TMCnews Featured Article
September 10, 2010
Hosted CRM: The Key to Driving the Optimal Customer Experience
By Susan J. Campbell, TMCnet Contributing Editor
Sales professionals know how frustrating it can be to deliver quality service if the rest of the team is not on board. The same is true for any customer-facing position and the company that does not make customer relationships a team effort are sure to spend more of their time dealing with customer churn than celebrating additional revenues with the existing base.
The business environment today is more competitive than ever, intensifying the need for teamwork where customer relationships are concerned. As maintaining the customer base is much more economical than acquiring new customers, it is increasingly important that companies work to improve customer satisfaction.
To work together as a team, everyone involved must share information and tasks and keep in mind that the customer expects that everyone at each interaction point has an understanding of their needs and issues. As this is hard to accomplish manually, many organizations are turning to integrated CRM solutions to provide the basis for sharing information and tasks and improving overall customer satisfaction.
Communication with customers is important if the company hopes to respond to needs and issues and also complete successful sales. This communication must often include a number of different employees or groups of employees. In many environments, these groups continue to use separate systems, creating islands of information. As a result, they have difficulty sharing valuable customer knowledge and significantly reduce their ability to form successful relationships with these customers.
Even in the most innovative of companies, communication gaps can exist. In one example, a presales engineer and application engineer are involved in the sales process, yet they are not using a common system. As a result, key information about the technical interactions may not be available to the entire sales group. As these interactions are important to the selling process, a lack of this information could lead the sales team down the wrong road in terms of price and position of the offering. Issues can also emerge in terms of customer problems.
An organization needs to capture and resolve problems on a timely basis and resolution may involve a number of different groups. When communication gaps exist among these groups, the resolution process takes more time than necessary, which elevates the risk of causing dissatisfaction for the customer. Companies experiencing the optimal results from their CRM solutions are those with integrated systems. Consider that the maintenance of different systems has a number of costs and performance issues, while they also inhibit the flow of information. Integrated CRM solutions provide the backbone necessary to allow a company to get the most from each customer interaction and drive the highest customer satisfaction.
Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMCnet and has also written for eastbiz.com. To read more of Susan’s articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by Juliana Kenny
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