Customer Facing Activities
From a high-level perspective, customer facing activities can be divided into three basic categories: marketing, sales, and service and support. In marketing category, marketers typically post advertisements or conduct events to promote products/services. In sales category, sales representatives try to sale products/services by contacting prospective buyers. In service & support category, company ensures customers are satisfied by providing the promised services or product supports.
Business Challanges
In a small size company, it’s not uncommon that one or two employees play a role in each category. Typically when business is operating on a low number of customers, these employees can manage information through spreadsheet and share them via email. The challenges appear when number of customers grows tremendously because the process is not scalable, and these can be identified through the several symptoms, such as lost of sale opportunities, decreasing customers’ satisfaction rate, and eventually loosing loyal customers to competitors. Internally, the employees are suffering fatigues from the difficulties to mange and share the growing customer information.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Every company that sells products/services typically has a set of processes used to manage customer facing activities. These processes should be planned, designed, and executed carefully to entice prospective consumers and to maintain customers’ satisfaction level. Most importantly, these processes must be supported by a system that allow each stakeholders to scale while executing the process. With CRM software, a company can structure and centralize prospect and customer data, automate processes, and take proactive and reactive actions towards certain business conditions.
Structured and Centralized Data
CRM typically comes with a set of standardized business objects (similar to database tables) that relates to the marketing, sales, and service & support business data. For example, Account, Contact and Opportunity object are used to manage sales related information. Campaign and Lead objects are commonly used to manage marketing related information. Product, Case, Solution are used to manage service & support information. These standardized objects structure data universally across the organization. The more employees start utilizing the system, the more data continuously stored into the system, creating a centralized repository for the the company. Structured and centralized data enabled company to mine the data and to create better reports to analyze the state of business and make better decisions. Compared with the spreadsheet documents & emails, this has definitely provided a significant improvement for the company.
Automated Processes
In addition to the standardized business objects, CRM usually comes with built-in automated processes. These built-in automated processes promote universal understanding about the process in the company. For example, when a lead meets its qualification, it can be converted into account, contact, and opportunity objects. Built-in automated processes also serve as the one of key primary differentiator between CRM and databases system.
Proactive and reactive actions towards business condition
CRM may come with feature for users to create and manage dashboards, reports and workflows. Reports are suitable to trigger reactive actions, while dashboards and worfklows can be used to initiate proactive actions. For example, a marketer can create an ROI report of multiple campaigns. After reviewing the report, she can decide to eliminate several under-performing campaigns. A support dashboard can inform the supervisor about his team performance by observing number of open cases. When the dashboard indicate high number of open cases, he can contact his team, investigate the causes and solve them preventing the situation to become a source of crisis. A workflow can send an email to the key executive when a new high value opportunity is created alerting him that there's important deal and he may to take further actions to secure this deal.
SaaS - Software as a Service
The ‘Software as a Service (SaaS)’ term does not really provide new meaning to software industry. But it’s a new term that represent the ‘Application Services Provider (ASP)’ and later commonly known as ‘OnDemand’ concept. This concept promotes an easy software consumption while avoiding common on-premise software installation and configurations pitfalls. SaaS application typically allows fast and easy software provisioning through the internet and web browser, as fast and easy as renting movie online. SaaS application vendor also use a subscription pricing model that allows company to consume the software in affordable subscription price. This model allows small and medium companies to enjoy the benefits of using "elite" enterprise software that previously was only affordable for larger companies.
Small and medium businesses should definitely consider moving away from the non scalable practices and should not shy away from adopting CRM. It will help companies to manage the full cycle of customer facing activities from marketing, sales, and service & support. It stores the activity data in structured, centralized allowing for easy reporting. Dashboards, reports, and worklows allows companies to be more responsive to prospects and customers. And with SaaS model, even a small company can enjoy the luxury of running its business activities as professional as enterprise companies.
2 comments:
Hey this is a great article. CRM is definitely a powerful tool – if only the employees used it. My small company has an old fashion way of doing things and is technically challenge in a lot of way. It is as much of a challenge to change people’s attitude towards CRM, let alone getting them to use it. So as worthy as a CRM investment is, the implementation of it is even more critical. otherwise it’ll just be another new technology adoption.
Agree. I think many SaaS software vendors realize about this and invest heavily in usability to make the system very easy and intiutive as possible. Yet, it's still a big challange. Company should provide employees with sufficient training.
Post a Comment