CRM solutions can help small and midsize companies manage the myriad ways they interact with customers—from marketing to new and potential customers to improving their customer support. These solutions integrate new social and collaboration tools, making it easier to connect with customers, and are available via the cloud, making CRM more affordable for smaller companies. Know all the reasons you need a CRM solution.
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Lean is not an overnight quick-fix; it is an unending commitment. As lean thinking has evolved and the concepts broadened, lean advocates have come to recognize that enterprise resource planning (ERP) and lean work together very well. In this paper, read about how five lean principles are supported and enhanced by comprehensive information control and the management tools that one end-to-end enterprise software suite delivers.
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Social media is providing organizations with a plethora of data about their customers. This paper explains how to leverage business intelligence software and advanced analytics to change the way business is conducted. The end goal should be to personalize marketing messages in a way that allows organizations to narrowly target specific customers based on the knowledge of the customer they already have.
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Sales managers usually have no problem grasping the value of CRM—it presents sales data in an easily digested format that allows managers to adjust programs, processes, and people to optimize selling. For sales people, however, CRM is often viewed as a new burden, a hindrance, and an example of the sales manager shifting his work on to them. In reality, it's as helpful to sales staffers as it is to managers, if it's used the right way.
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If you're a manufacturer or distributor considering an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system with an integrated customer relationship management (CRM) application, you need to find out how far the "CRM concept" really extends to other elements of the ERP system, such as order frequency, buyer habits, specific customer invoicing requirements, etc. How vendors answer the eight crucial questions in this report will tell you what you need to know.
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Maximizer CRM 12 is now TEC Certified for online evaluation of customer relationship management (CRM) solutions in the CRM Evaluation Center. The certification seal is a valuable indicator for organizations relying on the integrity of TEC research for assistance with their software selection projects. Download this report for product highlights, competitive analysis, product analysis, and in-depth analyst commentary.
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Recent trends in the distribution industry are forcing companies to continually re-evaluate their processes and value propositions and strategically chart new courses. This report contains support from a number of thought leaders for three resolutions that wholesale distributors can't afford to ignore.
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Social networks offer many opportunities for businesses to gain a closer engagement with their customers. This appears to be an unstoppable bandwagon that all organizations must leap on before they are left behind, but is it that simple? The social network landscape is packed with choices and pitfalls for the unwary, so a careful and appropriately nuanced response is required. Read more on how to best use social media.
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Semiconductor manufacturers can work more closely with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and expand into new markets by using Web 2.0 technologies. Infosys' experts reveal "white spaces" in semiconductor marketing strategies that can be addressed by digital and mobile capabilities. They demonstrate how best practices in information and customer experience embedded in Infosys' Semiconductor Digital Engagement Maturity Model can deliver a competitive advantage.
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Sage 100 Standard ERP (formerly Sage ERP MAS 90), v. 4.5, is TEC Certified for online evaluation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for services in the ERP Evaluation Center. The certification seal is a valuable indicator for organizations relying on the integrity of TEC research for assistance with their software selection projects. Download this report for product highlights, competitive analysis, product analysis, and in-depth analyst commentary.
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Traditional CRM systems have evolved to be used by the entire company (sales, marketing, customer service, accounting, and management), but in doing so they have lost their focus on the primary user--sales. As such, salespeople get stuck with a CRM system that does not increase sales activity, but instead, bogs them down and decreases activity, which subsequently decreases sales. Download this report to learn the criteria that should dominate the decision as to which CRM should be used. This report is for sales people, sales managers, VPs, IT, customer service and general management (CEO, CTO, CFO). It should be required reading for anyone that is part of the CRM selection team.
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S-Drive has been built on Salesforce.com as a managed application and is delivered exclusively via the AppExchange marketplace. It is a native AppExchange application, meaning that it is built to run in the cloud with multi-tenancy and scalability in mind. S-Drive uses Amazon Simple Storage
Service as its file storage platform, whereas the Salesforce.com is used as the application platform as well as the file information database. Besides Salesforce.com and Amazon Web Services, SDrive does not use any other servers or infrastructure that may introduce security vulnerabilities.
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A strategic planning process is critical for distribution companies. Not unlike personal financial planning, distribution executives have to select the best investments needed now to create profitable growth in the future. If you fail to make the right commitments at the right time, you will miss opportunities and increase your risk. This paper outlines a set of core analytics customized for wholesaler distributors.
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With recent advancements, publishers and advertisers need to know how to get the right message to the right customer and in the right place to achieve their campaign goals. This report explores the emergence of data-driven audience targeting and reveals some of the ways that publishers are embracing newer ‘actual data’ tools to create dynamic audience segments that are more flexible and truly able to meet advertisers’ needs.
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As a company in the financial sector, you place extremely high demands on your call center. The complicated and sensitive nature of the calls requires an agent who is highly trained and experienced. This leads to a high cost per call. At the same time, sacrificing caller satisfaction is not an option. This creates a tough challenge: How do you decrease the cost per call, while improving the customer experience? Download this white paper to find out.
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The Sunshine Act has prompted life science companies to look at alternatives to their expense reporting processes. The output to HHS is required to be electronic, searchable, and easily downloaded. A solution that supports these requirements from the initial input step of the process provides proactive control and management of the data—and of the direct marketing process as a whole.
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The buzz is that social media can be used to benefit business. So what are the social media platforms (SMPs) that are economically relevant to a business organization? How can they be used and leveraged? And why are they valued? This research paper answers these questions and more, concluding that a social media platform can be economically valuable to an organization only if it generates information that either improves the reliability of existing information or is new information. Learn more. Download now.
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Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems that address the needs of service industries such as advertising agencies represent a growing market. Although there are exceptions, business software vendors still approach the industry with a generalized set of functionality. This report aims to establish the areas of product functionality that this industry requires and identify a strategy vendors might take to improve the fit of their solutions to this market.
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Of the 30 billion invoices sent and received in Europe every year, more than 90% are in paper format. This is not only labour intensive and error prone, but comes at both a financial and environmental cost. Such manual operations slow invoice reconciliation, leading to poor relationships with suppliers and buyers and, potentially, poor cash flow management. This paper discusses the challenges posed by inefficient manual invoice processes, the need for e-invoicing, and how an organization can focus on its core business by handing over invoice processing to a managed service provider.
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Traditional voice of customer (VoC) analytics for understanding and predicting customer behavior relies on two types of data sources—structured (customer feedback surveys, focus groups, etc.) and unstructured (blogs, forums, etc.). Data is then organized for use by diverse teams across an organization. Read about how companies can use data captured from customer actions or on-board diagnostic (OBD) systems for VoC analytics.
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A man leaves his farm in search of the richest diamond mine in the world only to die penniless when, all along, unknown to him, his own land was rich with the jewels he longed to find. That’s the fable at the heart of AXA Equitable’s ongoing successful marketing program called Mining Diamonds. And the customer intelligence behind the program? SAS. Read the full story now.
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“SAS business analytics help us put a laser focus on knowing our customers, reducing operating expenses and innovating for the future,” says Chris McCann, president of 1-800-FLOWERS.COM. “As our business has grown from one flower shop to an online gift retailer serving more than 30 million customers, we need SAS’ abilities to really know our customers and turn that knowledge into action." Read the full story now.
