| Beyond the buzz
and hype surrounding Customer Relationship Management lies a
real problem-solving solution: ensuring that all your
customer-facing staff has access to the most up-to-date
information about everyone of your customers.
We'll explore 5 functional areas in this first
Heard Enough About CRM Quick-Tip Sheet:
- Contact Management
- Sales Efficiencies
- Marketing Efforts
- Customer Support
- Accounting Integration
Contact Management
A spreadsheet stored on one of your customer service
representatives' desktop is not going to help the accounts
receivable manager who's trying to negotiate payment terms with
a new customer. And even if that spreadsheet were available over
your network, can it truly be easily accessed by your sales
managers who are on the road more often than in the office? If
more than 2 people in your office maintain customer contacts,
you owe it to yourself to evaluate providing them with this
simple tool: a shared customer contact database, accessed from
anywhere, anytime.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Does your company have separate accounting, sales,
marketing and customer support databases?
- Do many people in your company use paper-based
calendars/day timers or standalone calendaring tools like
Outlook?
- Does your company have limited ability to track emails
sent to prospects/customers etc?
- If the company has a database, are there issues with
users not capturing the appropriate information?
- Do customer service reps have any idea how much business
the client does when they take their calls?
- Are customer issues and complaints getting resolved
adequately and in a rapid timeline?
- Does your sales team have any access to vital accounting
data like accounts receivable, credits limits, balances?
- Is information 'hoarded' and kept secret by different
departments in the organization?
- Do you have more than 2 employees responding to incoming
interactions (i.e. phone calls, faxes, emails, personal
visits, etc.?
The right contact management software, deployed throughout
your organization, will help you build and strengthen the
relationships with your customers, so they'll keep coming back.
It will improve your service delivery process, and will increase
your staff's awareness of customer needs. And more importantly,
it will reduce customer's frustration by not asking the same
questions over and over.
Read Part Two: Sales
Efficiencies
|
