A CRM is the first step towards becoming a customer-centric company.
Have you tried to speak with any of our Telco’s or Banks either by telephone or walk in into their branches for a complaint or enquiry and the line drops or you finish the call or visit and on calling back to follow up later when your issue has not been resolved. You had to repeat your story all over again to the same person or another? That Service provider does not have a robust CRM.
If you have called a service provier in Nigeria and the customer service person or relationship manager greets you by your name armed with the latest update based on your interaction history available on her screen or tablet, to serve you proactively. That, in my opinon is customer centric company and they definitely have a robust CRM!
What is a CRM ? A CRM simply means Customer Relationship Management! It can be a person, technology and process used by customer-centric companies who understand the need to capture, manage and track activities from lead generation in a sales cycle to close and support ( after sales) which also creates repeat business.
A CRM is a multifaceted platform with data driven categories integrated to streamlined processes where everything crucial to developing, improving, and retaining your customer relationships are stored and available to employees.
CRM tools make the customer-facing functions of business easier. They help you:
- Centralize customer information
- Automate marketing interactions
- Provide business intelligence
- Facilitate communications
- Track sales opportunities
- Analyze data
- Enable responsive customer service
Running a successful business is no simple task. With marketing campaigns, data analysis, meetings, customer care, and more all happen simultaneously, your business really need a robust and powerful CRM solution to bring all these activities and functions together in one environement. Not in silos or multiple applications , multiple screenss for diferent functions which makes it combersome to piece together information to serve customers.
As a Microsoft partner, Scimitar Global Services Limited offers Microsoft Dynamics CRM now called Dynamic 365 to Businesses. Microsoft Dynamics CRM is part of the Dynamics family that includes enterprise resource planning (ERP) products such as Microsoft Dynamics AX, Microsoft Dynamics GP, Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Microsoft Dynamics SL. All theses are now merged into Dynamics 365 as a cloud-based ERP and CRM enterprise system; built by Microsoft for maximum flexibility and extensibility.
Dynamics CRM comes out of the box with three modules of Sales, marketing and Customer Service and is available in the cloud (known as Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online) and on-premises, as well as in a hybrid cloud version. You are to decide wht deployment option you want based on your road map and requirements as well as budget and ROI expectations.
The Sales module is used for Sales force automation, Customer Service Module is used for Contact center automation and complaints management as well as after sales support. The Marketing module on the other hand is for Marketing automation which syncs into the sales module with One data available across board. This is why it has the capacity to give customer-centric companies 360 degree view of their customers, ensuring efficiency, customer satisfaction and loyalty which definitely increase revenue and a return on your investment on a robust CRM solution like Microsoft Dynamics 365.
The benefits of a CRM can never be over emphasized as you may miss growth opportunities and lose revenue just because you’re not keeping tabs and maximizing your business relationships kept by your employees, no mater the size of your business.
Imagine misplacing customer contact information, only to learn that your delay pushed your client into the arms of a competitor. Or, picture your top two salespeople pursuing the same prospect, resulting in an annoyed potential customer and some unfriendly, in-house competition. Without a centralized program where your people can log and track customer interactions, your business falls behind schedule and out of touch.
A customer relationship management (CRM) system is designed to integrate and automate sales, marketing, and customer service and you need to speak to partners like Scimitar Global Services Limited (SGSL) to go over your CRM road map as there are so many other consideration than just purchasing software. At that level, what you have bought is called Vanilla solutions. No workflows, No business rules, No customization , No integrations and No Intelligent reports.
When planning to implement a CRM solution, you must choose the right solution and the right implementation method that will power up your business and enable you to achieve your strategic business goals. Implementation should be considered an ongoing program and not a project because of the dynamics nature of both the customer and the market. Your business should be event-driven (customer triggered and System triggered) For example, a customer buys a product with his card, your CRM should trigger a workflow to the sales team to call him and pitch a loan or an installmental payments for the purchase.
Financial institiutions abroad are taking it further with Next Best Action (NBA) in CRM from VeriPark (one of my Microsoft ISV partners for CRM), which is is focused on using sophisticated rules, analytics and algorithms to better predict customer needs and in turn offer more relevant actions and offers leading to improved wallet share and loyalty. It leverages Azure Machine Learning capabilities to recommend what to do next for a customer in context.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 delivers the full spectrum of CRM through five individual apps—Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Project Service Automation, and Marketing —that work seamlessly together. So you can buy just what your business needs now, and add others as those needs grow.
Talk to us now for a discovery session with your stakeholders and business unit heads to look at your roadmap and agree on a roll out plan from the areas of priority and quick wins .
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By the way, ISV means Independent Software Vendor! it means the partner has patented a Microsoft software and #typeapprovedatredmond. I will b sharing some of their value adding FSI solutions in the coming days and weeks.
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