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Welcome to TEC's Vendor Spotlight series. This installment focuses on KANA Software, a company founded in 1996 that has evolved from e-mail management into service experience management. See how KANA's software and service offerings help more than 600 customers manage the entire customer service lifecycle, from initial customer contact through to satisfaction survey responses or peer-to-peer sharing of the customer experience.
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Engaging in conversation with consumers through new social media channels is helping retailers strengthen customer relationships and enhance their brand. To manage this conversation effectively, you need solutions that help you capture and analyze a massive amount of social media data and prepare an appropriate, individualized response. This white paper explores the ideal social media solution.
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Customer experience is now a competitive differentiator. As customers become more informed and more demanding, companies need to step outside of their comfort zone and explore non-traditional customer relationship management (CRM) areas. This paper explores a sampling of CRM improvements that allow companies to deliver a consistent customer experience to gain a competitive advantage.
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Organizations today are looking for low-risk solutions that provide immediate value. This paper introduces a set of solutions that offers a range of processes to address major phases of the customer life cycle. These rapid deployment customer relationship management (CRM) solutions give companies a live, preconfigured CRM environment that leverages CRM best practices. They also include a unique implementation methodology.
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In this paper it’s argued that over the next three to five years, the winners in sales will be the ones who figure out how to smoothly and productively manage a mobile sales team. Selling will be a mobile discipline. It’s imperative to craft a plan for making mobility standard and keeping information secure.
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It’s clear that no single software vendor can fully support the range of requirements encompassing a complete mobile business strategy. This white paper addressed how business software vendors can best support their customers by leveraging a robust mobile ecosystem built on solutions from a variety of vendors.
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Profitable customer experience (CE) strategies are holistic, sustainable, and focused on creating competitive differentiation. If you can deliver highly valuable experiences to your customers, in a sustainable way, the reward will be loyal, engaged advocates who help you grow your business. Read more to better understand how companies can provide a superlative customer experience and still make a profit.
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Customer churn is very costly—it’s many times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one—so retaining customers by offering a superior experience is a top priority. Also, delivering unique experiences to different customer segments is a valuable strategy. Read about how to increase brand equity and retain customers by offering a better experience.
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Learn how communication-enabled business processes (CEBPs)—processes enabled by communication systems that are tightly integrated with business applications—can help resolve customer relationship management (CRM) issues by reducing latency, providing recording of and visibility into interactions, and better enabling end-to-end processes involving employees, customers, suppliers, and partners.
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This paper evaluates various service software solutions for customer service and business process professionals to create differentiated customer experiences and build stronger buyer loyalty. Customers are increasingly online, want self-service options, and demand real-time responses. Also, social media has grown to be an important new channel for interacting with customers and engaging in innovative ways.
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The retail thought process has irrevocably changed. Science-supported process is now core to the merchandising discipline. However, faith in science is not always grounded in an understanding of what it can do (even for the largest retailers), leaving us with some concerns about unrealistic expectations and a backlash later in the decade. Read about the seven critical tenets for 21st-century merchandising.
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Promoting band image, improving overall business performance, and keeping customers happy is a main concern of many businesses. This paper demonstrates how the Extended Enterprise platform can help specific verticals to promote and sell their products to external audiences. Know the value of the Extended Enterprise solution in financial services, insurance, government, retail, manufacturing, healthcare, and associations.
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This business management solution is an affordable offering that supports profitable growth, enables business agility, and empowers your employees. It’s comprehensive, easy-to-use software that supports all stakeholders across your company as well as your extended ecosystem. Read about how you can grow your business, develop relationships, accelerate innovation, and streamline operations.
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Managing customer relationships is a challenging but vital part of running a business. Organizations have to acquire new customers to grow revenue and satisfactorily service existing customers to ensure loyalty and future business. A good business management solution has customer relationship management (CRM) functionality integrates with the entire range of your processes and provides a full view of customer data.
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CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is an essential tool in any modern business no matter its size. The primary purpose of CRM software is to manage all aspects of the relationship with existing and prospective customers. Get a quick start on your CRM purchase by researching the important issues and factors for your organization. This guide can help you find the right provider for your unique needs.
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Fabricated metals companies need to create a competitive advantage around their core competencies, demonstrated by their ability to respond quickly to change, efficiently manage relationships with suppliers, and deliver quality products on time. Read about a solution that provides these companies with transparency and control over their entire business, empowering them to respond immediately to issues and opportunities.
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IT is feeling the pressure to allow users to access sensitive corporate data via their personal mobile phones. Employees want the flexibility to use applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), e-mail and instant messaging not only from within the workplace, but at any time from any device. Yet, with network security and customer privacy at stake, IT has been slow to bow.
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Effective management of customer data is a critical success factor for insurers. To provide products and service that stand out from the crowd, insurers need a 360-degree view of each customer that covers his or her entire experience with the company. Read this white paper on how information technology that supports tightly integrated, end-to-end business processes can increase insurer responsiveness and customer loyalty.
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With $1 billion in assets under management, Hillview Capital Advisors, LLC had to pull data from a dozen different sources to gain a complete client view. The firm had been relying on a mix of applications that now seemed inadequate for its growing needs. Learn how a new customer relationship management (CRM) system helped the firm increase productivity and get instant access to know-your-client information.
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North American wealth management clients, recovering from the market downturn of 2008 and current market conditions have new expectations of their wealth management firms. Market changes present a tremendous business opportunity for wealth management firms that can adapt to the changing needs of investors. Learn about customer relationship management (CRM) solutions that address the demands of today’s market.
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Today’s leading-edge companies are making extensive use of workforce data to drive human capital management (HCM) decisions the way most companies use financial and marketing data to make strategic business decisions. Learn how these companies are making fact-based workforce planning decisions that will help them survive the current recession and position them to quickly ramp up workforce additions when the downturn ends.
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By upgrading to the latest release of the SAP customer relationship management (CRM) application as part of its CRM Clear Vision Program, SAP AG transformed the way marketing and sales teams collaborate. Find out how increased visibility and improved interaction has helped SAP realize greater value from a more effective sales process, making it easier to hit sales targets and maximize sales revenue.
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To achieve global transparency of all customer relationships, SAP AG upgraded to the latest release of the SAP customer relationship management (CRM) application. This upgrade is part of its CRM Clear Vision Program. Learn how the upgrade to a single global solution helped SAP AG achieve effective collaboration, better visibility, improved productivity, and stronger customer relationships.
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Wilson Tool recognized the need to develop its online presence. The company’s customers increasingly expected to be able to access information about products, execute order transactions, and view order status at any time—even after business hours—to support its own operations. Learn how the company’s new customer relationship management (CRM) solution helped Wilson ensure its customers’ success.
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In Q2 2010, Forrester evaluated 18 customer relationship management (CRM) solutions—CDC Software, Chordiant Software, FrontRange Solutions, Maximizer Software, Microsoft, NetSuite, Oracle, Pegasystems, RightNow Technologies, SageCRM, Sage SalesLogix, salesforce.com, SAP CRM, SugarCRM, and Sword Ciboodle—against 516 criteria reflecting the requirements of large organizations. Learn what they discovered.
