19 Essential CRM Features for Your Business

Customer relationship management (CRM) gives companies a complete view of their customers, which helps businesses serve customers better. They can do this thanks to CRM features that pull together the most up-to-date customer data and provide insights that make teams like sales, marketing, service, and commerce more productive and efficient.

As CRM technology has advanced, the number of available CRM features has grown as well. This is great news for businesses that want to provide better customer experiences, but it can be a challenge to understand exactly which CRM tools serve a specific organisation’s needs. To help, we’ve prepared this list of the essential CRM features.

What we’ll cover:

• List of CRM features

1. Contact management
2. Single source of truth
3. AI (artificial intelligence)
4. Reports, dashboards, and analytics
5. Cloud-based CRM
6. Mobile CRM
7. Automation, workflows, and approvals
8. Collaboration tools
9. Scalability, flexibility, and customisation
10. Sales forecasting
11. Sales opportunity management
12. Product level quotes and order management
13. Omni-channel support
14. Customer self-service
15. Field service management
16. Campaign management
17. Journey orchestration
18. Third-party integrations
19. Security

• How to pick the right CRM features for your needs

Contact management is a core CRM function that helps businesses access and organise important information about their current and potential customers. This can include email addresses submitted online, phone numbers gathered in meetings, or websites and social media profiles available online. It’s also a way to track leads as they become customers, and beyond.

Contact management can also provide calendar and follow-up reminders, or the ability for anyone to see detailed notes on interactions a customer had with the service team. With a complete picture of up-to-date information and activity, teams have more context around each customer.

There are many teams within a business — each of which might use different applications and systems. Sometimes that information isn’t even in a system, but saved in a private spreadsheet, post-it notes, or on the personal laptop of a past employee who's left the company. When customer data is siloed in different places, it can be hard to keep up with the latest information and deliver personalised experiences. That’s where CRM software can help.

CRM brings that information together in a unified customer profile, unlocking trapped data and letting any team member quickly access the information they need. That means sales teams can see when a customer interacts with a marketing campaign, or if they have a service case open. Uniting this data lets you serve customers better. It also means that your AI can learn from a complete view of your customer, helping generate predictions and content grounded in your data.

The introduction of AI CRM has changed the way all departments within companies are able to serve customers by increasing productivity and providing business insights. There are many ways that AI in CRM can make your teams more productive.

Predictive AI identifies patterns based on past events to predict future outcomes. It can help identify which deals are most likely to close and which are at risk, as well as the best channels and messages to use when marketing to your audience. Generative AI within CRMs use customer data to create customised sales emails, knowledge articles for service teams, product descriptions in multiple languages, marketing campaigns tailored to specific audiences, and more. Conversational AI, like Einstein Copilot, enables employees to interact with artificial intelligence using the same natural language they would use with a colleague.

The AI in your CRM is only as good as the data it is grounded on. While there are public models available, they don’t understand your specific business needs, or your customers. A better option is using a platform like Data Cloud, which securely unites and understands your customer data, then uses your customer behaviour to identify trends and make suggestions. It can also take action for you, generating lead follow-up plans, creating more engaging campaigns, and closing service cases faster.

The right CRM uses trusted AI, which is equipped with important safeguards. Zero data retention ensures information submitted to‌ — ‌and gathered from‌ — an AI engine exists only within the scope of the specific task. AI toxicity detection is another tool, which identifies toxic language and behaviour, filtering it out to provide appropriate responses. Data masking helps companies create modified versions of sensitive data, keeping the real versions in the right hands while still providing relevant generated content that is actionable for your teams.

Before you can act on customer data, you first need to understand it. CRM reports and dashboards provide a clear view of important information and analytics, displaying what’s needed to improve customer relationships and boost sales. Customisation of these tools is another great CRM feature. Each team, or even individual employee, can decide the metrics that are most important to them, and personalise their reports and dashboards to fit their needs.

Across teams, CRM-provided analytics can shed light on customer preferences, changes in purchasing behaviour, potential issues, and upsell opportunities. CRMs offer data visualisations that clearly segment customers and analyse their interactions with your business. When you add AI, like Tableau, to analytics capabilities, you can use machine learning to go even deeper to identify trends and use them to grow your business.

Modern customer relationship management systems are often called cloud-based CRMs because they work on remote servers. This is different than on-premise CRMs, which store their data on-site on local hardware. Cloud-based CRM is an example of SaaS (software as a service) software, which enables seamless remote access by its users. It also reduces startup and long-term costs since the CRM vendor ‌is responsible for performing all preparations, updates, and security monitoring.

A major benefit of using a cloud-based CRM is that whether your employees are in the office, on the road, or checking in from home, they can access their customer information from anywhere. Mobile CRM lets you look up all of your insights, data, and customer profiles from any device, including smartphone, tablet, or laptop. Even better, if your CRM has a built-in collaboration tool like Slack, all of your teams can see their data right there in the flow of work, without leaving the app.

Companies that can automate repetitive tasks not only increase productivity, but free up their employees to focus on higher-value projects. Automations let CRMs perform specific tasks in response to an action that has taken place. For example, CRMs can send an app notification if a customer looks at a product but doesn’t purchase, or follow up on an unanswered email after a pre-determined amount of time. The best CRMs have automation that feels human, sending customised notes or check-ins at an established cadence.

