Adapted from Hidden Benefits are Key to CRM, published in CRM2day.com. Roger Cole, Business Software Specialist, CPiO

Improving customer information through Customer Relationship Management (CRM) can result in surprising hidden benefits, but organizations need to target operational focus to leverage the opportunity. To date organizations have approached CRM with the single goal of improving customer knowledge to drive sales strategies. Understanding your customer has meant, in essence, easy access to consistent information about sales history. As a result, too many companies have been sold CRM as an extension to the ‘contact management’ concept, and have therefore focused on delivering customer information to sales people.

This information of course has value. However, this exclusive focus on sales not only constrains the scope of the project, it also significantly undermines the potential benefits and overall value that can be gained.

This is particularly relevant in the current challenging economic environment where making the business run as efficiently as possible can be as much an operational focus as retaining and increasing sales. For CRM provides a platform for information visibility across the organization. By pulling information from finance, sales, marketing, even support into a central, customer focused database, an organization can attain significant insight into business performance and attain attendant benefits including enhanced financial control; improved forecasting; and in depth business understanding.

The hidden benefits of CRM are demonstrated by design technology provider Stanford Marsh, which is using CRM to deliver a single, detailed customer view across its product sales, support, training and financial contracts businesses. In addition to boosting the effectiveness and efficiency of service and support engineers, this single view provides sales staff with both financial and stock information as well as up to date sales and support call history.

Credit risk is flagged in red to ensure awareness of problems and enforce credit limits, while immediate access to stock information enables them to place orders immediately for the customer and set delivery time expectation. This information has also significantly reduced internal calls, particularly to finance, further improving efficiency and effectiveness. The integration of CRM to its financial software has enabled Stanford Marsh to improve utilization of its engineering staff and enhance financial management, as well as providing excellent information to sales personnel. Customer service has improved and the company has expanded its service contracts by 60% in two years. Implementation and equipment sales have increased by 24 percent and debtor days have reduced by approximately 20%, releasing $500,000 back into the business.

It is clear that CRM offers so much more than the contact management systems of the past – but only for those organizations that can successfully embrace an open culture underpinned by access to the key business systems. Visibility across finance, sales, service and marketing provides an organization with the collective business understanding required to achieve a positive return on investment while supporting the CRM objective of enabling improved customer value.

To learn more about integrating your ERP solution with CRM click here.

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