Today more than ever, companies are seeking to ensure that they will realize a valuable return on investment from their CRM system. To best achieve this, companies must first have a clear understanding of what information they want to gather and how the CRM system will be used to capture and analyze data to make further improvements in customer service.
Most companies understand at some level that CRM is not really about “managing” customers but rather about putting the customer at the center of the organization. And in providing additional value to customers, customer loyalty increases and business benefits accrue in many tangible ways, from increased sales to customer longevity.
Choosing a Business Solution - CRM1080
Companies should seek a comprehensive overview of how CRM can benefit the corporation, including how it interrelates with other initiatives. The planning and installation processes of a CRM system are of critical importance. All customer touch points and their supporting business processes should be incorporated into the system. This involves not only linking with the call center but also integrating with other applications, such as e-business and back office applications including financials, production, shipping, logistics, and corporate databases. Integrating with other applications provides the opportunity to leverage existing technology investments while promoting a true 360-degree view of customer interactions across the entire organization.
In selecting a solution, serious consideration should be given to how quickly, easily, and seamlessly integration with other applications can be achieved. Some CRM systems provide an easy means of integrating third-party back-office applications through an integration module. By using the module, integration time can be reduced by as much as 80 percent.
A module also allows system administrators to not only view information from third-party or custom applications, but also to create and modify records from these databases directly into the CRM system. A few simple steps are required – links are created by logging on to a database, choosing the unique fields (such as account numbers) that will be the same in both systems, and selecting the fields that users will see in custom folder tabs. Data can then be viewed and manipulated in real time, avoiding the need for cumbersome import and export routines or other costly and time consuming custom solutions.
By enabling the seamless linkage between applications and the CRM system, employees can click a folder tab to access information from integrated back-office applications such as order management, enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, financials, logistics, or other verticals. In addition, automated data set updates to back-office applications greatly reduce unnecessary duplicate data entry and facilitate data consistency with disparate applications throughout the enterprise.
The tight integration and real-time access to information has many benefits, from reducing data redundancy, user account management, and end-user training on multiple applications to increasing data integrity and improving efficiency, including decreased usage licensing costs for integrated applications.
Whether your customer service and support representatives are courteous, responsive, and accurate will influence not only your customers’ decision of whether to buy from you in the future but also the feedback and recommendations they provide to their friends and business associates. Every customer interaction is important and impacts customer attitudes toward your company and resulting buying decisions, so it is important to enable your employees to be knowledge-workers, providing the best customer service possible.
In order to be embraced by employees, the CRM system must make operational sense, fitting in with sales and customer care staff tasks and processes rather than requiring meaningless external predetermined business processes. However, CRM initiatives provide an excellent opportunity to step back and evaluate business goals, objectives, and the business processes that support them and to implement important changes to better meet your company’s changing needs.
Selecting a CRM vendor requires a clear vision and key metrics of what needs to be accomplished through a CRM initiative. Although not the only approach, an integrated CRM suite provided by one vendor will definitely help reduce the chaos of implementing multiple vendors with disparate solutions. Regardless of which approach is taken, an implementation comprised of well-integrated CRM components will best achieve the promises of a customer relationship management initiative.
