Top Features for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software
CRM software tracks each interaction with every customer along with sales calls, marketing emails, and customer service interactions, mainly for marketing, sales, and e-commerce departments. Businesses today rely on Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to provide enhanced service to their customers. It is not only about deploying CRM software but also about having the result-driven functions included in it.
Top features for Customer Relationship Management software offer integrated and data-driven solutions enabling companies to track, manage, and store information related to existing and potential customers. The information is maintained and managed through a centralized system, with employees having access to the insights they need. This article brings you the top features for Customer Relationship Management software that would help you understand which CRM software features are required for your business.
Top Customer Relationship Management Software Features
Customer Data Management
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software offers customer data management in a strategic process of collecting, organizing, and using customer information in order to implement business relationships and growth. The software drives sales and elevates customer experience by using a centralized database that includes customer-related interactions and data. The data is accessible to marketing, sales, and customer service teams. Among the
- Personalized services: The software understands customer behavior and preferences, which helps respective teams to deliver enhanced customer service interactions and targeted marketing campaigns.
- Enhances operational efficiency: CRM software uses automation to streamline repetitive tasks. This automatically saves time, reduces errors, and encourages respective teams to focus on their targets.
- Boosts decision-making: Offers access to real-time customer behavior data and facilitates taking better-informed decisions that further help in smarter marketing strategies and resource allocation.
- Elevates customer experience: Having access to a customer’s interaction history, the customer service team can provide personalized and instant support, leading to customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Less Annoying CRM
Less Annoying CRM is a customer relationship manager software built for small businesses. It is the single source for all customer data, enabling users to access it efficiently. It allows users to manage contact info, track leads, and schedule follow-ups. It increases sales, keeps organized data, and provides tools to track contacts, leads, and follow-ups without any of the extra clutter. Less Annoying CRM users have scored the feature 9.9 in TrustRadius feedback review based on their user experience.
“I am the sales manager for an equine supplements company in NZ. Less Annoying CRM helps me to organize my cold calls, plan call lists, track client engagement and sales through the groups and pipelines, record client interest for future sales calls, track re-order dates for clients on my calendar, track important racing dates and events, and consolidate my contacts list with simple and easy integrations via Google.”
Read Cathy’s full review here.
Workflow management
Workflow management in CRM software automates task sequences to streamline sales, marketing, and customer support services. This feature reduces manual and repetitive actions. The software sets predefined “go-to-actions” to the system, which automatically initiates a set of subsequent tasks like sending follow-up or marketing posts, or promotional posts through emails. This feature thus provides the following benefits:
- Boosts efficiency: Workforce efficiency can easily be achieved through the software by automating repetitive tasks, reducing human effort, and focusing on strategy building, high-value activities.
- Eliminates errors: A CRM software eliminates human errors as the tool manages to perform well with its predefined functions using the centralised database. Manual data entry is thus reduced, paving the way for no mistakes in serving the customers.
- Elevates customer experience: Ensures consistency in timely communication from pre-purchase demonstration to post-purchase support, making customers satisfied and offering loyalty.
Salesforce Sales Cloud
Salesforce Sales Cloud is a comprehensive sales platform that brings together sellers, sales leaders, and operations teams to drive growth and boost productivity. Powered by AI-driven CRM capabilities with embedded data, it enables businesses to sell faster, smarter, and more efficiently. It helps automate parts of the sales process, such as sending emails, updating contact records, and following approval processes. Salesforce Sales Cloud users have scored the feature 8.4 in TrustRadius feedback review based on their user experience.
“Salesforce Sales Cloud is a modern-day customer relationship management software. The product allows us to improve marketing and increase customer loyalty. It is well-suited in activity and workflow management. Use of the product in our organisation has enabled us to navigate through modern selling and automate sales processes from marketing campaign management to lead naturing and scoring.”
Read Mipim’s full review here.