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In recent Aberdeen studies focused on sales effectiveness, the importance of providing sales and corporate leaders with real-time intelligence about its business has proven to be a best-in-class attribute. Combining technology with strong analytical capabilities helps top performers achieve better business results. This Aberdeen Analyst Insight addresses the trends among SAPs customers in adopting these practices.
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Effective sales organizations do more than just meet revenue goals. They find new ways to achieve their goals while ensuring their sales professionals maintain focus on activities that foster profitable customer relationships. Learn how a customer relationship management (CRM) solution can help your sales force acquire and cultivate profitable customer relationships, use their time efficiently, and achieve top performance.
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In a productive sales force, salespeople concentrate on acquiring, growing, and retaining profitable relationships within their account bases. To achieve this level of sales efficiency, you need a sales force automation (SFA) system that manages pipeline performance and territory alignment, and analyzes customer relationship management (CRM) data. Learn how a SFA solution can help you sales force excel.
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While companies are investing heavily in e-commerce and e-service deployments, the customer is in the driver’s seat. Customers are influenced by the quality of the Web sites they visit, and their perceptions are increasingly shaped by their experiences with social networking sites. Learn how companies are working with software vendors to incorporate advanced technologies into its e-commerce and e-service platforms.
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Marketing organizations are often the first to face spending and resource cuts—even as they face increased pressure to contribute to revenue goals. These organizations need to drive demand more effectively and support sales efforts. They must also prove their value to the organization. Learn about customer relationship management (CRM) applications that can help align your organization to increase marketing success.
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FMC Technologies Inc. of Houston is a leader in oil and gas equipment service. By replacing its legacy system with a new customer relationship management (CRM) application, the company integrated and centralized its forecasting data, enabling managers to make better decisions about supply chain capacity. Learn how this upgrade improved forecasting, increased user adoption, and lowered the total cost of ownership (TCO).
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The world is changing for public-sector organizations. To succeed, governments must go beyond basic cost savings and service effectiveness to shape constituent perceptions about the programs that serve them. Discover how using software solutions to enhance customer relationship management (CRM) processes enables governments to deliver levels of performance constituents are accustomed to receiving from the private sector.
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In response to the harsh economic climate, communications service providers (CSPs) are concentrating on improving offers of voice, content, and data services. But these offers work best when they are attractive to the customer, and made in real time and through the right channel. Discover solutions that enable functionality for real-time offer management optimized within the context of enterprise processes.
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Rapid convergence of communications, media and entertainment (CME) is driving telecom, cable, and content executives to seek more creative means to garner long-term customer relationships. But how does one go from lofty goal to measurable results? Customer value enhancement (CVE) is a predictive approach to linking front- and back-office functions through advanced business intelligence (BI) and analytics. Find out more.
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The master/subordinate customer relationship management (CRM) tenant approach facilitates a common set of workflow, record awareness, and data synchronization options across a variety of large-scale CRM instances. Based on years of research and development expertise, this approach lends itself not only to regulatory compliance and reporting solutions but also to ease of use, maintainability, and security. Find out how.
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The cost of enterprise information management (EIM) can be staggering—preventing many health care organizations from leveraging enterprise information when strategically planning for the entire system. If this is prohibitive for large and medium organizations, how are smaller organizations going to be able to leverage technology that can access vital information inside their own company if cost prevents consideration?
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Increasingly, midsize companies are looking to customer relationship management (CRM) to energize their sales organizations and make the entire sales ecosystem more efficient. But while many solutions for midsize companies can be rapidly deployed to quickly energize a sales organization, what happens after that first jolt? Discover five tips for making sure your CRM choice continues to deliver return on investment (ROI).
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Business intelligence (BI) efforts can only result in a truly intelligent, agile business if they are driven by business goals—comprehensively deployed and adopted; and managed in ways that produce meaningful, measurable and credible results. Discover five BI trends to watch out for in 2010, and learn how to develop an approach to BI that’s effective, and tailored to your organization’s unique needs and goals.
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When the term “enterprise resource planning” (ERP) was introduced, it applied primarily to the planning and management of resources needed to manufacture goods. Today, however, most business decision makers realize that their enterprises rely upon resources, and that planning is essential to optimize how those resources are acquired, allocated, and used. Learn how the definition of ERP has evolved, and what it means today.
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Although the industrial equipment market has been growing, based on strong customer demand, companies cannot rest on their laurels. Manufacturers and distributors must keep adding value to maintain existing contracts and win new business. They must be efficient enough to meet new demands while maintaining margins. Discover solutions that can help total industrial solution suppliers stay profitable during this expansion.
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One obstacle standing between demand generation and lead management is the lack of sales and marketing alignment necessary to create demand and capitalize on ready buyers. That lack of alignment is reducing the number of opportunities that convert to closed deals. Learn how to create a “stimulus package” to inject more efficient capital, energy, and management efficiency into your sales and marketing practices.
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Maintaining strong business performance and retaining loyal customers requires continual vigilance and assessment. Establishing metrics that focus on value-added and customer- centric performance allows manufacturers to stay close to the pulse of market changes and dynamics. Learn how performance tools such as dashboards and reporting can help your company monitor performance and enable better and faster decision making.
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Traditionally, customer relationship management (CRM) solutions have been seen as tools for commercial enterprises, aiming to increase sales and ultimately profit. Although the functionality in CRM packages undoubtedly supports the commercial activities of business, it is worth exploring how the same features can be used to equally good effect in a not-for-profit (NFP) or charity environment. Find out more.
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To succeed, wholesale distributors must respond quickly to customers’ expectations of high-quality, differentiated services. Good supplier relationships are crucial, too. Operational excellence and information transparency are key to keeping these important relationships running smoothly. Find out about solutions that can help you improve transparency and coordination, and also streamline inventory management.
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Companies are fighting a constant battle to integrate business data and content while managing data quality. Data quality serves as the foundation for business intelligence (BI), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and customer relationship management (CRM) projects. Learn more about software that unifies leading data quality and integration solutions—helping your organization to move, transform, and improve its data.
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Levi Strauss SA needed a marketing application that would support its customer relationship management (CRM) programs. In addition to insight into customer behavior, Levi’s wanted to know about customers’ preferred communication channels and their response to brand campaigns. Learn about the solution that helps Levi’s achieve this, as part of Levi’s Loop program, by expanding the company’s communication channels.
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In today’s fast-paced marketplace, communications must support the buying process to improve top- and bottom-line performance. Sales and marketing should work together. But to make your marketing streamlined, automated campaigns need to be deployed. Discover 10 hands-on tactics you can start using today to begin improving your revenue and return on investment (ROI)—so you don’t have to struggle to achieve sales goals.
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Building customer relationships requires six key elements to be in place and working together to maximize your customer relationship management (CRM) investment. Because these strategies are synergistic, one missing piece can have an impact on the effectiveness of the other parts. Find out about the six components that can lead you to having—and using—a profitable CRM system that includes a marketing automation solution.
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Mitsubishi Electric Europe thought its enterprise resource planning (ERP) would address all of its reporting requirements. But long-term, this proved difficult to sustain, due to the company’s ever-changing procedures. So Mitsubishi decided to invest in a tool that would integrate data from disparate systems, speed up the delivery of information, and provide dashboard, analysis, and reporting capabilities. Find out more.
