Customer journeys can often be long and sometimes chaotic. Imagine a busy street with cars, bikes and pedestrians (clients); they all have different needs, but they want to reach the same destination (make a purchase, resolve the issue).

Think of operational CRM as the traffic lights and crosswalks that make these journeys much smoother and more efficient. With operational customer relationship management systems, you can reduce ineffective processes and ensure customer satisfaction.

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Article Roadmap

• What Is Operational CRM?
• How Does It Work?
• Primary Objectives
• What Does It Help With?
• Functions
  • Salesforce Automation
  • Marketing Automation
  • Service Automation
• Types of CRMs
  • Operational vs. Analytical
  • Operational vs. Collaborative
• Benefits
• Next Steps

What Is Operational CRM?

Operational CRM is a type of CRM system that helps simplify customer interactions by optimizing sales, marketing and service processes. It takes care of all the “operations” and helps improve customer acquisition and retention by allowing you to keep tabs on buyers and their needs.

Some CRM systems have a singular focus and only help with things like service, sales or analytics. Operational CRM, on the other hand, blends multiple aspects into one and provides maximum efficiency. It’s what people think of when they talk about CRM software.

You can store data about your customers in a centralized platform, giving you one convenient place to access information. It also provides service automation, i.e., the ability to do tasks efficiently with fewer steps, leading to less work on your team’s part.

If you had to summarize in a sentence, operational CRM aims to make processes smoother and helps businesses make the most out of limited resources.

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How Does It Work?

Now that you understand what operational CRM is, let’s explore how the system helps customer-facing and support teams.

For starters, like most CRM software, operational CRM solutions are cloud-based and SaaS-based, providing flexibility and remote accessibility. You can handle business operations anytime, anywhere, from any device, be it a mobile, tablet, laptop or desktop (provided you have an internet connection).

There are also on-site operational CRMs available that help you host business data on your own servers.

Operational CRM offers a platform for customer-facing teams to communicate with each other, with clients and with external parties. You can ensure effective collaboration between all employees and make communication as seamless as possible.

The system lets you set privacy permissions, allowing only certain members to access confidential and sensitive customer data. Integrations with third-party apps like Gmail are the cherry on top that enable you to manage multiple tasks via a single platform.

When all your information exists in the same place, it becomes easier for teams to harness it and makes processes much quicker, more accurate, and, well, just better. Sales reps, marketers and service teams don’t need to switch back and forth between platforms anymore and can easily access relevant information at the drop of a hat.

Primary Objectives

Operational CRM helps you create meaningful customer experiences and increase client satisfaction. Its two primary objectives are:

• Automation: It helps teams automate repetitive and manual tasks, allowing them to complete them a lot quicker and dedicate their time to other core customer activities. The system also helps cut down costs while driving up revenue.
• Enhancement of process: Operational CRM lets you provide superior customer service and experiences without costing you an arm and a leg, leading to increased ROI in the long run.

What Does It Help With?

The key features of operational CRM include:

Marketing Campaigns

The marketing team’s job is to identify new clients and make initial contact with them, making the sales team’s work easier and increasing the chances of customer acquisition. Operational CRM helps marketers with projects by collecting and storing leads from various marketing channels and demand-generation activities.

It enables you to conduct lead management tasks and provides you with a higher rate of success in gaining quality leads. You can also be more efficient with advertising and reach your business goals with less effort.

Sales

Operational CRM helps sales teams by identifying prospects and managing how they move along the sales funnel. Think of it as the oil that lubricates your operations and makes them smoother. It also helps with manual data entry and increases the percentage of clients contacted and, ultimately, sales, upselling and reselling.

Customer Service

This team has a vital role in business as they resolve customer complaints, queries and concerns. Operational CRM makes this process easier and helps companies provide better client experiences.

It helps reduce the amount of wasted time and makes processes snappy. For example, if a client query goes unanswered or to the wrong department, CRMs can automatically reroute it or send reminders to keep up with communication.

Analytics

Gathering customer data isn’t enough. You need to identify trends and understand client behavior to gain insight into why they act the way they do and why they prefer certain things over others. You can use this data to alter and change your operations to the next level.

Operational CRM also aids with better data collection and report generation. Dashboards and charts are an added plus that helps visualize information.

Functions

Paul Greenberg, the author of “‘CRM at the Speed of Light’,” wrote:

Without a strong operational CRM system, even the most strategic sales and marketing plans can fall flat.”

So, what does a robust operational CRM solution constitute? Some of the things it excels in include:

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Sales Force Automation

First up, operational CRM has tools that address the many aspects of the sales process. It can distribute leads to sales reps and give them visibility into which leads are worth pursuing via lead scoring.

It also handles the time-consuming task of creating records for each new contract, freeing sales reps to spend time selling. Along those lines, operational CRM has a content repository for storing and reusing commonly used documents such as proposals.

Finally, operational CRMs help improve processes and workflows by automating routine tasks. This includes everything from scheduling meetings and transitioning leads through the pipeline to generating valuable sales reports.

Marketing Automation

Even though they can serve as standalone solutions, marketing automation tools are often incorporated into CRMs. They form another core part of operational CRMs.

Marketing teams have a lot on their plates — running campaigns to generate new leads, nurturing current leads till they’re sales-ready and keeping current customers coming back for more. With these types of CRMs, you can automate processes to make them more efficient and productive.

Operational CRM lets you set up complex email campaign sequences. Once you’ve built the campaign, everything runs on autopilot. This is possible thanks to event-based marketing, where each new event in a lead or customer’s journey triggers a reaction from the system.

