Managed customer relationship management (managed CRM) is the delivery mode of CRM software, which can be accessed directly from suppliers or through third-party service providers via the Internet. A fully managed CRM can be deployed, hosted, and managed on remote infrastructure and can be provided as a service to end-users or clients.
If you are involved or have knowledge in any type of sales-related activity, you will know how much information to track, which relates to your customers and their relationship with them. To meet the needs of customer service professionals, many different CRM products are provided. Although each quotation works somewhat differently, each quotation’s goal is to become the true source of CRM requirements, simplify your overall workflow, and ensure that nothing happens (whether it’s appointments or follow-up emails).
CRM software optimizes the process
- Email automation
- Remind sales staff to follow up and communicate
- Update contact information
- Attach additional contact information, such as a social media handle
- Direct incoming calls directly to the correct account holder
- Identify and track the status of qualified leads throughout the sales process.
- Track the performance of sales staff and individual employees.
- Make sure to follow a proven process and don’t let any calculation fall into a crack.
Types of CRM process
Before the advent of computers, sales agents and companies had been developing CRM for decades (perhaps centuries). It is easy to forget that CRM and CRM software exist separately.
Recognizing that CRM is a business activity or process and that CRM software is designed to manage and assist this activity can help people understand the functions that may be needed in the CRM software system.
Some of the features you will usually find in a CRM system include:
- Manage personal data: keep data related to customers and prospects
- Communication management: track the interaction of each sales team (and other teams) with customers or potential customers, and record the results and feedback
- Email management: Generally, a CRM software system can act as an email client to link incoming and outgoing email conversations to a specific person/company and be tracked.
- Transaction management: track ongoing or potential sales, and record statistical information about completion rates
- Forecast and forecast: Based on average sales statistics and completion rate, forecast potential sales. Or use artificial intelligence and machine learning to determine who is most likely to buy.
- Email list or newsletter management: regularly send messages to customers and prospects promptly
- Manage sales leads/sales leads: According to various terms such as geographic location, product experience, or transaction rate, distribute the sales leads information or information to the members of the sales team.
- Marketing-related functions: Whether you rely on advertising or social media marketing, it can make it easier for you to manage things from your core CRM system.
Best overall CRM hosting
Customer development and retention are critical to business success, and the information collected by customer relationship management software can be a gold mine. Except identifying potential new customers, business owners can also discover opportunities to sell or mutually sell new products and features. According to data from Market Research Future, in front of entrepreneurs, the global CRM software market will reach 35 billion U.S. dollars by 2023.
The best CRM software does not need to rely on huge spreadsheets or lengthy email links to illustrate sales or customer loyalty data but makes information accessible, structured, and comprehensive. The software improves sales, support, and marketing processes by automatically executing specific emails and alerting employees when they need to follow up and monitor account activity.
Although enterprise-level platforms such as Microsoft Dynamics or Salesforce require significant investment and complex hosting infrastructure, smaller organizations can use many free, low-cost, or open-source platforms through their web hosting accounts. For example, as our first choice for CRM hosting, SiteGround realizes the automated installation of CRM software through one-click scripts and prides itself on the best combination of its performance-centric infrastructure and friendly customer support.
SiteGround is well known in the web hosting industry, and it uses a hands-on approach to solve customer problems. In the first batch of hosts to isolate security accounts and Linux containers, the company also built internal solutions for caching, server monitoring, backup, brute force attack protection, issue tracking, and load balancing support.
Best self-hosted CRM
CRM software comes with various software packages. As mentioned earlier, premium services are usually hosted in the cloud, which can be hosted from a software provider or a larger network (such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure). For entrepreneurs who don’t want the trouble of installing, configuring, and maintaining CRM software, the hosting option is very convenient, albeit cheap.
Self-hosted software or software in a hosted environment can provide greater affordability, greater flexibility, and control over data. You do not need to download a monthly subscription fee, but you can download open-source software or pay a one-time license fee. You have more advantages to improve dashboards, features, and plugins and create the most efficient and useful platform for your specific business. You already have a virtual host for a branded website-why not add CRM software to the same space?
As an excellent customer service provider, SiteGround excels at all changes, so support agents can respond to chat messages and calls immediately. Customers will also receive a notification of their email ticket within 10 minutes, and support requests will be routed through the company’s load balancing in system to ensure that your problem finds an available agent with the appropriate experience. In addition to SiteGround, many other hosting service providers also provide enough computing space and functions to accommodate their CRM software implementation. A2 Hosting is known for its extremely fast servers, supported by solid-state drives 20 times faster than traditional storage devices. In addition to the list of SSDs and the usual web hosting features, GreenGeeks also offsets its energy consumption by returning three times the energy it consumes to the grid in the form of renewable energy.
vTiger CRM hosting
vTiger is one of the most famous options on the market today. The platform provides services for sales, marketing, and customer support through open-source, cloud-based mobile CRM products and serves the entire product portfolio of Fortune 500 companies and convenience stores.
The vTiger team was founded in 2004, started in the open-source field, and continued to build an active community of thousands of companies, users, developers, and other partners. The company’s software has been downloaded more than 4.5 million times on SourceForge, making it the most popular free and open-source CRM platform on the site.