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As you begin a customer relationship management (CRM) initiative, software selection is only one facet of a successful project. You may consider implementing your new CRM system with internal resources. But even in providing a simple CRM solution in your company, a number of steps need to take place, including requirements gathering, configuration, and more. Discover the benefits of selecting a CRM implementation partner.
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WebTrends, a leader in Web analytics, needed a way to offer customers reporting and analytical access to the information generated by its Visitor Intelligence product, which combines off- and online data to provide insight into customers. WebTrends sought a scalable best-of-breed business intelligence (BI) solution that would integrate with its own product. Find out about the reporting and analytics solution it chose.
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Providing accurate and timely analytical information to health care professionals is critical to the success of PH Tech, provider of health care benefits administration services. PH Tech opted to integrate a business intelligence (BI) solution that allows its clients to make better-informed decisions leading to improved performance, lower costs, and enhanced patient and provider goodwill. Learn more about its BI software.
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Interdyn, a solution integrator specializing in the Microsoft Dynamics line, showed an insurance brokerage how to access the data locked in its customer relationship management (CRM) system. After being shown a business intelligence (BI) solution made just for Dynamics CRM, the client immediately saw the value of having its CRM data presented in visual reports using dashboards showing multiple metrics. Learn more.
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High Concrete encountered several challenges in trying to understand its customer relationship management (CRM) data. Its CRM reporting involved lengthy and error-prone processes. After seeing a demonstration of a business intelligence (BI) application specifically designed for its Dynamics CRM system, the company knew integrating the two systems would be easy—and provide flexible reports, quickly and accurately.
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Most companies want to use customer relationship management (CRM) applications to “supercharge” their sales forces. They want to gain some advantage with customer retention and acquisition, to manage the sales pipeline, and to have better market insight. But few companies realize these goals, often because of the way CRM is implemented. Find out where a CRM implementation can get off track—and how to ensure CRM success.
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In an unpredictable economy, you need to refocus your marketing efforts to be more cost-effective, while achieving measurable results in even shorter time frames. E-mail marketing has many advantages when used as part of an overall marketing solution. Beyond just driving short-term results, you’ll see opportunities to differentiate your firm—so you can expand your market share while building brand awareness.
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Digital marketing involves using your Web site and associated marketing tools to promote your business online. You can learn some basic skills in both search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing. But for optimal results, you’re advised to consult a professional, who can provide you with insight into what SEO services should entail, allowing you to make an informed decision when selecting a supplier.
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LPEC, a large Polish energy distributor, found its financial and bookkeeping system was obsolete. New systems didn’t offer the data integration the company needed, and so it implemented enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to address bookkeeping, fixed assets, and materials management, as well as logistics, purchase contracts, and fleet management. Find out how the ERP system allowed full integration of all data.
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Can your company and brand rise to the challenge and cash in on mobile marketing opportunities? Companies are often bullish about mobile marketing benefits, but lack the skill set to execute campaigns. And, though the interest in targeting consumers is high, the concern that opt-in databases won’t deliver is also high. Learn more about the dos and don’ts of mobile marketing, so you can ensure more effective campaigns.
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The current market is asking retailers some difficult questions—ones their existing processes and tools can’t answer. It takes a mix of science, retail intelligence, and merchandising art to ensure that every store in a supply chain carries the right inventory, while maintaining a high service level and market share. Learn how to better respond to the demands of consumers and rationalize your assortment at a local level.
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The school of business at one of Canada’s largest universities realized its old system for online registration, customer relationship management (CRM), and e-mail lacked needed functionality. The school wanted better reporting capabilities, automated waitlist maintenance, the ability to locate and change multiple profiles, and more. The learning management system (LMS) finally chosen allows easy modifications. Learn more.
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No matter how effective your sales staff is, there’s always room to boost efficiency and increase sales. But how you go about doing so may be a point of contention. Sales force automation (SFA) solutions come in many flavors, but they don’t all offer the comprehensive SFA functionality you need. Find out how to avoid the pitfalls of choosing SFA software, and get help matching your needs with the right solution for you.
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Oracle’s Accelerate is a program in which Certified and Certified Advantage partners build industry-specific solutions combining Oracle enterprise applications and rapid-implementation tools with the partners’ own expertise or software. The program aims to reduce the time, complexity, and cost of deploying Oracle solutions, to make them suitable for mid-market companies and governmental organizations. Learn more.
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By geocoding your address data, you have the location intelligence that helps you see patterns and create new opportunities to grow your business. There are three levels of positional accuracy, based on budget and business needs, as well as more enhanced levels of geographic accuracy. Learn more about geocoding, and how you can use it to perform market-specific data analysis—to strengthen customer relationships and more.
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IT departments rarely have the luxury of spare capacity or sufficient knowledge of all the products and technologies that the rest of the organization expects. However, IT is an integral part of most companies, and supporting diverse or specialized technologies and understanding their impact on the business is necessary. Organizations not only need third parties—they need them to be focused and cost-effective. Learn more.
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Search engine marketing (SEM)? We’re talking about tactics for Web site promotion—increasing both a site’s visibility to Google (and other search engines) and the site’s prominence in search engine results. We’re talking about pulling visitors through search engine optimization (SEO) and improved organic listing and using paid placement to push visitors to a site. Learn more about how to develop an effective SEM process.
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As marketing budgets shrink and companies in the corporate services industry aim to leverage their Web sites as less expensive alternatives to traditional marketing tools, Web-site strategy is becoming more important. Web-site strategy must focus on enhancing credibility, strengthening existing relationships, generating leads, and more. Get tips on how to create a Web-site strategy that will help you achieve these goals.
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Customer service means being aware of needs, problems, and fears. Studies have shown that the cost of acquiring a customer is seven to ten times that of retaining a current customer. And according to The Harvard School of Business, even a 5 percent improvement in customer retention can boost profits up to 85 percent. How do companies retain a loyal and consistent customer base? They listen, learn, and adapt—find out more.
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During a recession, don’t follow the cost-cutting crowd. Of course, be frugal, but in areas that don’t touch the customer. Forget what everyone else is doing. Now isn’t the time to follow the masses—now is the time to make difficult decisions that will poise your company for unprecedented growth coming out of the downturn. Find out how to think and act for the long term—and emerge from the current economic stall a winner.
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Almost everyone has had a bad call center experience—due to long queues, ineffective interactive voice response (IVR) systems, or an agent who doesn’t communicate well. After, the story is told over and over to friends, warning them about doing business with "that company." Are your customers saying this about your local contact center? If so, do you know why? Learn why you should update your customer feedback systems.
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Enterprise feedback management (EFM) is the process of systematically collecting, analyzing, consolidating, and using all sources of feedback to improve your company and your overall profitability. EFM includes not only aggregating feedback from multiple stakeholders, across multiple channels, but also getting real-time, actionable information to where it’s relevant in the company. Learn more about implementing EFM.
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Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and blogs are just a few Internet services that make up the new growing digital world called social media. Many companies have seen the influence these new sites can have on their organizations for both good and bad. All companies should ask themselves, "How can we tap into the power of this new method of communication to improve our business and the experiences we provide our customers?"
