At Collier Pickard we believe, broadly speaking, that there are three ways CRM should bring benefit to a business – and this comes in the form of increased efficiency, increased effectiveness and reduced risk. But it’s not as simple as scraping together the budget for a few SaaS licenses and giving your sales team the keys.
Delivering measurable ROI requires planning, effort, and a baseline measurement on where you are now. How else will you know you’ve improved in these three key areas in the future?
CRM Increases Efficiency
First, let’s focus on how we do things faster. Fewer clicks, faster load times, access to more data about more business objects, machines doing the simple but time-consuming tasks. Common sense, right?
Configuration helps us to reduce the number of clicks and screen transitions, integration lets us access more information about more things, and automation lets machines do the repetitive tasks for us.
The benefit of increased efficiently is not only less time to get the same revenue but the time it frees up allows businesses a chance to analyse and improve processes – becoming more Effective.
CRM Increases Effectiveness
By using the time created from becoming more Efficient, we have the opportunity to review and improve current processes. Perhaps we might identify that there is no process to follow up with a customer after a purchase or no process to follow up after a complaint to repair the relationship. It could be that we realise there is no understanding of why customers decline a quote because that information is never recorded in CRM – or perhaps who we lost the deal too, or who authorised the purchase.
By identifying these shortfalls in the way, we currently operate and fixing them, we enhance that cliché 360-degree view of the customer, giving us the chance to maintain a stronger relationship and are able to ask more, and better questions as part of reporting.
Configuration allows us to ensure we are recording valuable information about a customer that is specifically relevant for us, automation allows us to guarantee that we follow up with a customer after an important event such as a purchase or complaint, and integration enhances the capability of Configuration and Automation – for example automatically following up with a customer, if they have not paid within 30 days based on Accounts information, or automatically notifying a customer if there has been a delay in their shipment based on ERP information.
CRM Reduces Risk
By improving the customer’s experience and filling cracks in operations, we reduce the Risk associated with customer churn and keep revenue and customer loyalty optimised. The less risky and more consistent business operations are, the easier it becomes to be a market leader in your industry.
How we’ve helped customers
Now that we understand the benefits associated with the power trio, I wanted to give you some brief examples of how we’ve helped our customers take advantage of these benefits:
- Automated Quote follow-ups (Efficiency)
Customers are automatically reminded about quotes they have been sent, this reminder may be escalated to the account manager depending on the quote
- Product tracking (Risk)
Automatic logging of information about a product in emails – for an audit trail of everything related to each product, for every customer.
- Integration to eMarketing systems (Effectiveness)
Linking CRM to eMarketing (specifically dotMailer and Mailchimp) to ensure we capture all useful customer information in one system (Clicks, Responses, Opens/Views, etc.)
- Integration to ERP systems (Efficiency)
Provide visibility of customer order/delivery statuses, allowing the account managers to handle more requests from the customer in less time.
- Integration to Accounting systems (Efficiency, Risk)
Provide visibility of order and invoice information, and allow lockdown of customer records if they are put on financial stop.
If you want to find out more about how CRM can benefit your business, or about CRM in general, feel free to get in touch with one of our consultants or have a read through some more of our articles.