By enhancing collaboration and addressing the entire customer journey, vTiger enables organizations to support automation, role-based access control, project management tools, mobile applications, plugins, and various plugins.
vTiger is the most popular CRM software installed on SiteGround servers, accounting for 37%. The software is active on the company’s enhanced servers, integrated Cloudflare content delivery network, and the latest secure versions of PHP and MySQL.
Outside of SiteGround, vTiger is available through several other virtual hosting providers, which provide customers with access to the Softaculous library of software installation scripts. A2 Hosting is once again one of the best vTiger hosts with its impressive infrastructure. InterServer is close to the top three in terms of emphasizing its affordability.
Open-source CRM hosting
Although the open-source option is usually free, you are responsible for setting up and installing everything, including the server on which it runs, which means you may need to find a CRM hosting provider. It doesn’t need to be too complicated, but this is a task you need to participate in. The only situation where you don’t choose to use a CRM hosting plan is if you intend to serve it locally or just make the application available; in addition, if you think you may need a little control during the operation, open-source CRM tools may lack support. When installing, setting up, configuring, and using, please double check to see the available options.
It is an open-source CRM software option that is currently used by more than 10,000 non-profit organizations and charities worldwide.
CiviCRM considers itself “a completely open-source CRM software” and “finds itself with high-quality, reliable and easy-to-use software features that can run seamlessly between different platforms and devices.” What does it mean?
CiviCRM gives you full control of the built-in CMS, or it can be integrated with Drupal, WordPress, or Joomla. CiviCRM features include:
- Contact management, with comprehensive records, which contains all relevant data for each potential customer you work with
- Since CiviCRM is open source, it can be fully configured and customized by developers
- Manage memberships, including subscription, payment, renewal, and target email
- Accounting integration and donation management, so you can track gifts, send affidavits and generate reports
- Case management will help to implement the workflow that best suits your organization’s needs
- Manage events, including potential customer attendance records
- Email marketing and promotional activities to promote your organization and your work
- Peer-to-peer fundraising function for personal events
Reports-you can choose from 40 standard reports, or you can create your own reports
XRMS is an open-source CRM software option with features that support sales force automation, business intelligence tools, and phone line integration (as well as third-party applications and tools).
XRMS is no different from other CRM applications, but you know that the software does not provide support. If you find yourself in trouble or need help, the best option is to consult the general community for help (although obviously, there is no guarantee that you will get an answer).
However, we do not want to prevent you from using XRMS. It is one of the more powerful CRM tools with well-designed free features. Unless you are satisfied with the technology and let things work for you, move elsewhere.
It is an open-source CRM software suite with mobile CRM, social customer relationship management, and gaming (i.e., similar games) functions.
Zurmo’s goal is not to beat other CRM software options by charging a lot of features-its the goal is to provide a product that is easy to use and customize and can adapt to almost all use cases.
One potential problem with open-source products is that future updates may imprison existing features. Zurmo prides itself on using a test-based approach when building or improving existing codebases to reduce future compatibility issues.
Zurmo was created by developers who used to work for proprietary CRM software companies.
Zurmo’s feature set includes tools that can be used for the following purposes:
- Contact management
- Event management
- Track transaction
- Gamification for end-users
- Reporting
- Custom workflow
- Marketing automation, which is the process of automating what the salesperson did before (such as setting reminders, email notifications, etc.)
- Product management
- Internationalization (transaction with other currencies)
- Zurmo is mobile-friendly, so you can use it on the go.
If you need other features, Zurmo comes with a RESTful API that allows you to perform operations such as integration with Google Maps, currency conversion tools, and email archiving.
How CRM software increases your growth?
As the CRM market is rapidly growing and expanding, software programs are becoming more and more complex to enable companies to gain an advantage in an increasingly competitive environment.
Collecting and organizing data from multiple sources into actionable insights is a daunting task that requires precision, accuracy, and durability-so why not find a reputable, scalable CRM system provider to eliminate opportunities for human error and enable your business to invest its workforce elsewhere?
Companies that know the importance of customer satisfaction and user experience through enhanced ability to identify, understand and help customers will benefit from the benefits provided by CRM software
Comprehensive data organization: With all the information related to your customers, their accounts, and their interactions, you will not miss any profit opportunities.
Improve communication: Since every customer service representative or sales agent has to access customer information, they can consistently provide the same high support level.
Improve efficiency and automation: Solve customers’ and employees’ weaknesses by automating difficult tasks and ensuring that no steps are skipped.
Better sales performance and profitability: By identifying inefficiencies or weaknesses in the conversion channel, quickly measure potential customers’ viability and increase the conversion rate. In addition, you can view the account history of existing customers to identify new opportunities.
Once you decide to integrate the CRM solution into your business workflow, be sure to take the time to evaluate the usability, support, and features of each platform and how the components support your goals. Evaluate your technical resources to understand whether it is easy to afford to implement, configure, and maintain self-hosted open-source software or cloud-based SaaS systems. After creating all the content, be prepared to reap the rewards of enhanced customer interaction!