How Can Online CRM Help Your Company To Communicate Better?

Given that 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers, you clearly need to take good care of your client base. Yet sales, customer service and finance functions within a company fail to join up, and this can be bad for business. Knowledge is power, especially when it comes to customer relationships, and installing a CRM provides a simple means of sharing relevant information about your customers that will help your employees to do their job better. 

Let’s take three hypothetical situations to demonstrate my point:

• A salesman is chasing a customer for a new order, but is unaware that the customer has unpaid invoices that are more than 90 days overdue .

• An engineer arrives on site to perform an installation, but has no knowledge of discussions between the customer and his salesperson on the detail of the work to be carried out so the work is completed incorrectly.

• An accounts administrator is chasing for payment of an invoice that has been issued, but is not aware that the contract has not been able to be completed because the goods are being returned as faulty.

In each case these people may have acted differently if customer communications had been joined up using a CRM system. The salesperson may have insisted on cash in advance;  the engineer wouldn’t have had to revisit an installation, and the accounts administrator may not have lost a customer for appearing incompetent.

What Else Does A CRM Do?

Of course there is a lot more to a CRM than providing a central point of reference for customer communications for everyone in your company. A CRM can join up your entire business process including:

• Gathering web  and social marketing leads directly into your sales process.
• Generating documentation for quotations, orders, invoices and customer service.
• Producing business pipeline reports  to assist in business planning.
• Analysing the relative profitability of all of your products / business .
• Measuring the performance of your sales staff.
• Evaluating the return on investment of your marketing campaigns.

You can of course do all of this by extracting information from multiple sources and crunching numbers through a spreadsheet, but at a far greater cost over time. It is the integration and automation of your entire business process that is the true prize of a successful CRM deployment.