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Pronto Software—Australian vendor of software meeting the needs of a range of vertical industries such as retail and food and beverage—wants to ensure it sustains profitable growth. To find partnerships with value-added resellers (VARs) in North America and in other markets, Pronto relies on Technology Evaluation Centers’ (TEC’s) software industry programs. Learn about the other ways Pronto benefits from using TEC.
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It’s a simple idea: get a better understanding of your customers’ wants and needs, deliver on their expectations, and your revenue will increase. But more than 40 percent of companies surveyed do not have a formal customer relationship management (CRM) strategy in place. And those that have one still struggle with CRM at nearly every stage. Learn more about areas where you can improve your own CRM system strategy.
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In a tough economy, retaining customers and reducing costs become paramount, and sales force productivity takes center stage. You should also be thinking about territory alignment: territory management directly affects customer relationships and the ability to tailor your approach to various market segments. Learn how to optimize territory alignment with the right set of tools, and overcome sales process obstacles.
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Interaction center managers must deliver greater value on smaller budgets. But you can’t simply cut costs and services, or your customers won’t remain satisfied. To better weather the economic storm, release the untapped potential of your interaction center with software that maximizes your workforce management capabilities. Learn how to go beyond traditional channel data for bigger contact center return on investment.
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The consequences of fleeting customer attention—as companies with complex sales cycles know only too well—include lengthening sales cycles, stalled opportunities, and quarters that bring unpleasant surprises. The easy answer is to spend more time with your customers. But a better answer is having more comprehensive visibility into the sales pipeline and a complete understanding of the end-to-end sales process. Learn more.
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Showing value has always been key to greater sales and higher prices. However, the bar has been raised. It’s often no longer enough to claim value—now the customer has to see, believe, and care about the value. Sales organizations must get their eyes back on the value ball, with five value-selling maturity levels that tie in to sales effectiveness. Learn how to improve your revenues while reducing sales effort and costs.
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Following several acquisitions, Colombia-based ceramics manufacturer Corona found itself with multiple enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to manage. To find a single ERP solution that was suitable for all of its facilities, and would integrate with its existing business software, Corona turned to Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC). Learn how TEC’s selection methodology helped Corona choose the right ERP software.
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Falcon Technologies, Inc. (FTI) is a leading distributor of data and telecommunications products. After several years, FTI realized its legacy accounting system could no longer manage the growing business, and that it needed an industry-specific solution. The new system, with a few customizations, has allowed FTI to improve its efficiencies and productivity, resulting in a growth rate of over 50 percent. Find out more.
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Business networks have come to the fore in the past decade, as the power of customers and consumers has increased relative to the manufacturers and retailers that serve them. These networks enable these companies to deliver faster innovation to customers at lower costs by sharing investment, assets, and ideas. Find out how information technology and communication (ITC) systems can help you unlock new market opportunities.
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Any corporate executive can tell you that a strong brand can help achieve price premiums, promote customer retention, and more. Yet in times of economic instability, you may be tempted trim costs around efforts such as brand building. Downturns, however, can actually present opportunities to grow brand strength. Find out how you can maximize your brand value and take advantage of changing customer buying habits.
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Many small to medium businesses (SMBs) do not have experience with software as a service (SaaS), but are looking to adopt SaaS solutions soon. According to studies, 2009 will be the tipping point, with a majority of companies aiming to adopt SaaS this year. But these companies must be cautious, as the old rules for on-premise software analysis and purchase don’t apply. Discover the new rigorous criteria you should use.
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An unsettled economy needs a different approach to managing revenues. Companies must identify their most profitable customers and the most effective marketing and sales vehicle for reaching them—with a shrinking budget. And shifts in customer spending demand a fresh look at the value proposition of your current products and services. Find out how you can stay close to your customers as their needs change.
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Workers spend on average close to 80 percent of their workday with some combination of enterprise applications and desktop tools. Best-in-class companies have already found ways to improve productivity. Learn more about the convergence of enterprise applications with desktop tools, and the role it plays in providing visibility to enterprise data, improving communication, and facilitating real-time decision making.
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To move your sales team to the next level, you need to find answers to several questions. For example: How do you determine which customers provide the best opportunity for a successful sale? Can you develop and present a comprehensive view of your value position to a prospect? What is the role of IT in driving a best-run sales organization? Find out how leading companies have answered these questions—and how they excel.
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The success of direct marketing, measured in terms of qualified leads that generate sales, depends on accurately identifying prospects. Ensuring data accuracy and data quality can be a big challenge if you have up to 10 million prospect records in your customer relationship management (CRM) system. How can you ensure you select the right prospects? Find out how an enterprise information management (EIM) system can help.
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Do you know what evaluation criteria you should consider when making a customer relationship management (CRM) purchase? Before embarking on the process of making this critical business decision, learn more about the 10 fundamental functional areas to consider, including acquiring new sales, improving customer satisfaction, getting a consistent view of the customer, and improving renewal, up-sell, and cross-sell.
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The economic downturn means that businesses must capitalize on every opportunity to gain revenue. With the right customer relationship management (CRM) solution, you can protect current revenue streams and unearth new customer revenue opportunities—despite the most challenging market conditions. CRM helps ensure you deliver exceptional service to your current customers, building their long-term loyalty. Find out how.
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Most of your customers and prospects expect you to be involved in social media—and they’ll be more likely to do business with you if you are. So how do you expand your customer relationship management (CRM) strategy to engage social customers, and gain their trust? Discover how to integrate Web 2.0 social media tools and strategies into your traditional CRM efforts for better, more meaningful customer relationships.
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A new set of business practices is creeping into the way companies sell to customers. Some call this new trend “Sales 2.0,” because many of the tools and methods fueling it are rooted in the Web 2.0 movement. Many companies are trying to harness the forces of Web 2.0 to apply them to their sales and marketing efforts. Discover how using collaborative technologies can help you sell your products and services more easily.
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Selling roles have changed. For many companies, selling is more about relationship-building and less about transactional order activities. In spite of the promised benefits of customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, the cost of sales for many companies is rising while sales effectiveness is decreasing. Learn why—and how you can leverage “social CRM” to help overcome the challenges facing your sales force today.
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Limited resources dictate that most midsize companies must support business continuity at the lowest cost and without putting additional pressure on scarce IT resources. But business continuity is more of a critical success factor than ever before. Customers won’t tolerate a lack of service availability. Midsize companies must find a way to ensure maximum business continuity, and reduce downtime—and costs. Learn more.
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Sales force automation (SFA) solutions hold plenty of promise for companies looking to empower their sales representatives. In addition to providing timely data, SFA solutions can help managers better forecast future sales, and provide senior-level managers with accurate performance assessments. Find out what to look for in a SFA solution, what you can expect to pay for it, and how you can get the most value from it.
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Research shows that back-office connectivity is not addressed by many customer relationship management (CRM) solutions—meaning, customer data cannot be shared effectively and companies are prone to errors, delays, and needless paperwork. In the long run, this negatively impacts overall customer satisfaction in small to medium businesses (SMBS). Learn how front-to-back-office integration can help you address these issues.
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Since opening its first location in 1987, Australia’s TradeTools Direct has become a multilocation retailer to customers in the building trade. When it came time to transition from its cumbersome paper-based record-keeping system, the company chose Pronto Software. Find out how Pronto’s fully integrated point-of-sale (POS) system and accounting functions helped TradeTools increase efficiency and improve customer service.
