0800 381 1000
+44(0)1628 661810

Preact CRM
Vandervell House
Vanwall Business Park
Maidenhead
Berkshire
SL6 4UB

sales@preact.co.uk

How businesses benefit from CRM

Different businesses look to CRM for differing reasons but most recognise that customers are the essence of their business and retaining them is typically the core reason for implementing or upgrading a CRM software solution.  

CRM software, correctly implemented, helps businesses to do exactly this. From entry level applications to enterprise level packages, CRM software is about storing customer information, treating contacts as individuals, gaining performance insight and delivering a service that keeps customers loyal and drives profitable relationships.

Here are just a few of frequent reasons that businesses of all sizes rely on CRM software.

Improving Customer Service

The customer service functionality that all CRM systems including Sage ACT! provide enable service teams to:

• Store critical contact and relationship information about a customer in one place so that data can easily be found.
• Track customer communications so that everyone can easily see your stand with each contact and company.
• Schedule follow-up activities to proactively communications with customers.
• Personalise fields and attach linked documents for complete contact tracking in one place.

• Integrate CRM with your accounting software for front and back-office integration.

More advanced CRM systems like Microsoft Dynamics CRM offer extended customer service tools to:

• Increase the visibility of customer issues and cases and resolve items in line with service level agreements.
• Use automated processes to escalate outstanding case resolve customer issues efficiently. Easily see at a glance who your most profitable customers are.
• Apply workflow rules that prompt users to consistently progress outstanding cases in line with established business rules.
• Identify where service time is being spend and which customer issues are absorbing the most time.
• Easily see at a glance who your most profitable customers are.
• Give customers their own self-service portal on your website that integrates with CRM so that they can log issues and check the status of service requests.

• Transform customer service from a cost centre into a key asset that empowers everyone to be part of the process and strengthen customer loyalty.

Improving Business Insight

By storing critical customer and sales data, CRM software is designed to provide individuals and businesses managers with valuable insight to make timely and informed decisions.

• By centralising account and contact information in a single CRM database, managers have an immediate overview of individual customers and prospects.

• Identify the top opportunities forecasted to close over any timeframe based on value and close date for either yourself or across a sales team.

• Use on-demand dashboard enable performance to be instantly assessed and offer drill down analysis.

• CRM sales reports help individuals and managers to monitor performance trends and identify what factors are impacting on performance. Real-time CRM reporting clearly show where opportunities drop out of your selling cycle, how many meetings are converted into sales, how many new sales opportunities where created over any timeframe and much more.

By deploying advanced CRM systems like Microsoft Dynamics CRM, managers have access to a wider range of business intelligence and metrics across all departments including sales, marketing and service teams.

With in-built reports, dashboards and export options, CRM systems offer instant analysis across all key business areas using accurate data that can be acted upon.

Increasing Productivity

All CRM systems help users to make better use of their time by enabling them to:

• Use calendars and task lists to see what needs to be done each day and prioritise time effectively. Activity alarms, priority levels, calendar filters and activity rollover are standard features of virtually all CRM systems.
• Run simple searches or build advanced queries to easily find the information that you want to work with.
• Integrate CRM with Microsoft Outlook to track all email communications and synchronise diaries.
• Get mobile access to contact and sales information in CRM. Use CRM offline using a laptop and synchronise the changes, use web-access or a mobile device.

• Create letter and email templates that reflect your standard documents so that communications can be quickly sent from CRM without duplication of effort.

Advanced CRM systems offer extended functionality so that routine tasks can be streamlined:

• Apply CRM workflows in line with business rules to prompt and guide users on-screen through routine tasks like progressing a service requests or logging a sales opportunity to enforce consistency and cut processing time.
• Connect CRM with back-office systems to see a complete customer view from one interface to improve service delivery and avoid wasting time searching for information.
• Populate a knowledgebase to share best practice and solutions so that frequently encountered issues can be swiftly resolved.
• On screen training videos and coaching tips help new users build confidence using CRM software.

• CTI integration offers screen popping and automatic phone dialling from CRM so that more calls can be handled each day.

Advanced CRM systems offer extended sales tools:

• Gain a 360-degree view of each customer to easily identify new selling opportunities and make recommendations
• Enforce consistent sales processes across sales teams through automated processes including lead routing and escalation
• Automate manual processes including lead routing to streamline efficiency and cut the cost of selling

• Seamlessly process items from initial quote through to invoice within a single interface

Improving Marketing Effectiveness

Inbuilt marketing functionality that's available in virtually all CRM systems enable marketers and marketing teams to:

• Easily communicate new offers and products launches by email and mail
• Create and manage marketing lists that can be used to generate a new source of leads
• Profile individual contacts to select the right contacts for each marketing message

• Track the results from phone calls and other communications with contacts

Advanced CRM systems help teams that need to:

• Understand results from marketing activities by demonstrating the return that's achieved
• Gain real-time insight into each marketing activity without grey areas and guesswork
• Create a unified marketing effort that fosters better communication between teams

• Measure the cost of marketing activities to assess the bottom line profit achieved by each campaign

How Preact CRM Help

As CRM experts, at Preact we offer independent pre-sales advice to help businesses select the right CRM software for their requirements.

However, software selection is only one step to achieving CRM success. Although CRM technology has come of age, repeated surveys continue to report that many businesses still struggle to achieve results from their software. Consistently these findings reveal that a lack of user buy-in is the top reason for CRM failure. 

All too often this is because new CRM users have received little or insufficient training and as a result they don't properly understand how to use the software. In other cases, CRM has been deployed out-of-the box without field or layout customisation and therefore lacks relevance in the eyes of users.

As a result, people only use the basics or don't use CRM at all so potential gains in customer service, productivity and sales remain unfulfilled.

We work with businesses to design and implement CRM software around their precise requirements to ensure that their system is correctly configured and consistent with the way that your people work. Our consultants provide on-site training that quickly builds new users confidence with the software and helps teams achieve quick gains with CRM. Ongoing help and advice is available with phone and remote dial-in assistance.