CRM Solutions for your Business

A CRM must manage the entire sales cycle in companies as part of the customer journey. For the sales team they will need an easy-to-use CRM that supports their daily work and provide them with the information they need to manage their sales pipeline, improve their sales performance and easily spot opportunities. As such, look for integrations, workflow automation, and sales intelligence features in the CRM solutions you shortlist.

The best mobile enabled CRM software will allow sales reps in your business to manage their tasks, activities and meetings from wherever they are, reducing unwanted administration time and building in best practice into prospect management.  A cross-functional CRM, integrated across the teams in your business, allows sales to uncover more opportunities and knowledge about their customer accounts and prospects. For example, a customer may contact the customer service team with a complaint or issue which in turn will trigger a change request, a new need being identified for cross-sell or some fast relationship recovery to be made. This information can be automatically stored in the customer history and a notification (task and email) sent to the sales rep to request action.

Sales management will expect a role-tailored dashboard (with the ability to drill down into detail) to help them manage team KPIs in real-time and spot performance areas for improvement. What marketing leads have not been contacted or qualified, what customers need to be nurtured, what products and services are being proposed and how has the sales rep moved an opportunity along, have they used company guidance and best practice at each sales stage?

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CRM software can provide both marketing and sales features within their own operational requirements; but should also enable better collaboration and transparency between teams across your business; putting the lead, prospect and customer at the heart of the CRM and customer strategy.

Marketing teams communicate with their audience in multiple channels, responding to customer needs that have changed drastically in recent years. As marketing channels developed, teams may have used separate tools for email marketing, social media management, event marketing, direct marketing and so on. The problem is that these software tools were separate and the data in them needed to be exported and imported across one another in order to see the customer’s most recent contact and status. Now leading CRM solutions provide all the multi-channel features your marketing team need, in one single platform, allowing them to set up automated, dynamic and personalized campaigns to manage the customer journey using segmentation based on demographic and behavioral profiles.

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Customer service teams need to be able to deliver a positive customer experience and to do this they need to be supported by a CRM system that gives them a good record of past customer contacts, support enquiries, technical incidents and product history.

Help desk software may be in use currently by customer service teams that do not connect with other teams such as sales, marketing and field technicians; leading to a disjointed customer experience and lost opportunities for customer success.

Seamless omni-channel experience for agent and customer alike is now an expected feature in CRM solutions. Customers expect not to repeat their requests regardless of if they are contacting a business by email, online chat, social media or telephone. Customer service agents want modern tools that widen their skill sets and empower them to help their customers and resolve cases quickly. ChatBots and self-service portals are becoming increasingly common in businesses’ customer service contact strategies, allowing simple requests to be handled automatically, leaving agents to deal with more complex tickets.

Customer service supervisors expect dashboards that allow them to monitor KPIs, spot trends and proactively deal with escalated cases.

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A field service technician is usually deployed as part of an ongoing maintenance contract or when things go wrong on the customer site (break-fix scenario). The ideal for a business is to be able to predict and resolve customer issues before the customer is aware. A best-in-class CRM will support predictive maintenance by connecting to products after sale, using IoT embedded within the CRM system.

A core objective for field service management, is ensuring the technician arrives on time, equipped with the right tools, the right information, and the right amount of time to resolve the issue the first time. This means empowering maintenance engineers and schedulers with CRM that shares information with inventory, skills, customer and finance areas is key.

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To complete your customer experience management, your CRM data should work alongside other data sets about the customers you serve.  By unifying and structuring this customer data, you can unlock further insights about your audience in order to better understand them and personalize your offering. Customer Data Platforms bring together transactional, behavioral, demographic information to create multi-dimensional customer profiles, in order for you to better understand and predict customers and their relationship with your business.

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