business will need all the help it can get from the technology.
Benefits of CRM
CRMs can help improve a business’s social media presence — which is especially important when most people turn to social media for entertainment during lockdowns. In a survey done by Hootsuite, about 3.96 Billion people were found to be active on social media during the pandemic.
Another survey was done by Globalwebindex that claims people spend an average of 3 hours a day on social media in the year 2018. This highlights the importance of social media engagement at a time of crisis.
With the use of CRM, entertaining queries from customers on multiple social media platforms, and reading their feedback would no longer take so much time and effort.
Your different social media channels can be integrated into a single system — which centralizes all the messages in a single inbox. This saves you time from switching applications or platforms just to answer queries. The system also provides you your customers’ contact information which helps you personalize your responses. This leads to faster and more efficient customer support which provides an improved customer experience and eventually, customer satisfaction.
Features to look for
What features do SMEs need in a CRM? You are already familiar with some of the features to look for, those mentioned in this article earlier. But let’s sum them up for you:
You should look for a CRM that has functions and options for users to optimize their processes involved in getting leads and clients.
This includes Lead Scoring, Automated Workflow Process, Task Management, Documentation, Email Tracking, Categorization, Status & Updates, Meetings, Calls & Reminder System, and Reporting.
When choosing a CRM, look for a system that allows you to take charge of your sales processes and gives you real-time updates on your sales pipeline. It must be carefully designed to enhance and optimize the most important part of your business–– your sales.
Those that have Sales Pipeline, Deals Management, and Sales Forecasting features are preferable.
Your CRM should be designed to enable you to effectively engage your new, potential, and existing customers. It should be built with functions that allow you to reach out to your customers in multiple channels and monitor the effectiveness of your campaigns.
The preferable features include Email Marketing and Campaigns Management.
Your CRM solution should empower your clients and expand your reach to them. It must allow integration of Payment Service Providers (PSP), Calendars like Google Calendar and iCalendar, and your email account so you can send emails using your CRM right away.
Introducing Saphyte
If you are looking for these features, choose Saphyte.
Saphyte is a cloud-based CRM that allows you to gather customer information and make strategic business decisions out of them. This CRM tool is designed and developed with contact management features that would enable your sales team to connect and engage with leads and effectively turn them into customers.
Even if you are a business owner of a small business, Saphyte will be happy to assist you, especially during these difficult times.
Saphyte: helping SMEs during the pandemic
Saphyte continues to upgrade its partner businesses amidst the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Establishing meaningful client relationships has become a challenge for businesses with all the restrictions to movement in place. To create a solution, Saphyte has introduced best practices for its partners to enable them to adjust to a disrupted business environment.
The CRM software is expected to augment the company’s sales and marketing efforts and increase business productivity at every level. Saphyte is designed with adaptability in mind — helping clients to be able to adapt to changing business needs and requirements, internal or external, and to be more efficient, productive, and profitable at the end of the day.
With the challenges presented by the pandemic, Saphyte has formulated the best practices in maximizing its CRM technology and equipped its partner businesses with the necessary knowledge to cushion them from the negative impacts brought about by the ongoing disruptions.
Saphyte provides an ecosystem of team and workspace, sales, marketing, and support that addresses the most important issues surrounding businesses. With features designed to enhance users’ team coordination, sales management, and marketing management, the CRM technology sets businesses up for success with continued use.
With the ongoing campaign of the company to provide support to their partner businesses during the pandemic, local partners have been enjoying privileges that they do not normally get from international CRM software providers.
Saphyte’s campaign to digitally transform local SMEs prompted it to waive all set-up fees, implementation fees, and customer support fees for its users. Customers will also only be billed according to usage. The company believes this unique payment plan will reduce all barriers to access this technology which will help businesses during trying times.