What is the difference between CRM and ERP?
Usually, everyone gets confused when it comes to differentiating a CRM and an ERP because they have many similarities like helping businesses to improve efficiency and increase profit. Even though sometimes these two systems overlay with each other, at other times they are even used in tandem with each other. But it is always best to identify them by contrasting both together.
CRM — Customer Relationship Management
CRM provides businesses with a way to collect, plan and follow all the information about their clients. This could be used for sales, purchasing, research and business development sections of a company.
A typical CRM tool consists,
- Marketing integration and automation
CRM can manage prospective leads and handle email campaigns or even sum up the results of a marketing camp.
- Sales management and automation
CRM provides you with a real-time experience of the current sales. At the meantime, it allows you to forecast the sales.
- Customer service automation
Some CRMs also provide the call routing and call monitoring services as well.
- Support desk automation
Offering self-services and ticketing features is how CRMs support the desk automation.
- Reporting and dashboard
With CRM software you can make insightful reports and a customisable dashboard. These could be used to take a look at essential business metrics.
ERP — Enterprise Resource Planning
ERP connects all the operational perspectives of a business including customer relationship management, human resources, business inventory and etc. Some venders permit you to create your very personal customised version of ERP software while some provide various product choices with different feature sets.
An ERP system naturally have,
Accounting subsystem: to manage the business transactions and invoicing etc.
Inventory: Real-time news about products and goods in the stock.
CRM: There are ERPs with CRM features.
Business intelligence: The latest advanced ERP systems also have business intelligence features as well.
Supply and delivery chain subsystem.
An ERP system often has a CRM sans some of the important features including analytics, reporting and customisable dashboards which are available in current advanced CRMs.
If your workforce is happy with most of the enterprise solutions, then a new CRM software is all you need. If the employees are unhappy with your enterprise solutions, you should go for a customisable ERP system. If your ERP system requires some of the features that you think a CRM should have, then you can purchase a CRM as well taking your budget into consideration. Most of the modern ERP systems could be integrated seamlessly with CRM systems.