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Founded in 1916, Oldfields is an Australian manufacturer of painting equipment, scaffolding, and garden sheds. To meet aggressive customer responsiveness targets, the company depends on up-to-date information and reliable communications. Learn how implementing PRONTO-Xi on a wide area network (WAN) helped Oldfields get quick access to data required for decision making, controlling costs, and improving customer service.
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Founded in 1951, Photo Continental is the southern hemisphere’s largest destination camera store. With over 81,000 products available to customers, the company recently decided to upgrade its business management system to meet the challenges of the digital era. Learn how the Pronto enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, customized for the photography industry, gave the company complete visibility over its business.
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Established in 2002, Fibrelogic is now Australia’s leading fiberglass pipe company. Recognizing that its spreadsheet-based systems—for everything from inventory management to financials—were delaying month-end reporting, the company implemented the PRONTO-Xi enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Learn how the new system helped Fibrelogic access information for strategic decision making and improve customer service.
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The question constantly being asked by Microsoft® customers is, “How can Microsoft® help our company save money?” Customers want an integrated, adaptable business management solution that works well with, and is similar to, familiar Microsoft® software. Find out about the solutions Microsoft® believes are the best for helping its customers save money, to gain a competitive advantage and fuel business productivity.
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As a business leader, you’re likely thinking about ways to save money and improve performance. A little fiscal probity coupled with an increase in productivity will ensure you ride out tough times and emerge as a stronger, more robust, successful business. Find out how Microsoft® business solutions can help not only save money, but drive productivity change with customer relationship management (CRM) and other solutions.
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Within large companies, there are an increasing number of activities and people to manage, including suppliers and third-party agencies. These activities are often supported by underdeveloped IT systems—but marketing is always “too busy” with campaigns, web content, and other activities to do anything about it. Learn how marketing resource management systems can help manage marketing activity and accountability.
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Today, more than 100 million web sites vie for the attention of consumers worldwide. Many of them will use a search engine to find the goods, services, and information they want. When they do, you want to make it clear that you have what they’re looking for—you want their search to start and end with you. Learn more about how to use a content management system to create web content for search engine optimization (SEO).
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You can have the best sales pitch in the world, but if you don’t know who your audience is, or what they’re looking for, your strategy is based on chance. Marketing—smart, cost-effective marketing—is about listening to what a specific person or group of people are looking for and responding to their needs or desires. Learn how to use analytics to focus your marketing efforts, for more effective and efficient results.
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In marketing, customer lifetime value (CLV) is the present value of the future cash flows attributed to a customer relationship. Using CLV as a metric tends to place a greater emphasis on customer service and long-term customer satisfaction than on short-term sales. Find out how to calculate CLV and why assigning customers a potential total monetary figure can be a useful metric when evaluating customer acquisition cost.
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How does your company approach direct mail? Do you just randomly send the same package to everyone on your list, without regard for past behavior or purchase models? Probably not—so why is it that when it comes to e-mail marketing, many companies apply an entirely different standard? Don’t waste your time and your customers’—use information about their online activities to get a better customer view and increase revenues.
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Focusing on the customer is not new. But some companies are going deeper into a customer experience management strategy to become customer-centric. Can you manage every part of the interaction and experience your customers have with your company? Learn how to develop a customer-centric approach that will make your customers feel not only connected, but delighted, loyal, and able to be a consistent advocate of your brand.
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When marketing managers look to expand their teams, they measure individuals on a number of different attributes, including creativity and attention to detail. And it’s no different when signing on with a marketing services provider. When outsourcing a database marketing solution, you should spend time evaluating the services offerings as well as the capabilities of various marketing services providers. Find out how.
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Want to really frighten someone? Invite the poor soul to a meeting titled “Marketing Integration Planning.” Because when marketers hear “integration” they imagine the goal is total, perfect integration, and lose heart—not realizing smaller victories can be achieved along the way with big payoffs. Demystify integration: discover what’s really achievable based on the needs and capabilities of your company and suppliers.
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Virtual worlds where customers can connect and share information are another channel through which marketers can improve the customer experience. Social networks can help you gain customer input on product and service development—and, of course, to reinforce brand messaging. Learn the four steps you can take to improve your customer experience by integrating online, off-line, and branding efforts via social networking.
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One of the best starting points for determining a web site strategy is to understand both the market that your company operates in and the needs of your key stakeholders. But most companies today are highly complex and political, making the identification and prioritization of stakeholders a difficult task. Discover the three key broad stakeholder groups that you need to factor into your web strategy planning.
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Over the past few years, many marketing departments have been involved in selecting and deploying analytical solutions, building marketing databases, and implementing campaign management. These solutions have helped in some ways, but they do not help manage the marketing process or manage marketing assets and resources. Find out about how operational marketing applications can help you achieve more substantial benefits.
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In today’s complex, ever-evolving marketplace, the need to integrate marketing processes and channels has never been more apparent. Marketers are looking to maximize the value of each customer interaction, both inbound and outbound. Customer analytics is a critical function in leading this change. Find out how embracing analytics can help you evaluate campaigns, drive contact strategies, and enhance customer experience.
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How much time do you waste juggling multiple applications or searching for documents instead of focusing on your customers and prospects? Salesforce.com and Google, two software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers, have teamed up to bring together Web-based business applications that can streamline communication and collaboration. Find out how to take advantage of the benefits of SaaS to meet more of your business needs.
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Swiss financial services company Global Refund needed to replace its antiquated customer relationship management (CRM) system. To find a mobile-enabled, user-friendly solution that could handle the company’s 15 million yearly transactions, Global Refund turned to TEC. Learn how TEC helped Global Refund turn its long-list of 40 vendors into a short-list of four, and shave two months off the selection process.
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Successful organizations ensure that customers receive accurate answers and efficient follow-through on all commitments. Their call center agents are equipped to handle all incoming and outgoing transactions, and their managers can make decisions based on timely administration, maintenance, and reporting analytics. Learn how new technologies can help you improve your call center and reduce costs without losing customers.
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Noble Trade, a wholesale distributor of industrial materials, lacked a customer relationship management (CRM) system. Customer data wasn’t organized, and customer activity history was being lost. To address these issues, managers selected Microsoft® Dynamics CRM Online as the company’s CRM solution. One of the benefits is better collaboration between sales and service, leading to increased customer satisfaction.
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Expanding rapidly into new lines of business and geographic regions, Current Energy found its old accounting software was limiting its potential. The company wanted to combine intercompany accounting functions, its point-of-sale (POS) and field service management solutions, and top-notch business intelligence (BI) and reporting capabilities. Find out how it improved customer care and reduced monthly closing times.
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Widex Canada, a manufacturer and distributor of high-end hearing aids, wanted to automate its work flow—from sales order entry through shipping and delivery. It also wanted more flexible reporting accounting and sales. Learn how combining Microsoft® Dynamics NAV with Tectura’s Configure to Order and Workflow helped Widex make its day-to-day processes more efficient and report results quickly and accurately.
