Customer relationship management (CRM) software is an excellent foundation for growing your business and empowering it with the functions to run smoothly. However, no two CRM systems are designed alike; each software can be categorized according to its specialty, operational and analytical.

So what are the differences between operational and analytical CRM software? A functional CRM tackles processing and day-to-day operations, while an analytical CRM handles strategy, analytics, and other functions that aren’t directly related to customer interactions. This article will discuss both types of CRM and how your organization can choose which type is best for you.

What is Operational and Analytical CRM?

Operational CRM is a tool that allows you to sync the processes and tasks. The management and teams can efficiently coordinate while using this tool. This CRM tool prioritizes and streamlines various tasks. 

Tasks between multiple teams can also be synced for the collection and effective organization of essential business data. It can help companies process day-to-day operations and provide effective customer service through the extracted data.

On the other hand, analytical CRM tools offer a wide range of benefits for back-office support. The analytical CRM tools are used for dealing with the back-office processes. 

For strategic development and analysis, these tools are used. These tools do not directly concern customers and are more helpful for backend processing.

Operational vs Analytical: Key Differences and Features

Operational CRM and analytical CRM utilize the same approach but address different problems. The significant difference is that operational CRM is focused on customer-facing processes, while analytical CRM is more attuned to developing the organization’s systems through customer insights.

Operational CRM

The primary goal of an operational CRM is to reduce the time you spend on repetitive business tasks through automation. It provides essential support for these tasks so you can take better care of your customers. 

As a result, you can organize the information you base your decisions on and maximize how you sell, market, and retain customers. The three primary features are sales automation, marketing automation, and service automation.

• Sales automation: Operational CRM allows you to incorporate various efforts and automate your entire sales process. Instead of being preoccupied with administrative work or data entry, you can nurture relationships with customers since you can:
  • Auto-populate customer profiles from internal and external sources
  • Integrate the database from multiple applications to reduce data entry requirements
  • Organise your leads and automate a lead-nurturing workflow.

• Marketing automation: With marketing automation, engaging prospects and customers becomes a breeze. For example, when a customer inquiries about a specific product, marketing automation can target them with relevant ads afterwards. Marketing automation will help you scale your marketing efforts. Some of the things you can do are:
  • Send leads through an automated email campaign.
  • Organise marketing collateral for accessibility
  • Reach out to prospects based on specific triggers
  • Target prospects with content appropriate for their marketing funnel stage

• Service automation: Service automation helps your organisation provide better service and improve relationships after every customer interaction. By delivering consistently excellent service, you can increase customer retention. With service automation, you can:
  • Identify customers who are encountering difficulties and assist.
  • Automatically send helpful resources related to a customer’s inquiry.
  • Send follow-up messages to customers.
  • Keep a record of a customer’s history for faster case resolution.

Analytical CRM

A large amount of information flows daily in every organization, but this information isn’t valuable until insights are extracted from it. 

Analytical CRM solves this problem by looking at customer information from various touchpoints to evaluate your business’s performance.

This helps upper management, marketing, sales, and support teams find areas for improving customer service. Here are some key areas where analytical CRM can help your organization with:

• Customer retention: You can maintain a good relationship with existing customers by automatically scheduling appointments, sending special promotions or deals on specific dates, and analysing additional information from third-party sources to improve your understanding of their needs.
• Customer acquisition: You can discover which leads are good opportunities to pursue, which ones are more likely to make a purchase, or who needs to be contacted with more information.
• Data management: You can find actionable insights, including which customers frequently use communication channels, how many people open the emails you send, and what kind of content they prefer to see.
• Report generation: You can spend less time manually creating a report on your findings. With a few clicks, you can program the software to generate customer, market, service, and channel analysis to help you create a customer relationship management strategy aligned with your organisation’s goals and values.

Which CRM Is Right For My Business

Recent data from Gartner indicates that by 2021, companies will be spending more on CRM software than any other kind of enterprise software. This underscores the imperative need for CRM in your company’s day-to-day operations.

If you’re new to CRM, you might be wondering what it’s all about. Well, CRM, or customer relationship management, is software that keeps all of your prospect and customer data in one place. Essentially, you can go to one dashboard and get an idea for the pulse of your sales, marketing, customer service, and other core operations. 

CRM is essential because it can be used to automate many of the daily tasks you’ve probably got your team doing. This frees them up to do other things, all while giving you valuable data that can help grow your business. CRM is essential to the life of your business!

It can be used to store your contact information, including data for prospects and customers; manage your marketing campaigns, and identify sales opportunities. 

In addition, CRM software can do a fantastic variety of things, such as handle email blasts, schedule appointments, handle customer care, collect data, identify and predict trends, and much more.

While you might already know a bit about CRM, now you’re ready to dive in. Most people are unaware that there are various types of CRM. There are three kinds of CRM, and each type has its very own purpose. 

CRM is beautifully dynamic and designed to work for you, and in this article, we’re going to give you a comprehensive look at the three kinds of CRMs out there, who they are designed for, and what they can do for you. 

If you’re looking to get the most from CRM, then you need to know the ins and outs of each kind of CRM.

Operational CRM Examples

When searching for the proper operational CRM for your needs, it’s essential to find a platform that will fit all of your needs. There are plenty of options out there, but these are the ones we find to be among the most popular and effective for businesses of all sizes.

Salesforce

When it comes to operational CRM, Salesforce is a no-brainer. It’s been around awhile, and it’s used by many. Salesforce presents a comprehensive CRM solution with many, many integrations and options for customization. Salesforce task management is second to none, offering advanced automation that quickly benefits the company. However, Salesforce is a bit of a beast, and it does take some training to master it. Luckily, Salesforce provides Trailhead online lessons to show you how to get the most from the platform. There are four tiers that range in price from $25 per user per month to $300 per month. Although Salesforce might be too expensive for some, it’s a hard-hitting operational CRM option.

Salesforce Einstein

When it comes to analytical CRM, you can’t go wrong with an intuitive platform. That’s where Salesforce Einstein takes the cake. Einstein uses Salesforce predictive technology to adapt as your date begins coming in. 

While it’s pretty powerful at the start, the longer you use it, the more intelligent Einstein gets. If you want to track KPI, metrics, and identify opportunities, then you’ll love having Einstein as your analytical CRM platform. Plus, it features a storytelling feature that lets you seamlessly take advantage of automatically created graphics and slides. The biggest downside of Einstein is likely to cost, as it starts at $50 per user per month. Still, its machine learning-driven tools can revolutionize your business.

If your company isn’t quite a start-up anymore and now has data rolling in, then you know it’s time to put that data to use. Keeping spreadsheets and notes to try to create actionable insights is exhausting! On the other hand, if you want to get the most from your data, then an analytical CRM platform is what you want. We’ve tested the platforms listed above and can attest that they are all solid systems. The key is to find what fits your budget, team size, and precise needs in terms of features.

Your clients expect that they can switch from email to phone to chat without repeating themselves, but that’s difficult if you don’t have the right system in place. A collaborative CRM makes it possible to promote that seamless experience and improve client satisfaction with a friction-free interaction.

The right CRM for your company depends on many factors, but hopefully, this article has given you insight into which category makes the most sense for you and your business.

Martin Gessner

Martin Gessner is the Founder of Focus on Force.

He has spent over 10 years working in various Salesforce roles including business analyst, project manager, consultant and solutions architect. Along the way he has earned twelve certifications, published "The Salesforce Career Playbook", and helps Salesforce professionals learn more about Salesforce, develop their career and prepare for certifications.