You’ve probably interacted with such a campaign. For example, if you buy a new book to download on your Kindle, you might get a follow-up email with recommendations for similar books. That’s event-based marketing at work.

These sequences can be as simple as a welcome email for new customers or as complex as a multi-stage nurturing sequence with dozens of potential paths based on how the lead reacts (or doesn’t) to each new message.

Service Automation

Operational CRM also helps you automate customer service by giving your customers self-service options. This covers things like setting up online autopay or scheduling an appointment from their phone.

You can also automate service by setting up a help center or knowledgebase where customers can turn first to get their questions answered. Chatbots are also becoming more prevalent and can serve as the first line of contact in your customer service process.

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Types of CRMs

There are three different types of CRMs — collaborative, analytical and operational. Analytical and collaborative CRMs have more specialized features, while operational CRM systems are more well-rounded and offer a range of business functions suitable for many companies. So, if you’re new to CRM systems and thinking of buying one, operational CRM is a good place to start.

Some CRM solutions offer a mishmash of all three platforms that enable you to have the best of all worlds. However, it also means you’ll have to settle for platforms that have less specialized functions.

Operational vs. Analytical

These two CRM types are a little similar to one another, so it’s easy to get confused about which does what. Let’s break their differences down so you can understand better and make an informed decision.

For starters, operational CRM is for, you guessed it, handling a company’s day-to-day operations, and analytical CRM focuses on strategy and analytics, which aren’t directly related to customer interactions. Operational CRMs help mainly with customer-facing activities, while analytical CRM systems are about gaining client insights to improve your organization.

Operational CRM systems help optimize daily tasks through automation. Analytical CRMs, on the other hand, help sales, marketing and support teams enhance customer service.

So which one is the right one for you?

If you’re looking for help with customer interactions and support, go for operational CRMs. They’re also great if you’re new to CRM systems and provide functionalities that assist most business operations. Lead generation, lead conversion, contact management and data organization are some key facets with which operational CRM platforms can help.

However, if you’re looking to scale up how your organization leverages customer insights, analytical CRM is the one for you. It’ll help you make data-driven decisions, optimize marketing campaigns and improve customer support quality.

Analytical CRMs provide data-driven insights, while operational CRMs actually help implement those insights by making workflows better.

Operational vs. Collaborative

Collaborative CRM helps teams manage communication via their preferred channels. It helps employees share tasks, workloads and information about various deals and leads.

During the customer communication and query process, clients may interact with multiple clients over different communication channels. Collaborative CRM ensures that all communication — whether it involves multiple sales reps or spans over several days or weeks — remains smooth, fast and cohesive. This helps improve customer experience and satisfaction, leading to better client retention.

Yes, both operational and collaborative CRMs focus on client interactions. However, collaborative CRM focuses on driving engagement forward through stellar customer communication, while operational CRM aims to reduce inefficient processes, optimizing consumer interactions indirectly.

Trying to find an ideal type of CRM can get tricky and tiring, but its benefits outweigh its not-so-great parts. The right CRM system type will help:

• Make more efficient decisions, so you’re not lagging behind the competition.
• Provide a centralized platform and automate tasks.
• Divide tasks between various departments in an optimal manner.
• Deploy staff and resources effectively.
• Optimize inefficient processes so you can put forth higher-quality outputs.

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Primary Benefits

Operational CRM, offers several benefits that help streamline business operations and enhance customer interactions:

• Automate repetitive tasks: While data provides various interesting facets to work with, activities like data entry can get tedious sometimes. Operational CRM makes this ordeal easier by automating manual tasks so your teams can focus on stuff that matters, like building strong customer relationships. You can automatically send follow-up emails, create reports, score leads and schedule appointments.
• Enhance collaboration: Operational CRMs eliminate missed communication and information silos and help gather and access information from a single platform. This reduces the chances of data being lost or misrepresented, leading to more transparent communication. You also don’t have to switch back and forth between various platforms, leading to more seamless communication.
• Increase customer satisfaction: Better collaboration leads to more accurate datasets and insights about client behavior and trends in the long run. You can also reply to customer queries a lot quicker, ensuring increased customer satisfaction and profits for your organization. Live chat features provide even more touchpoint opportunities and help consumers stay engaged with your brand.
• Improve marketing processes: Gain laser-targeted focus on client data and use it to create buyer personas and launch campaigns that target similar customers. You can analyze customer demographics and buying trends to tailor marketing campaigns.
• Leverage cross-selling and upselling opportunities: Operational CRM records every sale, deal, customer lifecycle, project and query that goes on and offers the perfect opportunity to cross-sell and upsell. With access to communication history anywhere, on any device, sales reps can personalize strategies for each client.

All these advantages, along with valuable features like lead scoring, pipeline management and email marketing, help increase ROI and boost your company’s business.

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Next Steps

While operational CRM offers many benefits, it might or might not be the best system for you. However, it’s a good starting point to gauge what needs you have and which kind of CRM could help best fill them.

You can always move on to a collaborative or analytical CRM solution or pursue a platform that’s a mash-up of all three if that’s better for you. So, while trying to decide what’s best for you may be stressful, you can always improve your current system to fit your needs.

Still confused and unsure which CRM software to use? We’ve got you covered. Our free comparison report provides insight into top industry leaders, along with the features and benefits they offer.

Have you worked with operational CRM before? How can it benefit your business? Let us know in the comments below.