If you wish to understand Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, you must get the hang of the common buzzwords used in the business. If you are new to the CRM domain, you must know the jargon.
So here is a rundown of CRM terms and their meanings.
Accounts represent companies (B2B) or people (B2C) that you have a business relationship with. Typically, an account record in the CRM would contain a range of customer information from their billing address to purchase history. Each account would also have one more Contacts and Opportunities associated with it.
Appointment pages display free slots from your schedule for customers to fix an appointment with you. Your calendar is blocked when they pick a date and time for the meeting.
Approvals allow process owners to set up automated approval processes. Users can view, approve, and reject approval requests from co-workers using this.
Assets are tangible or intangible resources that are rendered to your customers. It becomes easy for your support center to audit individual product items and cases resolved upon them with Assets.
Assignment rules are used to automatically assign records to your sales, support, and marketing team members using different assignment modes.
You generate a bill from a purchase order (PO) to initiate the payment after receiving the ordered items from your vendor. Bill records specify the payment made to vendors on a PO.
Business hours are your company's, team's, or an individual's working hours. They define the period in hours that your customer-facing teams are available to serve your customers, based on time zones.
Calendar Hours are the regular full-day hours. They include non-business hours.
Campaigns offer your marketing team the ability to schedule and execute mass marketing campaigns such as a trade show, webinar, etc.
Cases are any kind of customer service requests. Cases provide a great way to promptly track and respond to customer issues and be linked to a Product, Asset, Contact, or Organization.
Chat insights consist of widgets that show data in charts. Each chart shows a specific set of information related to your team's performance and progress. It helps team managers and supervisors get insights into their team's performance.
A contact represents a Person, either in an individual capacity or representing a Business that has already purchased your product/service.
Contact roles help you identify the role a contact plays in a deal. Specifying different roles for a contact can help sales teams differentiate among stakeholders and understand the type of influence they have on a deal.
A credit note states the amount that must be paid back to a customer as a refund or a credit on the invoice.
A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a single location for all customer data gathered from multiple sources. Having a single source of data makes it easier to organize and present the data to customer-facing teams. A CDP helps to optimize campaigns and real-time responses since everyone is operating from a single source of customer data.
A deal is a sales opportunity that you may be pursuing with a person or an organization.
A delivery note is a document accompanying the shipment of goods. It lists the description and quantity of the goods being delivered to a customer.
Documents act as a repository for all the documents you create or those shared with you by your customers or team members.
Email Campaigns are emails that are sent to targeted customers regarding products, services, offers, etc.
Email Sequences is an outbound sales campaign tool that enables you to send a predefined sequence of emails to a prospect. These emails are triggered automatically, based on the previous email interactions with a prospect.
Emotional journeys reflect a customer's experience throughout the sales cycle. They highlight both the positive and negative experiences of the customer. This helps sales reps take proactive measures toward improving customer experiences.
Engagement score or lead score is your prospects' interest level in your products or services. It is calculated based on the interactions your prospects have with your customer-facing teams.
Esign Documents allows you to send PDF files to your clients and get them signed electronically.
An event could be a call or meeting or an appointment that has a specific time.
Exporting is the process of transferring a copy of data from the CRM to your local computer. Exported data comes in handy when you cannot log in to your CRM account. You can simply refer to the exported copy when you are offline.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) are commonly asked questions about a process or a business. FAQ are written in pairs of questions and answers.
When you follow a record, you get notified about all the updates made to the record.
Forecasts help an organization predict and plan the sales cycle from Pipeline to Closure, making a managerial decision, identifying peak and lean periods, and facilitating better sales pipeline management.
A Gantt chart is a horizontal bar chart used in Project Management to provide a graphical illustration of scheduled task details that help plan, coordinate, and track specific tasks in a project.
Groups can combine different users, roles, roles and subordinates, and groups within an organization.
Through Help Desk Insights, you can ensure that cases are being routed to the right group and handled effectively.
Importing is a process of transferring the records present on your computer to the CRM.
Third-party integrations will help you connect other business applications to the CRM software to extend its capabilities and streamline your business processes.
An invoice is a document that records a transaction between a buyer and a seller and lists products or services ordered by the customer. An invoice is created when a customer confirms the order.
Kanban View displays data column-wise in neat little sections. Kanban’s visual approach helps you act on a blocker quickly, view and plan the remaining work, optimize the process, and improve productivity.
A lead is someone interested in your product or service or might not even have an interest.
