Top 5 industries that use CRMs

Today, customer relationship management, or simply CRM, is a comprehensive strategy that includes practices, principles, guidelines, and technologies an organization uses to manage and analyze customer data and interactions throughout the customer lifecycle. 

We’ve talked a lot about customer relationship management on our blog and about CRM software in particular. We’ve discussed the important milestones in CRM software development, compared the best CRMs, and shared our experience building a CRM system. Now is a good time to talk about industries that need CRM software the most.

Retail & eCommerce

Shopping usually involves going to the store or buying things online. In the past year, lockdowns, retail store closures, and travel bans have made eCommerce growth happen even faster. According to McKinsey, between February 2020 and April 2020, eCommerce moved 10 years ahead in just three months. Consumers and brands are rushing online, making online retail the economic sweet spot. 

Effectively communicating with customers isn’t easy. eCommerce CRM software helps both retailers and eCommerce businesses manage customer interactions and internal communications. Let’s discuss the benefits of CRM software in detail.

What are the benefits of CRM software in retail & eCommerce?

• Know the customer

A CRM for service industry allows you to have all customer information at your fingertips. You can store key data, manage customer records, and automate customer interactions all in one place.

• Better understand your leads and keep them flowing

With CRM software, you can see who interacts with your business and how, where your opportunities are, and how well you’re interacting with leads and customers. You can also find and upsell the most profitable opportunities and prevent lead leaks through key data insights and marketing automation.

• Unify customer support across all channels

Using a service industry CRM, you can deliver fast customer service, especially when managing time-sensitive queries. CRM software stores every interaction with a customer, allowing you to personalize communication, offer solutions quickly, and respond to support requests using message templates.

• See how your business is going 

CRM analytics lets you better understand how your business is performing against your goals and allows you to measure sales and marketing performance.

• Manage inventory efficiently

Getting insights into the most and least popular products in your store can help you optimize inventory and make sure you have the necessary items on hand as well as remove products that aren’t selling. 

Healthcare

Healthcare providers and patients should work as a team for high-quality care. A medical CRM enables clinics to arrange, optimize, and synchronize all patient interactions, analyze information throughout the patient care flow, and automate business processes. 

Medgadget anticipates the global medical CRM market will reach $9.6 billion by 2026, growing at a 10.4% CAGR. Such anticipated market growth is due to the growing importance of patient engagement, increasing demand for structured data, and advances in healthcare technologies.

What are the benefits of CRM systems in healthcare?

• Harmonize data across departments

It’s challenging to unify and share information across healthcare systems. CRM software collects and synchronizes critical data between departments such as labs, billing, delivery, and supply. 

• Get patient insights

Understanding patient behavior is key to understanding your business performance. It helps you discover your strengths and weaknesses, see common issues your patients are facing, and find out ways to improve the patient experience. Additionally, you can see the number of patients by department and know the chances that patients will refer someone to your clinic.

• Improve and personalize the patient experience

CRM software speeds up communication with customers, since you have all important customer data at your fingertips and can automate customer service responses, marketing tasks, and repetitive workflows. Also, you can use customer insights for personalization.

• Cut down on no-shows

Another great benefit of a healthcare CRM is that it reduces no-shows and late patients by reminding patients about upcoming appointments.

• Reduce human error

A CRM minimizes human interactions and administrative errors (such as inaccurate or incomplete patient records) by automating the majority of administrative processes.

Real estate

Is CRM software a luxury or a must for real estate agents? It’s definitely a necessity. Just think of what a realtor does every day. Setting up meetings and open houses; filing property proposals, agreements, and other real estate documents; dealing with landlords and clients — especially those who need immediate responses; answering phone calls and emails; keeping up with past clients.

With a real estate CRM, you can automate mundane processes such as collecting and storing important information. You can also organize all your sales activities, analyze performance, and identify any leaks in your marketing and sales funnels. 

What are the benefits of a CRM in real estate?

• Optimize real estate processes

A CRM reduces manual work and lets you organize, streamline, and automate your sales processes. This can help you improve efficiency and organization, save time on administrative tasks, and communicate effectively with clients, giving them your full attention.

