A View From
the Top: Providing A Unified View of Your Customers
By
Lauri McClay And Dan Whelan,
Epicor Software Corporation
In
an age where companies are constantly campaigning for new customers and
striving to sustain the loyalty of existing customers, every resource must
be fully leveraged. After all, customers can always elect to go elsewhere,
and sometimes it's as easy as the click of a mouse.
Sales and support, the two primary customer-facing departments, stand to
reap the greatest benefits from utilizing a unified view of customer
information. In the spirit of debate, we offer both sides of the customer
interaction spectrum an opportunity to sound off on how utilizing a
single-source for managing customer data is helping them get their jobs
done.
At any given time, a typical account executive must manage the activity of
hundreds of active accounts and prospects. Organizing all the information
that goes along with a sales campaign, such that you are calling the right
clients or prospects, sending the right literature and scheduling the right
events in order to win the business, is impossible without CRM. With the
emergence of customer relationship management (CRM) technologies, the sales
force has at its fingertips a comprehensive tool for managing the entire
sales life cycle.
CRM solutions combine complete contact, lead, opportunity and account
management in one comprehensive and more importantly, one shared resource.
This collective, collaborative repository provides sales executives with
valuable information that can help the sales force close new deals and grow
business in the install base.
The sales manager stands to benefit from leveraging a single-source CRM
solution as well. An integrated CRM solution helps facilitate shorter sales
cycles and drives efficiency in the sales force by delivering management a
real-time snapshot of the pipeline, so verifiable revenue projections are
always on-hand. Predictability is key to the success of a sales
organization. With accurate pipeline information supporting the forecast, a
high level of predictability is more likely.
Facilitating A Graceful Sales Cycle
In sales, it all starts with the lead and ends with a closed deal.
Understanding what happens between those two stages is key to improving
overall effectiveness. The CRM application should serve as the primary tool
throughout the entire sales cycle, through categorizing leads, pinpointing
and engaging prospects and converting them into a winning conclusion. CRM
will never capture the 'art' of selling. However, it does capture the
science of it. And with a better understanding of the science of selling,
sales organizations can improve upon their consistency in quota achievement.
By managing lead generation programs through the CRM system, the marketing
department can leverage cost/benefits ROI analysis capabilities to help
create more focus in marketing efforts, and determine which campaigns turn
the best leads. This closed loop process does more than clearly identify the
ROI on any particular campaign. It also aligns the sales and marketing teams
in that everyone operates with the knowledge that accurate information is
key to the decision-making ability of the marketing organization. If they
make the right decisions on where to spend marketing dollars, then the sales
team gets more leads. With the right exposure into the value proposition, a
company truly can get to the closed loop process. And a full implementation
of this will improve your overall marketing ROI and ultimately sales
effectiveness.
Depending on the sales structure, customers may work with multiple contacts
in the organization: outside sales, inside sales, system engineers,
consultants, management and once the prospect is made a customer, the
support organization. The transitioning of customers through the sales cycle
can be cause for concern if it occurs at the expense of the customer's
confidence in the sales team and your company. When working from a single
information source, the entire team that reaches out to the customer or
prospect can leverage the same data at the same time. Customers quickly
realize the benefit of this when, no matter whom they call at your company,
they know you have the complete picture of their status.
The Customer Comes First
Nordstrom department stores set a standard for all selling organizations for
managing customer relationships ' in both its sales techniques and supreme
service mentality. By catering to each customer's needs, individually,
Nordstrom's has created an environment where customers feel valued, and
therefore their loyalty ratings are unsurpassed.
The comparison between a retail store and today's business-to-business
enterprise may not be a direct parallel. Still, the 'I love my customers'
mentality in all customer-facing positions is a requirement for those
companies looking to demonstrate a commitment to their customers. As the
competition grows broader and more intense, companies must put a stronger
emphasis on relationships to reduce churn and increase revenue per customer.
As a result, they will look to improved processes reinforced by existing
technologies and supplemented by training programs for customer-facing
personnel.
Information Exchange: Sharing The Wealth
Every sale could be viewed as equally valuable, although research has shown
that selling to a prospect is at least ten times more expensive than selling
to an existing customer, making effective management of customer
relationships essential for success. What's more, as customers continue
their relationship with your organization, access to up-to-date concise
information is as good as gold.
This is particularly critical when selling into the installed base, where it
is absolutely essential that the salesperson have full knowledge of the
customer's experience with the product and with other customer touch-points
in the organization, such as customer support and marketing. By providing a
unified view of the entire customer lifecycle, the sales force has a wealth
of knowledge from which to build their sales strategy.
An integrated solution enables customer information to be shared across the
enterprise. It enables employees to an-swer any question about any customer,
at any time ' from the status of their account to detailed order and
delivery information. By creating a shared information resource, customers
will no longer have to call back because they reached the wrong person, or
because the person they reached did not have the information needed.