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King Plastic manufactures polymer products for worldwide distribution. Upgrading to the latest versions of Microsoft® Dynamics GP and Microsoft® Dynamics CRM, the company wanted to boost user adoption without scaling support costs. Now, it uses the solutions to track sales leads and manage profiles for its growing list of customers. Find out how it gained better control over IT costs while improving employee productivity.
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Customer buying decisions are often affected by “inspiration”—an emotional state that separates a casual browser from an engaged customer. Successful retail merchandisers select products and promote them in ways that lure prospects into the selling environment. But what are the elements of an ideal selling environment? How can you create one? And how can you tell if it’s working? Learn more about how to inspire customers.
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In the face of increasing global competition, a retail company can remain visible only if it provides a differentiated shopping experience for customers. The majority of retailers, however, are still struggling with inadequate technology and the difficulty of hiring and training competent in-store salespeople. Discover the strategies other retailers are using to anticipate customer needs and improve customer satisfaction.
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To customers bombarded with so many products and experiences, it is the brave retailer who can claim to offer anything unique by way of intelligent merchandising or customer service. So how do retailers try to hook customers with fresh, unusual, and relevant shopping experiences? Learn about the results of a global survey of 180 senior retail execs, looking at three aspects of merchandisers’ relationships with customers.
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It’s never been more important to create and sustain mutually valuable customer relationships. How can your company improve execution of customer-centric business management and drive total customer value? Learn about four best practices for better customer experience management, including building genuine relationships through collaboration. Explore the next frontier in achieving genuine customer relationships.
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The strength of a company can be traced to the value of its brands. Brand marketing managers seek to create and develop brand value by converting consumer insights into consumer loyalty. How can you overcome the challenge of developing effective marketing campaigns that convert consumer information into revenue and profit? Leverage the value of your brand with an integrated approach to brand management. Find out how.
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In today’s tough economic climate, companies need their sales teams operating at peak performance. But traditional customer relationship management (CRM) may be hampering field salespeople’s productivity, with frequent downtime and lengthy sales cycles cutting them off from their managers. Learn how mobile CRM solutions can help speed up and improve the sales process, so your company can survive even the toughest market. (White paper sponsored by Maximizer)
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Because sustaining a strong relationship with customers is essential for future growth, the most successful companies work hard to ensure that their customers don’t feel shortchanged. But the benefits of customer satisfaction extend beyond gaining more business with a single account. Find out how to get a better understanding of your customer information, such as customer spending, for more reliable sales growth.
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Investment banks, hard-hit by the subprime meltdown and credit crunch, are grappling with a dramatically different deal landscape, all while coping with massive write-downs, staff cuts and budget cuts. Learn how client-centric strategies and customer relationship management (CRM) tools are helping banks maximize the value and loyalty of their client bases, take advantage of new opportunities, and do more with less.
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Customer relationship management (CRM) strategies—whether new to a company or already installed—can make some critical differences that help a company survive economic setbacks. Though you might be tempted to put off a software installation project due to tight economic conditions, you should include a CRM strategy as an important component of your plan to return to—or maintain—economic health. Find out why.
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Today’s office phone systems provide a means to communicate and much more: videoconferencing, unified messaging, and automated attendant. And with the rich selection of features available, companies ranging from small offices to large companies can find the solution they need, and even integrate it with other business applications. Find out about five phone systems features that could be valuable to your company.
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Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are becoming the centerpieces of broader customer-centric strategies to manage and coordinate information flow throughout a company. Users are increasingly using CRM to manage all phases of the business process, including sales force management. Discover nine strategies for using CRM software so you can make better use of sales metrics—for better sales management.
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In the wake of the subprime meltdown, many financial services firms are coping with huge write-downs and high market volatility by cutting staff and budgets. But even in uncertain times, smart financial firms can find ways to grow. Learn how you can use customer-centric strategies and customer relationship management (CRM) tools to maximize the value and loyalty of your client base and gain insight into new opportunities.
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Sales benchmarking is a diagnostic discipline that objectively identifies opportunities for sales-related performance improvement and enables best-practice solutions. This Sales Benchmarking Primer includes two important chapters from the best-selling book Making the Number—and provides a process-based framework for marketing and sales that can help your company survive and prosper in an unstable economy.
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Companies are starting to realize they don’t have the option of ignoring the quality of their customers’ experiences. Overstock.com knew customers want excellent service, regardless of which channel is used. But it had to overcome some obstacles on the road to excellence. Learn about the customer relationship management (CRM) solution the company chose, and how it improved the quality of customer interactions.
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Many buy cycles start months before sellers are even aware of them. A system that provides reps with immediate awareness of a lead’s interest is critical, as is linking marketing’s and sales’ efforts, coordinating campaigns, and consolidating access to information and reporting—including manager dashboards. Learn how eliminating the gap between sales and marketing can increase lead quality and increase sales performance.
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It’s no secret that winning and retaining customers is the key to growth and success. But that’s no small feat, with ever-increasing customer demands, as well as the difficulty of implementing and enforcing processes to support your interactions with prospects, customers, and partners. Eight proven customer relationship management (CRM) best practices can help you create a customer retention strategy. Learn more.
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The Internet offers a wealth of information for buyers, who can window-shop from their desks. Power has shifted to buyers, who no longer need to rely on salespeople for information. But sales managers can use Sales 2.0 to tap into these new buying habits to instantly interact with prospects and provide personalized service. Find out how Sales 2.0 can help you instantly view and serve prospects entering your online store.
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Most businesses are impacted by the slow economy, but recessions and economic slowdowns don’t last forever. Smart companies will be able to manage the challenges and emerge stronger and more vital for the experience. Discover how business process automation, a renewed focus on customer service, new tax opportunities, and other best practices can help your company shine in these tough economic times.
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Even in tough economic times, innovative small-to-midsized companies can still find opportunities for growth. Technology and business software solutions like enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), product lifecycle management (PLM), and supplier relationship management (SRM) can help your company ride out the global economic downturn. Find out how.
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Call centers are mission critical to companies of all sizes. The quality of customer care is one way a smaller company can outshine its larger competitors. All call centers regardless of size have the same needs to drive customer satisfaction, grow revenues, control costs, and capture valuable market intelligence. Learn about an integrated call center solution designed for the needs of smaller companies.
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Contact center managers are expected to provide high levels of customer satisfaction while increasing revenues and controlling costs. How can you reconcile these seemingly opposing goals? One solution is to implement a performance management process using a technology-enabled closed-loop coaching framework. Find out how they can result in a powerful return on investment for your company and improve agent productivity.
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Security Benefit is a financial services company based in Topeka, Kansas (US). The company’s outside sales team operates from remote locations nationwide. For years, the company used an internally developed contact management system to support its remote sales force. But, field sales staff couldn’t stay connected to the most relevant business data. Learn about the solution that gave the company access to real-time data.
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When looking at extended enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), or customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, some companies get distracted by details of the technology and miss the bigger picture. Learn how to choose an operating platform capable of supporting your business needs, today and in the foreseeable future, and ensure that your suppliers will be around when you need them.
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Mobile devices have become important tools for leading-edge companies looking for an advantage in a competitive global business environment, by providing users with instant access to key people, processes, information, and products. Turning to a mobile customer relationship management (CRM) solution can help you see further gains in productivity, customer satisfaction, and real-time updates. Learn more about mobile CRM.
