TMCnews Featured Article
November 19, 2010
Hosted CRM Proves Viable Solution for Elobau Sensor Technologies
By Susan J. Campbell, TMCnet Contributing Editor
Has your company leveraged the power of customer relationship management (CRM) throughout the organization to optimize your customer contacts and sales opportunities? If you want to drive effective sales department streamlining without investing significant capital upfront, you may want to consider hosted CRM solutions.
A recent PDD Net report captured the excitement hosted CRM can deliver to an organization. It seems Elobau Sensor Technologies Inc., a designer and manufacturer of non-contacting sensor devices, was having trouble developing and maintaining strong customer relationships. In essence, the company lacked a formal method to track customer follow-up.
This is a big problem given that some projects can take anywhere from one to three years to reach completion.With such long periods of time between product order and completion, it is not uncommon for Elobau to work with a number of different individuals within the customer organization. And, while this is a good idea, it also adds complexity to the process.
The biggest problem was that accurate follow-up records were not being kept and as a result, some customer information was lost in the process. Elobau also lacked the ability to easily track the income that could be turned into revenue from specific projects or opportunities being tracked in the pipeline. Contacts and customer interaction notes were being managed through software, yet the solution lacked the necessary ability to access the information from remote sites and would not allow users to share the information.
The need for a true hosted CRM became very clear. To solve these challenges, Elobau looked for a hosted CRM solution that was easy to implement into their environment and did not need a local server.
The company was searching for a tool that would allow them to manage complex sales and follow-up sales projects that would involve multiple contacts in any one company.The winning hosted CRM solution for Elobau was Avidian’s hosted CRM, Prophet OnDemand. As a Software as a Service solution, Avidian took on the burden of maintaining the backend equipment and data storage by placing it in its secure cloud.
As a result, Elobau was able to access their customer data whenever needed and eliminated the need to have to deal with routine IT management activities that might normally be associated with the solution.The Prophet OnDemand solution enabled Elobau to take advantage of such tools as project opportunity tracking, sales stage reports, application configuration flexibility and the ability to assign projects to specific representatives based on the characteristics of the project and the assets of the individual.
In all, Elobau gained access to the tools necessary to effectively manage customer relationships and interactions with the purchase of the hosted CRM solution from Avidian.
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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