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 For example, according to a Capterra CRM user survey, 47% of respondents cited their CRM as a major factor in customer retention. That same percentage also cited their CRM as helping to increase customer satisfaction. When potential and current customers are happy, they’re likely to not only buy your product but also refer others to your business.

 Customer relationship management systems can be divided into three capability categories of CRM: operational, analytical, and collaborative. Although every CRM should have these capabilities, different companies will lean more towards a specific one depending on their needs.

 Operational CRMs assist with managing the daily activities of company teams. For example, rather than reps having to manually create customer records, the CRM automatically inserts customer contact information into the platform. An operational CRM works well for companies with short sales cycles as these CRMs are extremely efficient.

 Analytical CRMs organize and manage large amounts of data to gain insights on the customer experience. For example, analyze past buying behavior within your CRM to determine what campaigns to roll out for certain customer segments. An analytical CRM is great for companies with heavy competition and multiple customer data points.

 Collaborative CRMs connect communication and data across a company’s sales, marketing, and support departments. This integration makes for a seamless customer experience. For example, when support members can see the conversations that sales reps are having with customers, they can offer better service that matches the reps’ messaging. A collaborative CRM is an excellent option for companies to manage pools of data across departments.

 Beyond capabilities, there are many factors that go into choosing a CRM. Do you want to build your own or use a tool that’s already created? What are the goals of your CRM? How much can you realistically spend on the software? All of these are important considerations as the costs of choosing the wrong CRM are high.

 Customer relationship management software can be used by a number of departments, including sales, marketing, and customer service. Here’s how the tool is typically implemented in each department.

 A sales CRM has become an essential tool for sales departments as customer activities, conversations, and tasks are spread out across sales teams. Use it to manage your sales pipeline, monitor deals, and track customer interactions and progress. Contact management, sales tracking, and CRM reports tools are all in one place with a sales CRM, so you don’t have to implement multiple point solutions.

 A sales CRM is used by both sales reps and sales managers but in different ways. Sales reps use CRMs to communicate directly with customers, while managers use the tool to monitor and assess performance data for their team.

 For example, sales reps can connect with customers by phone or email, manage tasks and appointments, and keep an eye on whether or not they’re going to meet their sales quota. Sales managers can use the CRM to keep tabs on team performance and activities, complete sales forecasting, and create/review reports to see what targets were met and what areas of the pipeline need improvement.

 If you’re with a marketing department, you need to know as much as you can about customer needs. And if you’re with customer service, you need a way to quickly and easily access and answer customer questions. This is where a CRM comes in.

 Marketers use a CRM to learn about leads and customers, so they are able to more effectively target them with campaigns. For example, with a CRM, you can segment customers by geography or industry. The software also allows marketers to track the effectiveness of their campaigns and determine how much revenue their marketing efforts are bringing in.

 Support reps can also use a CRM to manage all customer interactions on one platform — track tickets, make phone calls, and review customer satisfaction metrics. No matter where customer interactions are coming from (social media, live chat, phone, email, etc.), your CRM should be able to create tickets based off of each interaction, so you can solve customer problems faster and more efficiently. You can also make better solution recommendations after reviewing past interactions.

 Whether for sales, marketing, or customer support, a CRM is a valuable tool for all activities that involve the customer. Learn how to make the most of your CRM (specifically for sales) with the following resources:

 Customer relationship management is not a sprint — it’s a marathon. It takes time to develop strong customer relationships and requires a focus on improving the customer experience. However, combined with the right strategies and software, you can both efficiently and effectively manage customer relationships.

 Of course, we’d like you to consider choosing Zendesk Sell as your sales CRM software. Beyond managing your customer information, our tool also provides valuable insights to improve your pipeline, sales performance, conversations, and processes.

 Over the past 30 years, the term customer relationship management (CRM) has evolved with the times—what was once seen as a tool designed to provide visibility into a company’s sales pipeline has morphed into something much more powerful.

 At its heart, CRM is about managing current and potential customer relationships by collecting and analyzing data. So while sales teams have long used CRM systems for tracking and evaluating leads, they’re now just one of many organizations that rely on the technology.

 “CRM as the industry thinks of it is a tool that was built for salespeople, but the new world of CRM software is not built for salespeople,” says Jon Aniano, vice president of product for Zendesk. “It’s built for the customer, and it’s built for customer experience.”

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 That emphasis on the customer, and specifically a business’s relationship with that customer, has pushed CRM systems from their sales niche to a starring role in the customer journey. CRM’s key strength is its ability to provide a single, unified view of each customer, a direct result of how it can collect data from multiple tools and, critically, provide the kind of insights that can fuel proactive support.