Help desk management
Help desk management can easily be accessed through a CRM system. The tool raises customer support tickets using a detailed customer database and enables businesses to offer personalized and proficient services. The software platform consolidates customer queries collected from different channels into trackable tickets and automated workflows, catering to a holistic support customer experience. The additional benefits of the features are:
- Satisfied customer: Quick, efficient, and personalized support offered by CRM software brings progress towards building a strong bond with its customers. The prompt problem-solving approach against customer inquiries or issues helps businesses to keep their customers content and regular.
- Ticket tracking system: The software gathers customer concerns or queries from multiple mediums like chat, email, and social media, and manages them through a ticket tracking system.
- Automated workflow: The tool can smoothly create, prioritize, and assign tickets automatically. This ensures no requests, issues, or queries go unaddressed.
- Support through multi-channel: The app manages customer communications across various platforms by supporting the customers to use their preferred communication channels, like chat, email, messages, or social media.
Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM supports enterprises to build better customer relationships and improve retention. This includes trouble ticketing, knowledge base, self-service, and service level agreement (SLA) management to manage help desk services. Zoho CRM users have scored the feature 8.3 in TrustRadius feedback review based on their user experience.
“A CRM module is a must for small usage and at the initial stage of any business. Manual tracking or keeping Excel up to date can also be a little troublesome, which is where Zoho comes in handy. Their free version and limited access for up to 3 users really help users understand the software and get going.”
Read this Verified User’s full review here.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the top features for Customer Relationship Management software. Marketers can use the CRM’s centralized customer data to send personalized emails, automated messages to customers, as well as leads. This approach takes information from the purchase history of customers to create targeted emails. This also helps in audience segmentation, tracking engagement, and finding leads through sales. It streamlines marketing and sales teams through the unified platform, saving time and staying aligned with each other. It also focuses on:
- Promotional campaigns: The stored customer data in a CRM software has audience segmentation, which enables building promotional and targeted campaigns for targeted audience groups. This ensures the right customer receives the right message at the right time.
- Integration and automation: A CRM software, through integration, enables an automated workflow. Follow-up emails or messages are automatically sent to customers once they visit a specific website page or download something related to the product.
- Tracking and managing leads: It helps track leads as well as manage them by sending them relevant content during different stages of their buying journey, which automatically drives the company toward sales.
- Analytics: The CRM software tracks campaign performance and email engagement as well as provides in-depth insights on how to optimize future efforts.
SAP Sales Cloud
SAP Sales Cloud is a modern sales automation platform that empowers organizations to sell smarter and faster. By unifying customer data, insights, and workflows, it enables sales teams to connect seamlessly with prospects, optimize processes, and adapt quickly to changing market conditions. It makes it stronger customer relationships, higher win rates, and scalable growth. SAP Sales Cloud users have scored the feature 8.1 in TrustRadius feedback review based on their user experience.
“We use SAP Cloud as our primary platform for getting leads and tracking the opportunities. Our sales team can access CX data, pricing, and order history easily due to its integration with SAP ERP. It centralises all the customer data into one place and automates repetitive tasks like followups which ease the burden for our sales reps. They can focus on closing the deals because of this.”
Read Shubhank’s full review here.
Call center management
Call center management is an important feature of CRM software. It uses centralized customer data to provide agents with a complete customer history for offering personalized service. It integrates with different interactive channels to track customer conversations, automate tasks, and provide respective teams with data for monitoring performance and taking strategic decisions. This feature has instant screen pop-ups when a call comes, providing agents with immediate customer context, which helps agents to respond efficiently and smartly.
- In-depth management insight: Managers can smoothly monitor customer communication performance, identify trends, and make result-driven decisions to improve marketing or sales, or customer servicing approaches training.
- Strong collaboration: CRM software connects the call center with other departments like marketing and sales, developing consistent cross-functional teams to experience the entire customer journey.
- Screen pop-ups: The CRM software helps in having instant displays of a customer’s record to a call center agent when a call is received, and helps the agent carry out personalized interaction.
