What’s Best for Your Business

While CRMs are extremely flexible and can work in many unique business settings, they are commonly broken down into three discrete categories depending on their functions.

What Are the 3 Types of CRM?

The three different types of CRM are operational, analytical and collaborative. Each type of CRM will have some overlapping features but is tailored to work best in a given use case.

Operational CRM Systems

As the name suggests, operational and sales CRMs facilitate more streamlined business processes. This streamlining is mostly related to sales, lead management, acquiring new customers and customer service. The software will offer CRM tools built specifically for these purposes.

Characteristics

An operational CRM focuses on sales, service and marketing within an organization. The CRM will have tools to aid communications between these different departments within a business.

By having a central flow of information, data is always accurate and up to date. Each department can also access this information whenever they need to create their own initiatives or solve issues. For example, marketing campaigns can be created using data from sales reps and other departments.

Automation is a key function of operational CRMs, and they help with scheduling, follow-ups and other communications that would normally have to be maintained manually.

Use Cases

An example of an operational CRM in use would be a business that supplies manufacturers with the components and supplies they need. This business may have a website with informational content to help draw in leads that are then funneled to their sales and marketing teams.

An operational CRM would be used to capture these leads and then manage them throughout the entire sales process. Sales personnel and marketing teams would all access and share this information and act upon it as needed to close the sale.

Even after the sale, the CRM will track the customer’s purchases and history so follow-ups or other selling opportunities can be leveraged.

Analytical CRM Systems

Analytical CRMs focus on collecting data and making it easier for businesses to mine that data for useful purposes, such as finding sales opportunities or forecasting. The overall goal is to increase profitability through a deeper knowledge of their customers and their purchase history.

Characteristics

A core feature of an analytical CRM will be to segment customers into groups that can be targeted more precisely through various marketing messaging.

Another core feature will be the ability to track customer buying history so that important metrics such as customer lifetime value (CLV) and customer retention can be studied.

Finally, personalization features are another component of analytical CRMs for marketing. This allows for extremely targeted communications with customers, often through marketing automation. This can be for sales reasons or customer service purposes. The goal is to provide the most personalized service possible for each customer.

A business can use this data mining to better service its current customers, but it can also be used to target potential customers.

Use Cases

A common use case example of an analytical CRM would be a business-to-consumer (B2C) online retailer. In order to build their brand and fully leverage their existing customer base, they would use an analytical CRM to research various metrics and spot opportunities to help increase average ticket prices and repeat business.

This would be done through personalized marketing messages and discovering upselling opportunities after studying their customer behavior and purchasing history. All of this can be done with sales automation or marketing automation.

Collaborative CRM

Collaborative CRM systems focus on cross-team communications to help streamline overall communications.

Characteristics

Collaborative CRMs feature tools that eliminate wasteful or inaccurate communications, such as long email chains or different ticket-based systems when dealing with customer support. Instead, all of these communications are in place so that different teams can manage different channels in real time.

Use Cases

An example of using a collaborative CRM effectively would be a mobile app seller that wants to integrate its customer service, technical support and sales team to provide a better customer experience.

By using a CRM, the company can provide faster and more efficient solutions when customers contact them with support issues. Instead of having customers need to repeat their situation with each contact, the information is stored so any team can access it. Service automation tools can also be used to streamline overall response times.

Because of the centralized nature of the CRM, common issues that customer support deals with can be forwarded to the technical support team to look for a fix or determine the root cause of the common customer complaints.