Why CRM? - moving from Contact Management

What actually is CRM and what value will it provide to your business?

CRM is all about building long term business relationships with your customers. It is best described as the blending of internal business processes: sales, marketing and customer support with technology. CRM solutions empower businesses to more efficiently and effectively manage the activities that affect their relationship with their customers - having the information you need, in the right format, when you need it. The ultimate goal of CRM is to meet and exceed customer expectations, create a positive customer experience and build customer loyalty.

Contact Management

Before we look at CRM in more detail, let's review what Contact management is all about, and look at the benefits it provides. After all, CRM is really an extension of Contact Management and we need to understand Contact Management  to understand the benefits of CRM.

Contact Management encompasses capturing information about your customers and prospects, such as position, company name, address, phone & fax numbers, email address etc. You also need to log all interactions with the customer, so you have a record of what documents have been sent, notes from phone calls, and perhaps email sent and received.

By logging customer interactions, you have a record of offers made and prices quoted, which is invaluable in the sales cycle. Also this information has been captured in your company and is not lost if your account manager leaves your company.

Further, in a workgroup environment, the contact information is shared so all your employees have access to the information. If a sales person is away when a client calls, another sales person can handle the call and have access to all previous interactions, correspondence and prices quoted.

Contact Management also automates the mundane day to day tasks - for example diarising a note to call a client. Instead of writing a note in your diary to remind you to call a contact in 2 weeks time, you add this to the diary in the Contact Management system, which will then automatically pop up a reminder in advance of the task. Likewise creation of To-do lists and reminders can also be automated.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

While Contact Management holds many benefits, such systems usually have many limitations, such as flat file architecture, limited customisation and limited integration with other applications.

Throughout the 90s businesses were focused on improving internal operations and using the fundamentals of Contact Management, more advanced tools emerged to automate   departmental functions such as sales, marketing and help desk. Vendors raced to the scene with independent solutions for sales force automation, marketing, help desk and customer service functions.

While many of these applications provided increased productivity, the approach of using independent solutions to address departmental needs served only to created islands of automation and information duplication. Furthermore, the lack of system integration and workflow between these departments meant that vital customer information was unavailable to sales and support personnel without jumping from system to system. This did little to support cross selling opportunities or increase customer satisfaction.

CRM changes all of this and represents a continuing evolution in managing front office operations. With CRM, traditional departmental applications for sales, marketing and customer service are consolidated into a single unified system capable of managing the entire customer life cycle. This approach allows employees throughout an organization to have immediate access to a complete profile of important customer information. for example, an Account Manager will be able to see that a customer he is about to call has recently been in contact with your support department and had a support questions resolved promptly.

As well as all the benefits of Contact Management, the key benefits of implementing CRM have been identified as:

• gaining customer confidence and loyalty
• providing personalised service to customers 
• acquiring better knowledge of customers and their buying habits
• differentiating themselves from the competition
• sharing customer information throughout their organisation

For large organisations, the focus is on implementing CRM at an operational level, and integrating with back end ERP, ERM and supply chain management. These solutions are complex, often taking years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to implement.

Small to medium size business has very different requirements. These businesses are unwilling to invest thousands of dollars per user or endure lengthy implementation cycles. They need a low cost solutions, that they can implement "out-of-the-box" and manage the system without bringing in costly experts and programmers.

Solution Providers

There has been a flurry of merger activity occurring in the market as vendors attempt to demonstrate that they have a complete CRM solution. Most of this activity is centred around traditional sales force automation vendors who are adding help desk and customer service solutions to their product offering. Buyers should be aware that it may take some time before these disparate systems provide true capability and should carefully evaluate each alternative before moving ahead. The chart below lists several of the main-stream companies competing for a piece of the CRM market.

Commence RM

Commence RM is a true CRM solution built from the ground up. For more than a decade Commence Corporation has supplied various manufacturers, resellers and end users with comprehensive tools and solutions to meet the needs of small to medium sized businesses. Commence RM is designed with their needs in mind and consist of a suite of pre-built applications for Contact Management, Sales Force Automation, Help desk, and Marketing functions. Together these applications form the foundation for delivering high quality services to the customer before, during and after the sale.

Commence RM is intuitive, user friendly and ready to use right out of the box. There are no lengthy implementation cycles and end users can custom tailor the applications to work the way they do without any programming knowledge.

What makes Commence RM unique is that it supports many of the features found in high end solutions costing several thousand dollars per seat. With Commence RM all customer information is integrated into a single unified database accessible to all authorised employees without having to move from system to system. Sharing this information between your sales department and customer care centre is vital for creating an effective and consistent front office operation that improves employee efficiency, productivity and customer service.

Commence RM will allow your business to support the sales process from lead qualification to closing the business, resolve customer issues responsively and professionally, manage marketing campaigns and facilitate team selling and support.

Furthermore, Commence RM users can integrate with their MYOB accounting solution with the optional AccountLink interface. This is a bi-directional link to MYOB, to update company, product and invoice information.

The future success of your business may very well depend upon how effectively your company manages, processes and utilises information to serve your customers. With Commence RM, you can be assured that you have the right solution for building customer loyalty and retention.