By uniting customer-facing processes through one comprehensive resource, an
integrated CRM solution helps drive efficiency while reducing operational
costs. This shared wealth of information ensures that everyone interacting
with your customers has access to the same information, making for a smooth
transition from sales to support, and resulting in more satisfied customers
and more repeat buyers.
As with most operations in today's enterprise, customer support activity is
often managed through a technology application and propelled by a winning
strategy and dedicated staff. However, the customer support team is tasked
with a sensitive and critical goal: maintaining customer loyalty through
some of the most challenging points in the vendor-customer relationship. By
providing immediate access to customer information ' from the products
they're using to complete details of each interaction in one technology
resource, a comprehensive CRM application can be a key driver in sustaining
strong customer relationships.
While the sales force is generally considered the dominant revenue-driving
source in a company, driving sales is not just the responsibility of the
sales team. Customer loyalty has proven to be an essential source of
sustainable revenue growth, making customer support a critical contributor
to driving revenue.
Utilizing a single-source CRM solution drives the efficiency in the support
department, resulting in improved customer service, and the reporting
capabilities inherent in many CRM solutions allow support departments to
identify and even forecast their contribution to the bottom line.
In Support Of The Collective Customer Repository
The implementation of any new technology or strategy should ultimately make
business processes easier and more streamlined, creating new efficiency
opportunities across the enterprise. So who specifically in the organization
benefits from utilizing a shared repository of customer information? Just
about everyone.
In addition to serving as a comprehensive information resource, an
integrated CRM solution serves as a tool for administering ' even
anticipating ' the support needs of external customers. By providing
immediate access to customer information, from the products they're using to
complete details of each interaction, an integrated CRM solution helps
maximize the efficiency of the support team, resulting in improved customer
service.
For enterprises that perform on-site customer maintenance of their products,
it is essential for field service personnel to have access to the same
up-to-date information as on-site workers have. Many business application
vendors offer integrated extensions to their CRM solutions that work with
common Internet browsers to easily connect remote sites and users.
The nature, length and quality of a customer's interaction with the support
team can be an important resource for other customer-facing departments in
the enterprise, such as sales and marketing. Knowledge of a customer's
experiences with the product they're using helps marketing create targeted
campaigns and sales build the pipeline. Furthermore, non-customer facing
departments such as product development stand to benefit from the
information in a shared customer repository.
The Self-Service Factor
In the face of demands to cut costs, while maintaining high levels of
customer satisfaction, Web self-service technologies are working their way
into today's enterprises. The potential for cost savings and increased
employee efficiency make Web self-service an attractive option to consider.
As more customers turn to the Web to conduct business, Web self-service will
become a critical component of a competitive customer service strategy.
As the corporate culture evolves, defining itself through changing business
processes and customer demands, it is necessary to consistently evaluate
customer-facing strategies. It has been concluded that Web self-service can
reduce the costs of customer maintenance. Yet, the proper application of
this conclusion requires strategic planning for success.
Integration with the core CRM application is essential. Without integration,
if a customer searches an online knowledgebase and is not able to find a
satisfactory answer, the issue is escalated to e-mail or phone creating
multiple, separate incidents. Integration allows the customer to go from
self-service to live service and provides the support team with an overall
view of the customer's issue and the actions he has taken to resolve it.
Strengthening The Information Chain
Operating in today's difficult economic environment has more and more
midmarket companies searching for ways to increase their efficiency and
effectiveness in order to remain competitive. Winning customer loyalty in
today's age requires a company to step up customer service levels. Everyone
who touches the customer must be aware of the complete customer relationship
' not just one aspect of it.
You've heard the idiom, 'a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.'
Such is the case in the information chain: knowledge is power, and for
today's midmarket enterprise knowledge comes down to precise, reliable
information.
Think of the various customer-facing departments in your company as pieces
of a puzzle ' the marketing department is implementing campaigns and
collecting leads; the sales team is filling out the pipeline and customer
support is working to keep current customers satisfied. Utilizing a CRM
solution helps put the pieces together, uniting disparate islands of
information through one comprehensive tool to effectively manage and share
information ' from customer and product data, to service agreements and IT
assets.
By putting the pieces together in a powerful technology resource that unites
the disparate units of information in one comprehensive tool ' each branch
is able to leverage the knowledge and experiences of its counterparts. The
result is more streamlined operations that improve efficiency, saving time
and money.
Lauri McClay is vice president of sales for the Enterprise Solutions
Group of Epicor Software (www.epicor.com),
a provider of integrated enterprise software solutions for the global
midmarket. Epicor offers a suite of solutions for financials, distribution,
supplier relationship management and CRM.
Dan Whelan is senior vice president, professional services and support for
the Enterprise Solutions Group of Epicor Software (www.epicor.com),
which complements its integrated end-to-end enterprise software solutions
with consulting and support services.
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