 So while sales teams still benefit from CRM technology, other teams derive just as much benefit from it, including customer service, product development, and marketing. And importantly, a CRM solution can help break down internal silos, enabling teams to collaborate more effectively and serve customers holistically.

 In this guide we’ll examine how CRMs help companies build relationships with customers, how that effort can improve business outcomes and customer satisfaction, as well as some techniques for managing the process.

 Why should you build relationships with your customers? Simply put, if your business doesn’t, your competitors will. One of the driving forces in modern consumerism is the rising expectations of customers, who increasingly demand that companies provide an omnichannel support experience. When they reach out to a business, they want to be able to do it from any channel—phone, messaging, email, chat, etc.—and they want to know that the company serving has a clear picture of who they are.

 By nurturing relationships with their customers, businesses drive engagement and loyalty. This is where the different categories of CRM systems come into play. “We’ve got this exploding world of public social media where basically the customer is in control of the conversation, they’re in control of their own experience, and they have incredible expectations about what having a relationship with a company means,” Aniano says. “We’ve gone to this place where companies know they live or die by the actual long-term relationships they establish with their customers.”

 As a result, Aniano says, the cloud-based CRM has become the place where the entire customer relationship—which is composed of customer interactions, or conversations—lives. Those conversations can come from a host of channels, including social media, email, and more. “It’s a place where those conversations are instrumented, where things are recorded and referenced, where a company can now truly understand what value it’s delivering to customers and how it can best maintain that relationship over time,” Aniano says.

 The understanding gleaned from CRM doesn’t just help large companies manage customer relationships—it can also play to the strengths of small businesses, highlighting their innate advantages in providing personalized service to consumers. “Small businesses today are in a world that is more challenging, more daunting, than it has ever been in the past,” Aniano says. “The opportunity for a small business today is to provide a level of relationship that cannot exist between the business and the customer—that cannot exist with a large company.”

 CRMs are particularly well suited to modern business, Aniano says, because many successful companies have transitioned—or are in the process of making the change—from focusing on simply increasing sales to recurring revenue models, such as with software-as-a-service (SaaS). So when future revenue depends on not only maintaining a relationship with a customer but enhancing the customer experience, having a CRM in place becomes crucial.

 “That initial sale is one of the least important interactions you’ll have with a customer over time,” Aniano says. “So CRM implementations have moved from incentivizing sales and creating sales efficiency to delivering the best customer experience possible and maximizing the long-term relationship with the customer.”

 And the wealth of data that a cloud-based CRM centralizes for companies opens up opportunities for greater sales efficiency, proactive support, and targeted marketing efforts, says Shawna Wolverton, senior vice president of product for Zendesk.

 “One of the greatest benefits of CRM is that everyone can be on the same page about where you are with your customers—you can push out information, you don’t have to call,” Wolverton says. “It’s not a phone call, ‘How’s the deal going?’ You can log on, see the stages of all your opportunities. As a manager, especially, it’s being able to get a high-level view—‘Yep, all the customer issues are being taken care of, all of the leads are being owned and addressed’—and to have that all in one place and to have the ability to focus on other things and set up rules for when you need to pay attention. For example, maybe you don’t care until the big deal closes. Maybe you want to know if a case has been open for three days and no one’s touched it. With a CRM, you can set rules so you don’t have to keep an eye on how your business is running—you only need to pay attention to when things are going off the rails.”

 It can be tempting to think of CRM software as a solution in itself. But as Wolverton notes, if the techniques your business uses in managing customer relationships is convoluted and inefficient, no software tool will fix those problems.

 “The thing to think about with CRM is that it is as good as you decide to make it,” Wolverton says. “The data that goes into a CRM is the data that comes out, so you need to make sure that for the people who are closest to your customers, it’s really easy for them to update the CRM. How many conversations start with, ‘Are you still at this address?’ You want the people on the front line to be sure that customer data is good, but then having data sit there is not particularly interesting—you need to get insights from that data with great reporting tools. You need to also take action based on that customer data—so rules and processes that make the best use of that data.”

 Beyond making it easy for employees to update customer data in a CRM, companies need to think about whether a CRM can automate routine tasks. The time savings gained from automation can then be redirected into more proactive, hands-on support.

 “With CRMs, you think of customer service—a lot of it is about people wanting refunds, or they want to update and change something, and those things often need approvals,” Wolverton says. “How can you automate some of those processes? You don’t want to bring your junk drawer into your CRM solution. It’s a good time to look at your business and the systems that are working and the ones that maybe aren’t. Think of all the places you have pain, and see if maybe there’s a solve for that in your new CRM system.”

 Meanwhile, managing customer relationships over time requires clear, actionable reporting about the entire customer journey, from prospects in the sales pipeline to common pain points for current customers.