Business’s digital transformation: choice, implementation and improvement of CRM-systems

The aim of the article. The aim of the article is to determine the essence, advantages and disadvantages of business’s digital transformation, describe the importance of business-process management through its digital transformation, define the nature, types and capabilities of CRM-systems, identify and describe trends in their development, analyze the results of prior researches and select the most popular CRM-systems, as well as research for existing problems of using defined CRM-systems, suggest recommendations for eliminating shortcomings of existing CRM-systems. Analyses results. The coronavirus pandemic has forced companies to rapidly change business processes and shift to remote work, which in turn has led to widespread using of CRM systems in customer relationship management. The modern market offers different goods and services, but they are mostly similar in many ways. The question is how to keep the customer for a long time? The introduction of CRM systems will help answer this question. The definition of CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, which refers to all the strategies, methods, tools and technologies that a business uses to develop, retain and attract customers. Customer Relationship Management is a special approach of doing business, where the first priority of the company is to focus on the client. The main purpose of the CRM strategy is to create a single ecosystem, which helps to attract new and develop existing customers. Managing relationships means attracting new customers, turning neutral customers into loyal ones, and forming business partners from regular customers. The concept of CRM means that separate business tools are combined into a well-established system. CRM includes programs for collecting customer’s data, managing transactions, control and monitoring manager’s decisions, analytics and forecasting. The article considers the essence of modern transformation of business processes, their advantages and disadvantages, defines the concepts, types, existing opportunities and trends in CRM-systems. The article analyses the experts’ opinions of the most popular modern CRM-systems and generalizes its shortcomings, measures the main elimination of revealed problems. The article conducted a study based on a survey of experts, the main purpose of which was to identify the share of popular CRM-systems among consumers, as well as to identify the main problems and limitations of these systems. Conclusions and directions for further research. The main goal of the CRM strategy is to create a single ecosystem for attracting new customers and developing existing ones. The main tasks of CRM-systems include: attracting new customers through various channels, communication, choice of interaction strategy, Purchase funnel, document management, closing sales, re-communication and analytics of the company. There are three types of CRM systems: desktop, client-server and cloud systems. The main trends in CRM systems development include: increasing usage of artificial intelligence, service automation, data integration, usage of blockchains and social CRM-system, a large number of different applied subsystems and voice interface. The most popular systems are proved to be: Agile CRM, Salesforce Sales Cloud, Zoho CRM, Dynamics 365 and Bitrix24. The main problems of existing CRM-systems can be identified as: slow work on query processing and data output; wasting time on system administration; a large number of built-in tools increases the time to get used with the system; high cost of service, etc. Prospects for further development of CRM-systems include: integration with Big Data and AI; usage of voice technologies as a method for increasing operational efficiency; usage of data from social networks; as well as the creation of a single and common approach of customer identification. In the future, vendors should simplify their product versions and reduce the number of tools to basic, which will reduce the monthly fee for service, as well as speed up data processing by the system, due to the lack of unnecessary add-ons. On the other hand, companies that use CRM systems in their daily work should pay more attention to the integration CRM systems with social networks, which contain essential share of information about their target audience and existing customers.