What is the Difference Between BPM and CRM?

difference between crm and bpm

There’s been a key debate in the corporate business world about the difference between BPM and CRM. The truth is that both concepts are similar and are often used interchangeably. But in this article, we will help us understand the main difference between BPM and CRM.

BPM stands for Business Process Management, while CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. BPM is the discipline that uses various tools and methods to design, model, execute, monitor, and optimize business processes. Similarly, CRM refers to software for managing and enhancing a company’s relationship with its prospective and existing customers.

The primary difference between BPM and CRM is that the former talks about various applications that simplify and automate business processes. At the same time, the latter is a specific software application that focuses on customer engagement.

What is BPM?

BPM is a process that brings organization to the behaviour of people, systems, information, and things towards achieving business goals.

The BPM discipline started getting traction after the pandemic. Because after the lockdown, people saw a greater need to automate their businesses so that closing their physical offices doesn’t wreck their operations.

Surprisingly, what became a thing of recent has morphed into billion dollar industry and counting. Organizations are now hiring BPM experts to automate their processes and activities. According to a survey by Accenture Technology in 2020, 76% of the companies and executives believe in a need to re-organize the technology and business processes that bring people and technology in a human-centric manner.

There are many use cases for a BPM, some of which are car hire process BPM, documenting process BPM, doctor to patient BPM, payment process BPM, request for quote BPM, etc.

What is CRM

A CRM tool is software for managing and enhancing a company’s relationship with its prospective and existing customers. It helps businesses coordinate, organize, and enrich their sales processes to build meaningful client relationships.

CRMs draw data from your various marketing channels like websites, online forms, live chats, online ads, and campaigns. They are easily integrated with multiple platforms and channels to access data quickly.

It’s like the brain of your business because it gives you a snapshot of the entire sales and marketing activities and results in your industry. Managers can make a sales forecast leveraging the insights and charts of events available in a CRM. Examples of CRM software are:

1. Pipedrive CRM

They’re a robust CRM software servicing over 100,000 companies across 179 countries. Pipedrive helps organizations save time and generate more revenue primarily by creating pipelines, keeping track of clients’ conversations, and following up with their contacts. Beyond the metrics, it helps business owners to maintain a healthy relationship with their clients.

2. Zoho CRM

With Zoho, you can generate leads from multiple sources like social media, telephony, offline campaigns, and business cards. It also has an AI assistant named Zia, which helps business owners keep track of all appointments, meetings, and bookings.

Try Zoho

3. FreshSales CRM

With Freshsales force automation, you can put your business on auto-pilot, automating from marketing to reporting. And that’s not even all. It allows you to identify which source brings you the best quality leads, maximize your efforts, attribute your ROI to the right source every time, and much more.

BPM Versus CRM

You can think of BPM as a big organization with many staff tasked with different roles. These include enterprise architectural modelling, visual workflow, analytics and forms, graphic incorporation of files, data capture, etc. It might be a process and software. The bottom line is that BPM is broader in scope and aims to improve overall organizational efficiency.

Similarly, you can think of CRM as a room that focuses on solving customer engagement. It has a few staff with different roles, but they’re all bent on customer engagement. With a CRM, you’ll still need another tool or software for enterprise modelling, graphic incorporation and similar things. While with a BPM, you might not need CRM because it can fill that space.

Bringing it Together

In reality, you can work with one or both, depending on your need. I would recommend a BPM for a big organisation, while for an SME, I’d recommend CRM. The listed CRM are incredible and would help you engage your customers and increase sales.

Other Software Tools for Organizations

As great as CRM software tools are, they don’t work in isolation.

Other aspects of your business would need unique and dedicated software to handle.

Here’s the best part, most CRM software is flexible and open to integration. That means you can seamlessly integrate them with another software tool.

Here is a few other software you’ll need:

1. FreshBooks:

Freshbooks is intuitive and pocket-friendly accounting software for business owners and organizations. Some of its top features include: invoicing, expenses, time tracking, projects, payments, reporting, accounting, and reconciliation.

Essentially, Freshbooks takes the burden of accounting off your shoulders.

Get a 30-day Free Trail of Freshbooks here

2. OnPay:

With OnPay, you can automate everything from payroll and human resource management. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re a 5-man business or an enterprise, OnPay makes payroll management look like a piece of cake.

The best part is that you can also use it to take care of your employee – from their first day until retirement.

Get a 30-day Free Trail of OnPay here

3. Vonage:

Vonage is a business phone system that enables businesses to link their VoIP phone system to online-powered devices for communication via text or video conferencing.

Basically, Vonage supercharges your phone system for effective local and international communication.

Get a 30-day Free Trial of Vonage here.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Posts

Get Started With Pipedrive CRM for Free!

Automation, AI, Email Builder, Insights & Reporting, Customization and much more.