Connected Business - Interprise Suite Resellers

Many organisations are keen to embrace and implement a customer relationship management (CRM) solution in their business. However CRM systems are not silver bullets that will improve and streamline existing business processes. These processes need to be improved in preparation for, and in conjunction with, a CRM implementation.

So what are the benefits? Well it really depends on the offer from your CRM vendor. As a basic any CRM system should be able to manage prospects, customers, communications, leads and opportunities for your pre-sales function of your business. Additionally any case management offered by a CRM solution is useful in the post-sales function. Of course your overriding business case is for a system that measures business performance in key areas so that it can be improved.

The idea behind CRM is that your organisation can treat each and every customer as an individual because you have a detailed communication history, ideally a sales history so subsequent dealings can be tailored specifically to that customer.

In one of the earlier posts we briefly mentioned the customisable nature of Interprise Suite and how it could be made to work in any vertical market. Well we recently had an enquiry from a fleet hire company who are looking for a supplier relationship management (SRM) solution. In a nutshell they were looking for something that would let them track the total spend per vehicle with a complete history of any parts or servicing work carried out. So by adding additional information to the purchase order form, and a new report they have the ability to do just that. This is the sort of work that takes days, not weeks!

Most organisations look to choose a CRM system to help them improve retention rates. The reality is that this rarely happens. Why? Because in simple terms you need to regularly communicate with your prospects/customers with attractive offers. So either you are not communicating regularly enough and your customers are going elsewhere, or, the offer that you are making is not attractive enough. So how do you tackle these problems? With most CRM systems is very difficult. The reason being is that you have no sales history readily available or in most cases you have no way of creating campaigns around a customers transactions. Armed with this information you can get a clear picture of how profitable each customer is to your business, how frequently they buy from you and what are the things they regularly buy. If your CRM vendor talks about return on investment (ROI) why not press them and ask them specifically just how their CRM offering will add real pounds or dollars to your businesses’ bottom line.

Is CRM software for the web your best bet? Well like anything it depends on your individual requirements. The same questions you ask of any web vs windows CRM solution can be applied to any application where you are deciding between the two platforms. Whilst web based applications give you the freedom to access your data from anywhere, for some this availability of data and the fact it is stored on a remote server may be an issue. Additionally web based applications won’t offer you the same sort of rich user interface that a windows application will give you. That said with new web technologies emerging all the time the interface of a well designed web application is starting to improve. Of course you need to bear in mind integration with other applications anytime you want to issue any sort of campaign communication, i.e. linking to Outlook for email management and linking to Word to perform mail merges.

I have often seen searches and terms for wanting the know the difference between a customer relationship managment (CRM) and an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. The fact of the matter is it is like comparing chalk and cheese, these two solutions are not the same thing, not even close. CRM is typically focused on managing relationships with prospects, those that have expressed interest but not bought, quotations and opportunities. CRM can also have an after-sale element which is focused on customer service/support. ERP on the other hand is the process of managing the financial operations of a business. Typically ERP extends the normal accounting functionality such as sales and purchase order processing, accounts payable/receivable and adds support for project accounting and resource ledgers (time management).

Now there are instances where the two are joined; a prospect exists in the CRM who then becomes a customer and now exists in the ERP system. However most solutions only allow the traffic one way; CRM to ERP.

Welcome to Connected Business Systems, resellers of the integrated CRM and accouting solution Interprise Suite. Interprise Suite is completely flexible in terms of bespoke modification which means it can work in any vertical market.