This view gives a list of all the records present in the CRM.
Mailroom automates actions on incoming Emails and makes sorting emails easier through virtual email addresses to which you can forward emails.
A potential customer starts as a Lead in a sale and then converts into a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL).
Get automated reminders on upcoming activities. View all the notified records in the Notification center.
One View is a 360-degree view of all the information related to a CRM entity. For instance, you can get a comprehensive view of contact-related deals, cases, campaigns, projects, and other details in the contact’s One View.
An organization represents a company/institution that you are doing business with. Information about the people working for an organization is stored in contact records.
Price books allow you to define different prices for products and services. You can also change the price anytime you wish.
Products represent a stock of goods in your inventory. Products can be procured from suppliers or rendered to customers or both, depending on the nature of your organization.
A product bundle is a set of grouped products.
Profiles are used to control user actions, such as restricting users from accessing specific modules, fields, and features.
Profile scoring is the process of assigning an appealing score to a customer based on how important they are to your business. It helps define your ideal customer.
A project is a planned work that involves specific goals, start date, target end date, budgets, progress, etc. You can specify all these details in a project record in the CRM.
Create project milestones to describe a significant event or an achievement in a project.
A purchase order is a commercial document and first official offer issued by a buyer to a seller, indicating types, quantities, and agreed prices for products or services.
A quote is a formal price quotation listing the products/services intended to be sold along with quantity, price.
A receipt note is an internal document produced as proof of the goods received after inspecting the delivery (e.g., from a vendor) to process and match against your purchase orders.
These are the invoices automatically generated at a fixed frequency for a specific time for a customer.
Recycle Bin is an archive of deleted CRM records. When you delete a record from a module, it is moved to the recycle bin. Deleted records stay in the recycle bin for 30 days, and you can restore them within this period. The records are deleted permanently from the CRM after 30 days.
Reports display data in an organized manner in the form of tables, graphs, and charts.
Roles define your organizational hierarchy, determining who can see what records based on the settings configured in the sharing rules area.
Sales Insights is used to get all the updates about your sales. It gives you multiple reports about your sales team’s activities, performance, and deals in the pipeline, along with a comparison of their work status and goals.
A sales order is a document sent to the customers authorizing the sale of goods or services. Sales orders can be created once a quote is accepted by your customer and the purchase order is sent to the customer for further processing.
A potential customer starts as a Lead in a sale and then converts into a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). After the process of Lead Nurturing by marketing teams, the MQL becomes a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL).
The scheduler periodically operates in the background to automate many operations by running a cron (script). You can enable or disable a cron from the sequence of execution.
Services refer to the free or paid assistance you would offer to benefit your customers.
Service appointments are events created from a work order. They represent the scheduled maintenance services that you must provide to your customers.
A service contract is an agreement between you and your customers to provide service on the product for a predefined period. It may include warranties, subscriptions, service level agreements (SLAs), etc.
A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a contract between a service provider (either internal or external) and the end-user that defines the level of service expected from the service provider. SLAs are output-based; their purpose is defined explicitly on what support the customer will receive.
Storage Guard monitors data usage in the CRM. CRM admins can configure a deletion policy, according to which the Storage Guard deletes the old data after notifying the administrator.
Subscriptions automate invoice generation and payment processing for subscription-based services.
Tags are a way to organize your data in customized ways. Tags help you find records that are otherwise not easily searchable; they differentiate the important records from other records.
A task is an item to be done. It doesn’t have a specific time but could have a due date for when it should be completed. You can assign tasks to a user(s) and track status, progress, and duration to get work done much faster.
Tax is a fee charged by a government on a product, service, income, or activity. You have the flexibility to manage all your tax rates in a hassle-free way through tax management.
Timelogs help you log the time you spend on a task, case, internal ticket, etc.
Transactions track the invoices generated for a subscription and their related payments.
The usage details settings show the limits and daily usage for API calls, Webhooks, and emails sent. This primarily helps CRM admins to monitor the use against the defined limits.
Users are employees in your organization who can log into their CRM accounts, access information, and perform tasks according to permissions that have been defined to them.
Vendors include companies, people, and contractors from which your company gets products and services. They can be either direct manufacturers or resellers.
This Vtiger CRM module records the Live Chat conversations between your support team and customers.
Workflows will streamline your business by automating operations like sending emails, creating activities, updating fields, etc. As tasks are performed automatically, you need not have to execute them manually.
It is the work to be performed on a customer asset or a service to be completed as per the customer’s request.