CRMs can help companies create workflows and automate tasks that keep teams moving forward. For instance, weekly reminders can be sent to employees, reminding them to fill out items like status sheets or update customer notes. They can also provide submission form workflows for employees to submit when submitting cross-team requests for needs like IT help or legal review.

When team members work from the same single source of truth, they can collaborate and communicate more effectively. Tools like Slack help that happen by integrating with your CRM to facilitate seamless teamwork, search, summarisation, task automation, and workflow builders. And with technology like conversational AI, employees can use the same language they would use with a co-worker to ask their CRM questions and direct it to take actions.

CRMs come with a wide range of features. The right CRM will allow your organisation to pick the ones that matter most to you, with the flexibility to add or subtract features as your needs evolve and scale.

The same applies to the number of employees who use CRM. It’s essential to choose a CRM that lets you add seats as you grow, rather than locking you in to a number. You may be looking the best CRM for small business today, but make sure that same CRM can adapt as your needs change.

In addition to enabling businesses to manage and optimise sales today, they can also project future performance. Sales forecasting assists with lead qualification and offers a better view of sales in relation to a team’s established goals. This also gives managers visibility into how individuals are performing so they can identify challenges and opportunities.

Also called pipeline management, sales opportunity management supports organisations in tracking opportunities throughout their lifecycle. This lets them optimise their interactions with potential buyers. Tools like Sales Cloud help companies capture and manage leads, organise sales across territories, track performance, and identify the next best steps using predictive AI.

CRMs help businesses keep an active inventory of their products and provide consistent quotes across engagements. With tools like Revenue Cloud, sales teams can reduce operational costs and quickly send quotes that reflect company policies. CRMs with these features can help sellers with guided selling and configuration process flows. They can also increase deal size by recommending compatible upgrades and add-ons. At the same time, they can also reduce churn by sending automated renewal quotes and midterm change notifications to existing customers.

Customers have become accustomed to having the same experience with a brand across various channels, such as phone, chat, social media, and email. A CRM with omni-channel support, like Service Cloud, provides customer reps with a comprehensive view of a customer’s history across all channels. This means service agents can use knowledge of past purchases and service calls to deliver an informed and elevated experience, and even identify potential upsell opportunities

CRMs that assist customers through self-service tools are a win-win. Not only do they free up time for employees, but 61% of customers prefer to find solutions to simple issues on their own. With the help of a CRM, you can create a knowledge base that provides quick, useful answers to common questions.

Bots and generative AI can also provide assistance to customers with personalised answers that are based on company service knowledge, as well as a specific customer’s data and history. These tools can even customise responses based on a customer’s location and language.

One of the benefits of a mobile CRM is that it’s always available to employees on the go. This is particularly useful to field service agents who spend their time working remotely. CRM field service tools make sure that your employees have all the information they need before making a service call. This includes AI-powered briefs that pull in everything they need to know about past customer interactions, issue history, and contract details on what falls within the scope of their visit.

These features can also provide easy-to-access knowledge bases for troubleshooting issues, as well as auto-generated post-call reports that are accurate and comprehensive. With the help of CRM and AI, teams can optimise their service call scheduling and dispatches, and even forecast and plan needs based on their data.

A CRM should make marketing your products easier and more effective. With tools like Marketing Cloud, businesses can schedule campaigns, track ROI, and view analytics from a single interface. They can also build out segmented audiences based on data and previous behaviours, then create targeted campaigns that are likely to resonate with those groups.

Journey orchestration allows your marketing team to segment customers by various traits and needs, then personalise a more meaningful journey as they engage with your business. This is all made possible by using the customer data captured in your CRM, and can be enhanced by predictive and generative AI tools. For example, AI can generate email subject lines and body copy that are customised to each recipient. It can then determine the right time and frequency to reach out, as well as include the product recommendations that are most likely to engage an individual customer.

We already know that when customer data can flow between teams, businesses can provide better customer experiences. This applies to external apps just as much as it does to the apps that are used within your CRM. Third-party integration tools, like MuleSoft, ensure that data can flow easily from one system to the next, giving team members access to insights across CRM, ERP, HR, accounting, and other apps. By combining these integrations with a data platform, all of this information from various sources can be harmonised into one single view of your customer that’s available across your teams.

CRMs are trusted with sensitive customer data and proprietary company information, so it’s essential that they are safeguarded against data leaks. Any CRM you choose must come with the latest security features, which they continually update. This will ensure that your business remains secure, maintains the trust of its customers, and follows local regulations. Role-based views, which let companies set security classifications for each job, are another way to keep your data safe.

Before choosing a CRM, businesses should have a strong understanding of their options regarding features. CRMs can be customised ‌to fit current needs and enable growth as the company evolves. As the #1 CRM, Salesforce has all the features you need to start strengthening your relationships with customers and leads.

Choosing the best CRM for your needs can help you meet and surpass your business goals by making the most of your data and placing your customers at the forefront of everything you do.