In the past 30 years, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, started to evolve and it has been an essential part of businesses since then in terms of emergence of cloud CRMs, early sales force automation systems, enterprise contact databases and so much more. Clearly, it has established a long history. Along with the continuing growth of mobile CRM apps, social CRMs, marketing automation solutions and Big Data, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) remains to develop to be able to serve new business needs today.

In fact, with at least $36 billion market the CRM market is bound to exceed Enterprise Resource Planning as the highest grossing enterprise software sub-segment, which makes it the fastest developing sort of business software.

Since CRM software is one of the most universal types of business software and an essential part of the software industry’s growth as a whole, it’s very significant to understand and comprehend how businesses truly benefit from this technology.

Who uses CRM?

To get an overview of what industries use customer relationship management software, we came up with this report.

Retail industry got the highest percentage of CRM usage with 18%.  Next is Business Services with 10%, followed by Technology with 10%. Second to the last is Banking/Insurance/Finance industry with 7% and falls at the bottom is Manufacturing industry which only uses 6% of CRM.

As you can see, the Retail industry appeared to be the top industry who uses CRM the most. This is because they benefit from using CRM data through suggesting interconnected products for upselling opportunities, logging loyalty points in their customer’s accounts and tracking purchase performance.

While the next four industries are likely to have bigger and more complicated purchases with the possibility that they’re catering to some consumers or other businesses. Although, it actually makes sense that software companies, insurance providers, equipment manufacturers, accountants, consultants and the like would want to keep an eye in all of their customer interactions and transactions over time, considering that it usually takes numbers of months and many people’s effort to make big purchases like those mention above. Also, once somebody buys one of these services or products, a CRM is still needed to track customer conversations, help invoices, contracts and requests.

Which department use CRM software?

Sales with 80% and Marketing with 50% are the top two departments that use CRM software most. Followed by Customer Service with over 40%, IT with 30% and Finance and HR tied in over 20%.

As shown above, Customer Service, which is often associated with “customer relationship management” falls only in third place on the list of departments that use CRM. However, 80% of CRM users are form the Sales and Marketing, which is not a surprise, given the fact that most of the importance of the CRM comes from the ability to track prospects turning into closed deals and sales.  While other departments which are HR, Finance, and IT also use CRM software in about 20-25%. HR professionals usually use CRM notes and call data to track employee performance and productivity of other departments. They may also use their companies CRM to keep track and monitor job applicants in replacement of implementing another system exclusively for recruiting. Finance is typically essential in accessibility to customer billing records and contracts, as well as predicting data based on existing sales trends stated in the CRM. And lastly, IT is frequently involved in CRM implementations, updates and integrations with other systems.

Most important in factors in purchasing the best CRM

Despite the cost that using a CRM would take, CRM users tend to care less about the price as only few of them would say that the price is the most important factor in the decision making in purchasing a CRM. Instead, people are keener on the functionality aspect. By far, it’s the most important factor in choosing a CRM. Next to functionality is the “ease of use” of the system. Given that there are a lot of parties that are included and are aggressively using the CRM every day, it’s important that companies would give importance that the software works as they need it to and in a spontaneous way.

Most used features of CRM

Most CRM users that we’ve asked have opted Calendar Management and Email Marketing as their most used features of a CRM. Also, there are 44% of CRM users asked who integrated their CRM with a marketing automation solution feature. Meanwhile, most of them wished that their CRM is provided with Social Media Functionality.

How effective is A CRM?

Over all, people are happy with their CRM being very effective. Very satisfied users come with 24% while the satisfied ones come with 47%. All in all, these are not a bad combination of numbers.

Conclusion

This Zoho CRM report shows how businesses use their customer relationship management (CRM) to manage their businesses well and measure its performance, preserve faithfulness among long term customers and improve sales as well as marketing efforts. This report also shows to us that CRM users are now influenced to also opt into the latest types of software, like social media monitoring and automation. And with this, we conclude that, new businesses will still embrace CRM technology as the economy continues to progress.