Customer relationship management (CRM) software is a great 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, such as operational and analytical.

So what are the differences between operational and analytical CRM software? An operational 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.

Operational vs Analytical: Key Differences and Features

Operational CRM and analytical CRM utilize the same approach but address different problems. The major 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. You can organize the information you base your decisions on and maximize how you sell, market, and retain customers. The three basic 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.
  • Organize 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 makes inquiries about a certain 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.
  • Organize marketing collateral for accessibility.
  • Reach out to prospects based specific triggers.
  • Target prospects with content appropriate for their marketing funnel stage.
• Service automation: The service automation feature helps your organization provide better service and improve relationships after every customer interaction. By providing consistently excellent service, you can increase customer retention. With service automation, you can:
• • Identify customers who are encountering difficulties and provide assistance.
  • 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

In every organization, a large amount of information flows throughout daily – but this information isn’t valuable until insights are extracted from it. Analytical CRM solves this problem by looking at customer information from various touch points so you can 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 certain dates, and analyzing 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 communication channels are frequently used by customers, 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 that is aligned with your organization’s goals and values.

Which Type Is Better For My Business?

Both types are useful in different ways, but maximizing CRM features depends on how suitable the software is for your organization and its needs.

Operational CRM is better for companies who aren’t familiar with CRM yet, since it can cover the basic areas most businesses need assistance on. It is mainly used for contact management, lead generation, lead conversion, and data organization during a customer’s lifecycle.

Good for: Businesses trying to manage customer interaction and support. 

Analytical CRM would fit your business better if you’re interested in obtaining and making use of customer information. It works especially well in streamlining back-end functions: helping management make data-driven decisions, understanding marketing campaign efficacy, and improving the overall quality of customer support.

Good for: Businesses looking to scale up by leveraging customer data. 

Benefits of Choosing the Right CRM

Most customer relationship management features and systems are customizable according to each organization, so thinking about CRM systems as “one size fits all” technology would defeat its actual purpose. Choosing a platform that fits your business exactly will allow you to reap benefits such as:

• Efficient decision-making: Businesses that take too long in making decisions will always lag behind their competition. A CRM system automates tedious tasks and provides you with information at a glance, so you can make better decisions faster and with more ease.
• Optimized task segregation: CRM software can divide and prioritize work among your organization’s departments, whether it’s your sales force, the marketing department, or even upper management. The software will allow you to create a strategy so you can deploy your staff and resources effectively.
• Streamlined processes: Inefficient data collection, integration, and reporting processes can be removed from your system when you successfully implement the right platform. CRM can assist you in identifying and trimming down what isn’t working, so you can deliver higher-quality outputs.

Work Efficiently with Commence

Commence Cloud CRM can help you automate your business operations and maintain great relationships with your customers. Commence provides automation and analysis that can increase your sales from 14% – 21% in the first nine months. Try out the award-winning Commence platform today.