Microsoft Dynamics 365
Microsoft Dynamics 365 includes features such as call routing, recording, and monitoring. It also has call list management, autodialing, and scripting, which allows companies to manage call center activities. It is a CRM platform offering sales, marketing, and service functionality. Microsoft Dynamics 365 users have scored the feature 7.8 in TrustRadius feedback review based on their user experience.
“We use Microsoft Dynamics 365 for 2 divisions. We use it for opportunities and also for customer complaints or cases. We have approximately 300 customers in each division. We import customer, product and RMA data into Microsoft Dynamics 365 from our ERP system (Oracle/PeopleSoft) on a nightly basis.”
Read Steve’s full review here.
Contract management
Contract management in CRM software uses the built-in or integrated features to manage contracts throughout their lifecycle, from creating the contract to its renewal. It makes the process easy with centralized contract data, automated tasks like document generation, approvals, tracking dates, enhancing accuracy, efficiency, and compliance, showcasing a unified view of customer relationships and agreements. A few other aspects of contract management are:
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E-signature integration: The software has the feature for clients to digitally sign contracts within the system, along with including notifications and an audit trail for the signing process.
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Monitoring: It also tracks key dates like renewal date for a contract or termination date of a contract, and sends automated reminders through email or messages, alerting customers not to miss deadlines.
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Extensive Insights: The tool has the feature of clause-based reporting and in-depth analytics that help in identifying risks, gaining insights, and tracking the performance of clients’ engagement with contracts.
HubSpot CRM
HubSpot CRM users can manage contracts, with features such as digital signatures, automated alerts, invoicing, and automated workflow for contract review and approvals. This CRM enables growth in businesses to optimize their relationships with leads and customers. HubSpot CRM users have scored the feature 7.9 in TrustRadius feedback review based on their user experience.
“We use HubSpot CRM mainly to manage our sales leads and stay on top of follow-ups. I use it to track conversations, log calls, and meetings. My day-to-day of using it usually has me looking at my tasks, checking out new signups, updated conversations and deals, and the timeline view of the conversation trail is super helpful. We have a couple of apps and tools integrated with HubSpot CRM, so that makes the different ops workflows particularly productive.”
Read Mantra’s full review here.
Single sign-on capability
Single sign-on capability in CRM software helps users to log in once with a single set of credentials to access their CRM and other connected business apps. This boosts productivity by reducing password fatigue and management pressure, and enhancing security through centralized control and multi-factor authentication, all vital for seamless cloud-based workflows. This feature helps in:
- Better user experience: To remember, less time spent logging in, and fewer interruptions.
- Enhanced Productivity: Faster access to essential sales/service tools, better for hybrid work.
monday CRM
monday CRM is a comprehensive sales platform designed to help business owners, sales teams, and RevOps manage the entire customer journey from pre- to post-sales. It centralizes all customer data in one place, making it easy to capture leads, streamline communication, automate repetitive tasks, and monitor deal progress to ensure no opportunity is missed. With real-time insights displayed in customizable dashboards, teams can analyze and optimize their sales processes with confidence. monday CRM users have scored the feature 8.4 in TrustRadius feedback review based on their user experience.
“How our team use monday CRM is to help organize & keep structure of our invoicing processes. We have many boards to our team use, but the main one we use is out “COTI” board which gives a run down of all required documentation & certain tabs needed to push a deal through the next phase to get invoiced. In the case there is a discrepancy that is needed to be addressed, we are able to tag the needed individuals and inform them of the request.”
Read Nathan’s full review here.
Choosing the Top Features for Customer Relationship Management Software.
CRM software helps organizations to manage customer interactions by storing relevant data about the customer journey in one platform.. CRM software helps marketing and sales teams to consistently drive customer satisfaction through automated email marketing, lead nurture campaigns, in-depth insight gathering, and much more. By leveraging top features for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software mentioned in this article, companies can deploy the most suitable software to manage customer satisfaction and loyalty.
To continue your research, explore the Customer Relationship Management software on TrustRadius. You can compare products, read verified reviews, and see which solutions best fit your needs. You may also find value in related categories and resources, including:
