Tools that can boost conversion rates by 300%, sales by 29%, productivity by 34%—yes, these are powers of customer relationship management (CRM) systems. A technology that is the cornerstone in customer relationship marketing provides a helping hand for most sales and customer support teams. Still, a proper CRM system can assist in all the departments, including marketing, logistics, IT, finance, or other employees—better internal communication and increased productivity are just a few among many benefits. And even though there is a large variety, there are websites like Sofware World that provide software comparison and make choosing best lead management software an easy task.

A simple fact: 91% of businesses with ten or more employees use CRM software. The number witnesses that CRM can be beneficial for almost any company, despite its activity. Plenty of possibilities allow you to choose software that is the best fit for your business. A CRM tool helps in storing and organizing customer/prospect/lead contact information, identifying sales opportunities, scheduling appointments, recording issues, managing marketing campaigns, and so on. And all this information is centralized in one database that is conveniently available to any employee who might need any data.

CRM has a lot to offer. But how to get the best out of it? Here are the four best CRM practices that can boost your business success.

1. Live and targeted communication

Integrating a customer communication solution, such as Intercom, opens up the way for more efficient and successful customer relations. First of all—with Intercom, you can run targeted live communication: chat real-time with the customers on your website or Facebook. Integrated products also allow you to interact inside your web and mobile apps, by email, SMS, etc. A few numbers about live chats: one reply in a chat increases a visitor conversion to 50%. Besides targeted communication that pays off, another pro is convenience: all communication is in one place. That leads to smooth and effective communication with any customer. And we all know the power of positive customer experience, right?

Here is how it looks from the Intercom’s side:

Also, live communication helps you have a more detailed view of customers: not only salespeople but also the customer support team collects the information about the clients. So you double your resources of customer knowledge!

2. Efficient customer support

When you have a lot of information about your customers, it gets easy to meet their needs. Managing requests properly is one of the key factors in successful customer service relationships. Integrating a request management tool—e.g., Zendesk—is a huge help here. It allows seeing all the data about customers and their requests in one place—including who and how solved particular questions. It is super convenient if you want a smooth collaboration between customer service and sales teams. They both have access to the same data, everyone can see the newest information, and close the cases faster. So you can keep high-quality customer relation way easier.

3. Exploiting custom fields and tagging

Segmenting customers is another CRM practice bringing benefits for sales. For example, Teamgate CRM makes this process super easy, smart, and highly customizable. There is plenty of possibilities to exploit custom fields and tags functions. You can create them according to the company’s needs—some may find useful tagging by marital status, for others access to the client’s LinkedIn profile would be invaluable. Tags may refer to the customer lifecycle stage (lead, prospect, customer), action taken (filling contact form, downloading an ebook, making an order), interests, and so on. They are generally used for info that can quickly change. Meanwhile, custom fields are convenient for a more permanent data: name, phone number, birthday, employment status, social network profiles, membership duration, subscription type, company size, revenue (continue as desired). In Teamgate CRM, there are four main custom field categories—People, Companies, Leads, and Deals—which you can fulfill with further detailed info about each of them.

In any case, segmenting customers generously assists in reporting, filtering, searching, and—of course—targeted marketing. If you send an email with a personalized subject line, the open rate increases by up to 26%. What’s more, researches show that targeted emails generate around 58% of revenue for a company. Personalization is not the future of marketing—it is present already.

4. Leveraging analytics

Nowadays, marketing is data-driven. A CRM system is made to collect and organize customer data, so why not using this to the max? When you have a clear picture of your customer, it gets way simpler to present a customer-specific offer. And modern CRM tools are capable of generating data-driven decisions that are based on the most recent, real-time information. They can perform analysis (thus saving your valuable time)—so you can instantly see and interpret the metrics, spot the weakest points, and the most promising ones.

Any company can make the best fit

These customer relationship marketing best practices show that CRM tools bring benefits to companies of all sizes. Convenience, time efficiency, better customer relations, better customer experience, profitable marketing, bigger revenue—these are several advantages of how CRM can help. It is especially useful for small or medium companies that often need an effective solution for streamlining the processes. The mentioned practices testify that CRM can be customized and adapted precisely to each company’s needs—and this is an efficient way to achieve maximum results.