Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

CRM is a comprehensive approach to identifying, acquiring and retaining customers. By enabling organisations to manage and coordinate customer interactions across multiple channels, departments and lines of business, CRM helps in maximising the value of every customer interaction and drive superior business performance. Businesses can reap rewards from CRM in several ways. These include:

• Extending the depth and breadth of customer relationships, to gain increased customer “wallet share” as well as market share
• Reducing delivery channel costs by moving customers and transactions from costly channels to less expensive ones, such as the Call Center, the E-mail and the Web
• Reinforcing the enterprise’s brand — not merely by raising awareness through traditional media (such as television), but by fulfilling the brand’s promise through more-interactive media (such as the call center)
• Reinforcing dealer/partner relations in order to support end-to-end customer-centric marketing, sales and service processes
• Building customer satisfaction and loyalty through every interaction with the customer, across multiple channels

Business must manage customer interactions across multiple communications channels (call center, field sales/service, dealer/partner networks, e-mail, fax and the WWW) and lines of business with overlapping customers and interconnected processes. The challenge is to make it easy for customers to do business with the organisation through any channel, any time, any way they prefer and make customers feel that they are dealing with a same (single and unified) company, that recognises them and their value at every touchpoint.

By streamlining processes and providing sales, service and marketing professionals with up-to-date, accurate and complete customer information, CRM enables organisations to establish more profitable customer relationships, increase customer retention, improve employee productivity and decrease operating costs. More specifically:

• Marketing departments can improve campaign management and marketing planning, increase marketing-driven revenue and campaign response rates, while at the same time decreasing lead generation and customer acquisition costs
• Sales departments can manage the opportunity sales cycle, improve cross-selling and up-selling, perform more accurate forecasting and increase key sales-performance metrics such as average order size, revenue per sales representative, revenue per customer
• Customer Service/Care departments can increase service employee productivity, improve resolution times and facilitate customer retention, while decreasing service costs and enhancing the complete customer view

Effective CRM is a strategic imperative for corporate growth and survival in a highly competitive environment, across every industry sector. Customer Service is of paramount importance to the overall customer satisfaction, while products are being commoditised. Research has shown that companies creating satisfied/loyal customers have more repeat business, lower customer acquisition costs and stronger brand value, all of which translates into improved financial performance.

Our CRM solutions provide the most comprehensive multichannel solution that allows businesses to manage, synchronise and coordinate customer interactions across all customer touchpoints. More specifically:

• The Sales application helps organisations eliminate productivity barriers, enforce consistency across all selling channels, grow revenues more quickly, predictably and profitably by helping them focus on the right opportunities at the right time. It empowers sales professionals with comprehensive support for sales planning and forecasting, territory management, account and contact management, lead and opportunity management, quotation and order management, configuration, contract management, incentive and commission management, time and travel management and sales analytics.
• The Call Center and Service applications support end-to-end, closed-loop service and enable organisations to increase service profitability, reduce cost per contact, optimise resource management and greatly improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. Transform service into a profitable center with a broad range of functionality to enable customer service and support, field service, e-service, service sales and marketing, service-contract management, warranty and claims management, repairs, channel service and service analytics.
• The Marketing applications provide a compehensive closed-loop solution that enables organisations to better understand their customers needs, segment their customer base, execute personalised campaigns synchronised across all channels and optimise marketing strategies through continuous testing, measurement and feedback. Improve the effectiveness of your marketing activities, maximize resource efficiencies and empower marketers to acquire and develop long-term customer relationships. It provides comprehensive support for segment and list management, campaign management, lead management, marketing resource management and marketing analytics.
• The Order Management solutions support complex pricing and product configuration, quote & order approval, availability checking and credit & payment verification to ensure customer quotes & orders are valid, accurate, complete and can be delivered on time to the customer. It enables you to capture & validate orders at any customer touchpoint and seamlessly integrate the information with supply chain, fulfillment and billing systems. It can be deployed across multiple channels, such as field sales, partners/dealers and call/contact center agents, to automate and improve labor-intensive processes for quote/offer configuration, quoting, proposal generation and order entry. With our solution you can increase sales productivity by avoiding rework and errors during the quote and order process and identifying the right solution to meet your customer's needs.
• The Field Service application enables organisations to ensure total life-cycle management of service requests for customers, technicians, contact center agents and third-party maintainers. It helps organisations profitably manage all aspects of their service operations, from preventive maintenance to invoicing and advanced parts exchange. Its flexible service-order and dispatch management solution provides a 360-degree view of your contacts, contracts, parts, time & expenses, guaranteeing everyone in your organisation has the information they need to deliver superior service every time.
• The Partner Relationship Management (PRM) solution automates and streamlines channel business processes, facilitates collaboration, supports real-time business-to-business integration with partners and provides powerful insight into performance and effectiveness across the entire partner network. Optimize your indirect channels with support for partner management, channel marketing, channel sales, channel service, channel commerce, partner and channel analytics. With the PRM solutions you are positioned to fully capitalise on your partner network, enabling you to increase revenues through all sales channels, improve customer satisfaction, and decrease operating expenses at the same time.