Companies that have not deployed a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution within their organisation tend to undervalue the benefits offered by effective CRM software. Functionalities and features of CRM software vary depending on the vendor but all CRM solutions should be able to assist in identifying valid prospects and valuable customers as well as planning and successfully implement marketing campaigns toand capture and resolve customer queries.

In fact, most CRM solutions, including products which are offered for free, provide support for personalising relationships with existing customers, therefore, enabling companies to focus on most valuable clients and target them effectively. In addition advanced CRM software is expected to provide ability to handle relatively large databases, providing instant access to a 360° view on clients and partners.

No perfect CRM solution can be found in the market for different enterprises have different needs. On the other hand, some vendors provide software that is highly customisable in terms of features it offers with different independent modules being upgraded at no additional cost.

Features of CRM Software

Features like leads and opportunities tracking, customer segmentation, ability to add custom fields and sales team performance analysis are common in software versions intended for both SMEs and large corporations.

Experts often point at three key features a fully-functional CRM solution should provide:

1. Operational CRM

2. Analytical CRM

3. Collaborative CRM

These features of CRM solutions refer to software’s ability to provide complete front-end support for various sales, service and marketing activities, process large data volumes applying different analytical methods and according to different factors to provide reliable analysis of future and existing trends (Analytical CRM); functionality to establish direct company-client relationships/communications that do not involve any third party as a mediator (Collaborative CRM).

In addition, a CRM solution should also include basic features like:

• Support for automated calls (plus ability to display caller information for incoming calls)

• Support for multiple users accessing independently and simultaneously a particular record(s) in a certain database(s)

• Reliable data encryption and data backup

• Contacts and calendar management functionality

• Document sharing, plus customizable user access levels to avoid reading, copying, changing, deleting, etc., of shared documents by an unauthorised user(s)

• Functionality allowing users to import and attach data in various file formats

SaaS CRM Solutions

A popular fallacy exists that remotely hosted CRM solutions offer less functionality while being just an inexpensive alternative to locally hosted CRM software. Recently, a growing number of CRM Software vendors are offering Software-as-a-Service solutions that provide feature-rich software in the cloud, which greatly reduces business costs associated with software licensing, hardware and software support, etc. Such CRM solutions are suitable for small businesses that cannot afford to have highly paid software specialists on their payroll, while taking advantage of all features of a cloud-based solution can offer.

Some CRM platforms, especially cloud-based ones, start to evolve into fully-functional collaboration platforms, featuring social media integration with popular social media services. Gesture and voice recognition is another feature of some, still in their beta version, CRM solutions, which is a method to significantly increase the speed of software-to-operator communication. Other companies bet on integrated messaging systems or embed various modules that are designed to serve the needs of a particular organisation, which makes it very hard to list all the features good CRM solutions can provide.

CRM solutions offered by numerous competing products, guarantee a healthy level of competition in this software niche, which is good news for businesses of all sizes. A basic rule when assessing a CRM solution is to look not for excessive features but for software modules that are highly customizable. Free, inexpensive and highly-priced CRM solutions offer comparable features but customisation can make the difference.