• See how well you’re performing

You can measure your business performance through sales projections and conversion rates. Also, key metrics can help you understand causes of poor productivity so you can make necessary changes. 

• Generate and nurture leads effectively

Qualify, segment, nurture, follow up with, and track leads ─ all in a timely manner. Having a single database of contacts, you can segment them based on different parameters and criteria.  

• Handle meetings 

Let CRM schedule meetings for you, cutting down on endless back-and-forth emails. 

• Manage marketing campaigns

You can save hours daily through automatic drip marketing and social media campaigns and spend more time on business tasks that matter.

Financial services

Because the financial services industry is large, financial institutions face fierce competition and struggle to differentiate themselves. A lot of businesses ― whether insurers, banks, or capital markets ― have realized they need to build and maintain excellent customer relationships to get a competitive advantage, win and keep customers, and take their businesses to the next level.

There are two types of financial CRM software that financial organizations use. Multi-purpose CRMs can be customized to align with financial processes and workflows. Industry-specific CRMs come with useful functionality out of the box to help businesses streamline existing operational processes.

What are the benefits of a CRM in the financial services industry?

• Build a customer-centric culture

A CRM system provides everything necessary to segment customers, communicate with them over their preferred channels, and personalize customer journeys. You can deliver a consistent digital experience and effortless engagements that customers love in real time across all channels and devices.   

• Increase productivity

Minimize repetitive processes, streamline proposals, and offer service that meets and exceeds customers’ expectations.

• Make marketing efforts more effective

With important data such as product purchasing trends and engagement channels and with a complete profile of every customer in hand, you can craft personalized marketing journeys.

• Foster efficient inter-departmental collaboration

Managing and tracking data across departments will help you know every interaction customers have with you, their top concerns, and other data points to help you improve your marketing and foster teamwork, collaboration, and data sharing.

• Build customer loyalty

Customer service is the main driver of customer value. A CRM system provides handy features that can help you improve customer service and customer satisfaction. Instantly answer support tickets, pull up customer histories, and turn complaints into opportunities.

Hotels

Improving efficiency is one of the biggest wins most hotels can achieve by using a CRM. Many hoteliers turn to CRM software to improve the customer experience.

Arguably, the most important factor in the hospitality sector is customer service. The most successful hotels know their guests well and offer products and personalized service that align with their needs. Hospitality CRMs come in handy here.

What are the benefits of CRM in hospitality industry?

• Have all important data on hand

A CRM serves as a centralized hub where you can store customer data. This data can help you assess the customer journey to gain a 360-degree view of your customers, craft hyper-personalized and integrated omnichannel guest experiences, and segment guests according to various criteria.

• Automate repetitive tasks

Free up staff for more critical tasks by automating manual tasks such as email marketing and reports. 

• Increase brand awareness

With CRM software, you can not only set automatic marketing campaigns but do so efficiently. A CRM allows you to get a better sense of your target audience, target specific customer groups, easily find new prospects, craft personalized content, and discover audience preferences and trends. 

• Improve customer loyalty

Creating a bond with customers through personal experience makes customers feel like they belong, winning their loyalty. 

Best CRMs by industry

There are quite a lot of existing CRM systems that cater to the specific needs of the industries mentioned above. 

TOP CRM SOFTWARE IN 2021 BY INDUSTRY

What’s the best CRM system for your business?

Healthcare, eCommerce, real estate, financial services, and hospitality aren’t the only industries that use CRM software. Companies in the agriculture, consulting, travel and tourism, HR management, call center, manufacturing, and pharmaceutical industries also commonly use CRM software.

Looking for a custom CRM development company?

No matter what industry you’re in, CRM software may be a necessity for your business. If none of the existing CRM solutions align with your business workflows and needs, you can go with custom CRM software development. By doing so, you’ll get precisely what you want. You’ll be able to:

• Design a system for your specific business requirements
• Choose what processes to automate and what departments to grant access to what information
• Create software that’s flexible enough to scale as your business grows
• Follow software security best practices

Looking to hire CRM app developers? At Globaldev, we have expertise and experience building CRM software. Check out our custom CRM development page to learn about Globaldev's decade-long expertise in providing CRM services.