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BPM (Business Process Management) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems both have their merits and have become a common feature in many organizations’ tech stacks.
Both systems can help to control the management of data, help your employees work more efficiently and save on operating costs. But there are stark differences between the two: BPM provides a broader, more holistic approach to process management and orchestrating the flow of data throughout your organization, whereas CRM is more focused on customer data management and improving the customer experience.
You need to establish which better suits your needs, or indeed if you need to use both alongside each other to achieve different business goals.
BPM (Business Process Management) allows users to map and analyze business processes, which enables process standardization and ensures compliance. It can be used to manage single processes, such as customer onboarding, or used as an end-to-end solution to optimize and integrate business processes across an organization.
When processes are mapped out, it enables workflow automation to streamline business activities. BPM enables tasks to be routed and automatically handed off to the next person or stage in the process, providing visibility of where the tasks sit within the process and what stage they are at.
Process modeling - Process modeling is the graphical representation of business processes or workflows. Like a flow chart, individual steps of the process are drawn out to provide an end-to-end overview of the tasks in the process within the context of the business environment.
A process model allows visualization of processes so organizations can better understand their internal business procedures so that they can be properly managed and improved. This is usually an agile exercise for continuous improvement.
Process automation – Once processes have been modelled, you can automate them to carry out tasks across the workflow, further driving efficiencies. This helps to bridge operational silos and optimize operations end-to-end across your organization.
The practice of BPM has evolved over recent years to incorporate digital process automation (DPA), as both focus on the optimization of business processes, with automation bringing additional benefits to those already delivered by process mapping.
Integration – Integration-centric BPM is useful for organizations that need to integrate data across multiple applications and systems, such as their ERP or CRM. Mapping the flow of data between any silos in your organization, a BPM tool can act as an orchestration layer to view your operations holistically.
The integration enabled by BPM to pass data between systems improves efficiency and communication between different areas of the business. It also eliminates the need for manual data entry, saving time and money and reducing errors.
Analytics – Data is playing an increasingly important role in BPM as more organizations look to their process models and the data within them to make informed decisions. Many BPM platforms now offer the capability to automatically generate reports based on your data, which can be displayed in visual dashboards to help with reporting.
This data not only provides real-time insights to help improve organizational productivity and customer service, but also enables you to review business processes for continuous improvement.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management), as the name suggests is a strategy or software system that helps to manage an organization’s interactions with its customers, throughout the customer lifecycle. In this instance, we are looking at CRM systems that help to streamline processes and compile customer data from marketing, sales, e-commerce and customer services into a single platform.
A CRM system can track all communications and interactions and match them with the associated lead and client. All this data is consolidated and stored in a central database where it can be analyzed to provide insight into customer behaviour. This helps to nurture relationships to retain customers, improve the customer experience and aid your sales and marketing team.
Sales automation – Perhaps the most important element of a CRM is the sales automation aspect that helps to manage leads and communications. It can automate tasks such as logging activities and updating lead records in the CRM, gathering customer information from different systems and areas of the business into a central profile, and sending quotes and proposals for internal approval before they are sent to customers.
This helps sales teams to be more efficient by reducing time and effort spent on manual tasks so they can focus on selling to the customer, or potential customer.
Marketing automation – A CRM is primarily sales-orientated, but it has benefits for marketing too if you are looking to upsell or attract new customers. The system allows you to automate elements of campaign management to streamline the process and monitor results using in-built analytics.
You can integrate your CRM with marketing automation tools that automate tasks such as email marketing campaigns, so that emails will be triggered to be sent to customers if they fulfil a certain set of criteria, or automating social media posts. Your CRM can then track all these customer interactions.
Customer service management – A CRM provides a holistic view of customer information and interactions, such as purchase history and previous conversations, all in one place. This helps customer service agents to better understand and solve customer queries and deliver timely and personalized customer experiences.
Some CRMs offer a dedicated customer service support feature, or enable you to integrate with customer service software tools, such as help desk ticketing system, and offer multiple contact points, including email, phone and even AI-driven online chatbots so that customers can have their queries solved 24/7.
Analytics – Customer data is the heart of a CRM, letting organizations know how their customers are behaving and enabling them to provide better customer service. Most CRM platforms provide reports and dashboards bringing together data from across the organization, helping teams to make data-driven decisions and improve customer satisfaction.
CRM analytics can help to segment customers and aid with profitability analysis to help organizations better manage their resources. It can also help to deliver personalized customer experiences and use intelligent technology to forecast future trends based on customer interactions.
While BPM and CRM systems both aid data management, sharing and analysis, the primary difference between the two is that BPM manages internal business processes and workflows across an organization, whereas CRM focuses specifically on managing customer data.
A BPM system provides you with a wider range of use cases and options, allowing you to build the basis for numerous enterprise applications and use cases, whereas a CRM is solely for managing relationships with clients.
This means that BPM software often offers more flexibility than CRM systems as it allows businesses to create custom processes and applications. CRM systems tend to provide out-of-the box features, so they are more rigid, but quicker to get set up and start using.
In terms of the overall aims of each system, BPM is used to optimize operational efficiency, orchestrate your operations, and align overall business goals. Alternatively, the aim of a CRM is to manage customer relationships, track customer’s interactions to provide them with a more personalized experience and help your team to sell and upsell your goods and services.
As the two platforms serve different purposes, you shouldn’t have to choose between them. In fact, a BPM platform can enhance your CRM system by integrating it with other applications and data repositories in the organization.
This can help to further streamline and automate operations, particularly lead management, helping you to make the most of upselling and cross-selling opportunities. It also helps to flag if customers are unhappy, which could signify deeper issues with your product or services.
For example, Swissslog Healthcare experienced growth through acquisitions, which led to fragmented processes and IT systems. The sales reps had to navigate different departments and systems with multiple touchpoints and hand-offs, spending 60% of their time was spent on non-business value-added tasks, with the risk of mistakes and losing focus on deals and customers.
Using Bizagi’s BPM capabilities, they were able to analyze the current business processes, before optimizing and automating them. These workflows were integrated with their CRM system. As a result, the time spent entering data into systems has been reduced by 30%. All this has contributed to a 50% decrease in lead time for quotations by reducing waste and unnecessary handovers.
The Bizagi platform provides real-time KPIs and monitoring to manage the sales team efficiently through a single platform with access from anywhere. The process automation allows the sales team to quickly convert leads into revenue, satisfying Swisslog Healthcare’s customer needs with confidence.
The Bizagi platform allows you to model, design, automate and manage your business processes on a single low-code platform. Our platform is helping companies around the world to evaluate, improve and automate business processes, all on one enterprise platform.
