What Is a Cloud CRM?

CRM (customer relationship management) is a technology that helps businesses organize and track customer interactions across their company by collecting and analyzing relevant customer-related data. This information lives in a centralized location, providing a single view of each customer across all teams within an organization.

Modern CRMs are hosted in the cloud, providing easy access to information, faster processing speeds, and the flexibility to scale quickly to meet an organization’s changing needs.

What we’ll cover:

• What is cloud-based CRM software?
• What is the difference between traditional on-premise CRM and cloud CRM?
• Is cloud CRM a SaaS software?
• Benefits of cloud-based CRM
• What are features of a cloud CRM?
• How to choose a cloud CRM

CRM software that is hosted on the internet by a CRM provider is called a cloud-based CRM. This type of system, such as Salesforce CRM, ensures that customer data is accessible from anywhere and from any device. This software solution is also known as SaaS (Software as a Service).

Before businesses were able to store and access their data in the cloud, there were on-premise CRMs. These systems are hosted locally on servers based on-site at an organization. Unlike a cloud-based CRM solution, on-premise CRMs require larger upfront costs and ongoing personnel management responsibilities.

With traditional on-premise CRM, a business hosts and operates the servers and networks that house the customer database. In addition to building the infrastructure, these businesses also need to pay for, and manage, the CRM. They require an IT staff to maintain the systems, which takes time, increases costs, and often means that they need to manually update each computer that uses the system — hurting productivity by taking employees away from their work.

By contrast, using a cloud-hosted CRM provider removes the need for a business to build and maintain the CRM infrastructure. This also means that upfront costs go down and responsibilities around logistics, updates, and security management are no longer their responsibility. Employees simply access their CRM through a web-based application or dashboard.

Yes. A cloud-hosted CRM platform is just one type of SaaS. Over time, more companies have moved their systems online, providing a wide range of business software and systems that are hosted through external providers.

Cloud CRM platforms easily integrate with other systems, ensuring the free flow of all data points to provide a complete picture of the organization and its customers. This complete, 360-degree view of the customer, with data from many different sources, ensures that every part of a business is working from the most up-to-date customer information.

Whether you’re a small business, large enterprise, or public sector organization, that are many benefits to using a CRM.

Using cloud-based CRM helps businesses serve customers better, improves employees productivity, and increases profitability. Here are just a few ways the benefits of CRM are increased by using a SaaS-based system.

When a CRM lives in the cloud, businesses don’t need to source and maintain hardware, host servers, or manage security oversight. They simply log in and the platform is ready. This frees up time, employees, and budget to focus on customer experiences rather than technical infrastructure.

Every member of a business can access relevant customer information when they need it. This means that if one team member is working from a laptop in the office, another checks their tablet from home, while a third is on their phone from the field — they can all access the latest customer information. This helps an organization be more responsive to changing customer needs and behaviors as they arise.

A cloud-based CRM provides the ability to scale up or down as businesses develop and needs change. Individual employee seats can be added or removed, and new tools can be added easily. This means that companies only pay for the users and features they need.

Security is an essential part of any software system. This is especially true when you’re handling sensitive customer data. In addition to your company’s responsibility to keep their information safe, there could be financial or even legal ramifications if there are security breaches. There are many security benefits to using cloud CRM, such as automatic backups, ongoing monitoring, and automatic updates that protect against threats.

A CRM is only as effective as its features. When it comes to assessing cloud-based systems that help manage customer engagement, here are some important features to consider.

First, a CRM should easily organize and update all of your customer information in a way that is accessible to every team that needs it. This is the first step to creating a single view of the customer that helps your company provide great customer experiences.

Managing the customer experience means keeping track of interactions from the first contact with a prospect, all the way through to onboarding and customer service inquiries. CRMs can track leads through the pipeline as well as manage conversions, and even analyze forecasts to provide insights that go beyond individual customers.

CRMs unite customer data in one place. That’s why it’s essential that they integrate with external data sources and connect with business tools such as email and website hosting systems. By connecting all of your data, you’re able to create a true single source of truth around your customers.

Cloud CRM pulls together a huge amount of customer data. Dashboards help make sense of that information, pulling together the metrics and data points that are most relevant to each team that uses it.

Modern CRMs are built to remove the burden of repetitive manual tasks by enabling automation that boosts efficiency and improves customer engagement. Automations like emails that are sent after a customer takes a particular action on website, or even internal weekly reminders sent to through communications systems like Slack, free up teams to work on more productive tasks.

CRMs are built to store valuable customer data, which means they need to have robust security and protection in place. The best CRMs include data backup provisions and security protocols to protect sensitive customer and organizational data.

A lot of planning and thought should go into choosing the best CRM for your business. Here are a few steps to consider.

What are your organizational needs and goals? These should be clearly defined so that they can be used as criteria when comparing different CRM options.

Having a sense of your budget will help determine what your team can afford, and which tier of cloud CRM you should be researching. Many CRMs, including Salesforce, offer tiered and flexible pricing based on which features you choose.

Of course, everyone wants the best CRM features, but make sure that you’re only paying for what you need. Choosing a CRM you can customize so that you’re only paying for the features and number of users you need — with the option to scale as you grow —will help you make the right decision.

Salesforce isn’t just a cloud CRM. It’s the world’s # AI CRM. Our portfolio unites your marketing, sales, commerce, service, and IT teams, and gives them the ability to work together from anywhere. See how you can get started with Salesforce CRM today.