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The secret to finding opportunity and growth in a downturn lies in your customer base. Don’t struggle to find ways to cut costs. Learn how your organization can use customer-centric strategies and customer relationship management (CRM) tools to maximize the value and loyalty of your customer base, get insight into new areas of opportunity, and do more with less—so your company can succeed in times of economic uncertainty.
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Marketing and sales teams have long disputed who’s responsible for converting leads into sales opportunities. Marketing argues that it has generated leads and tosses them over to sales, while sales complains the leads aren’t qualified. Learn how to convert more leads into sales with five key strategies, starting with encouraging sales and marketing to work together. Better lead management means you can win more deals.
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Businesses of all sizes can benefit from implementing customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. And no matter the size of your business, you must also know how to successfully implement best practices in CRM. Learn about three essential steps to preparing for CRM success: establish project leadership, create an implementation road map, and work with staff to facilitate user adoption and positive change.
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Among all customer relationship management (CRM) user groups, the sales organization is often the most important—and challenging—to win over. With sales force automation (SFA) one of the primary drivers for a CRM initiative, and one of the primary measures of its success, user adoption among the sales force is crucial. Learn the principles you can use to select a CRM system that sales users feel was built just for them.
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With products increasingly becoming commodities, chief executive officers (CEOs) recognize that first-rate customer service is key to enhancing customer satisfaction. While revenue is flattening for many product businesses, service income is increasing. Find out how integrating business processes and customer relationship management (CRM) data can help you deliver new service offerings and improve the customer experience.
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There are six fundamental truths about the dynamics of customer experience in large organizations, and anyone looking to improve customer experience must understand and comply with these underlying realities. The first law states that every interaction creates a personal reaction. Find out the implications of this law, what the others are, and how you can use them to manage customer interactions in your company.
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It’s easy to blame a poor service experience on the person who delivered it. But usually customer service failure can trace its root cause back to the technology and processes agents use—systems that are hard to navigate, don’t give access to vital data, and don’t provide multichannel integration with a clear view of customers. Learn how a multichannel system can enable a more effective customer experience strategy.
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The insurance industry’s turn from an underwriting-oriented vision to a customer-centric view has been painfully slow. Success isn’t just a matter of delivering superior products and services, but of incorporating customer insight into enterprise strategy on an ongoing basis. Learn how you can use your customer segment data for customer analytics that can help you determine which segments to grow and which to retain.
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To achieve sustainable success in selling a product or service, you only need to present the right offer to the right customer via the right channel—at the right time. Of course, it’s not really that simple. But service firms are finding it’s possible to make the right offers, through customer-selected channels, in real time. Find out how you can leverage your customer data to create opportunities for revenue generation.
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Customer relationship management (CRM) best practices aren’t well recognized by many companies. Disappointment with CRM systems usually results from poor strategies that don’t focus on a specific set of business capabilities to increase revenues or reduce costs. How well does your company stack up? Learn about CRM best practices, pinpoint the best opportunities for quick wins, and build an action plan to close the gaps.
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Customers today have high expectations of service levels. Many businesses have mistakenly assumed they can’t know customers personally because of the rapid pace of business. But with the right tools, you can gather details about your customers that help develop and maintain customer loyalty. Learn how basic customer relationship management (CRM) functionality can help you improve customer retention and acquisition.
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If there's one constant in any business today, it's pressure. And dealing with pressure can lead managers toward the temptation of taking complete control. However, this often stifles the one element that enables companies to break away from the pack: employee-driven innovation. Learn why empowering your customer-facing employees is the new path to achieving extraordinary, sustainable results—and find out how to do it.
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Companies can reduce operating costs and improve the ways they do business by using customer relationship management (CRM) systems that support real-time decision making. But you must ensure you deploy applications that can leverage industry best practices while retaining the competitive differentiation from a well-honed business process and strategy. Learn about the benefits of using CRM with industry best practices.
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The payment card industry (PCI) Data Security Standard establishes common processes and precautions for handling credit card data. Although achieving PCI compliance can seem daunting, the requirements represent security best practices that should be observed by any organization with IT systems and data to protect. Learn about network scanning and security assessment solutions that can help you manage PCI compliance.
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While marketing automation modules have begun to attract a new wave of companies to customer relationship management (CRM) software, CRM’s long-term benefits can help businesses make the most effective use of advertising and sales resources. According to leading industry experts, companies can leverage CRM applications in five specific ways. For one, CRM systems help you identify where to place ad dollars. Find out more.
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Even an advanced customer database system can have a troublesome implementation. Company culture clashes and fear of change often play larger roles in the failure of new customer relationship management (CRM) tools than the quality of the tools themselves. According to leading sales software experts, company leaders can insulate sales software projects from failure by following seven crucial steps. Find out what they are.
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The latest sales tracking software allows you to manage sales deals more effectively and efficiently. But without the right guidance, some veteran salespeople might view lead tracking software as burdensome. Sales database implementation specialists recommend focusing teams on the five most powerful outcomes of customer relationship management (CRM) tools. Find out what they are and how to use them for better leads.
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Since the last recession in 2001, customer relationship management (CRM) systems have gained greater acceptance. Though CRM systems haven’t been widely tested under adverse business conditions, results achieved by CRM strategies indicate that businesses with an effective CRM approach will have a vital competitive advantage in recessionary conditions. Discover three key strategies to using CRM as a tool against a recession.
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Companies that have adopted customer relationship management (CRM) solutions already know the benefits of tracking client information. However, salespeople in companies with older CRM systems are often forced to use workarounds for handling crucial industry-specific data. Luckily, the latest versions of popular CRM tools offer customized and targeted modules that can streamline and accelerate sales pipelines. Learn how.
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To remain competitive, retailers must improve costs, differentiate the shopping experience, and ensure effective promotions. Many retailers are asking how to improve vital business processes while offering customers more. Learn about key trends in the retail sector and how business process management (BPM) can help address challenges across in-store operations, supply chain management (SCM), and multi-channel integration.
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Whatever you offer as a service provider, success depends on how well you manage key accounts to ensure long-term relationships and the highest possible margins. But with today’s challenges, it’s difficult to maintain market share, let alone grow. SAP’s All-in-One fast-start program offers a solution that can help you maximize client and service-line profitability by supporting industry best practices. Learn more.
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Organizations increasingly see business model innovation—not new products and services—as the basis of their competitive advantage. Common approaches to innovation include improvements to customer experience and supply chain management, and implementation of a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Learn how these innovations can help create new opportunities for companies and their customers, partners, and suppliers.
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Customer relationship management (CRM) issues can often be traced to ineffective processes involving human communication. But you can overcome the limitations of marketing, sales, and service processes. With communication-enabled business processes—powered by communications systems integrated with business applications—you can have more visibility into interactions and improve your end-to-end performance. Learn more.
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Faced with longer sales cycles, declining sales productivity, and increasingly discerning customers, companies are being forced to streamline and automate how sales information is processed, and change the mechanics of deal-making. Learn more about the strategies that best-in-class (BIC) companies are employing to improve sales effectiveness, boost productivity, and ultimately remain competitive.
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A customer-centric strategy is an important part of winning the battle for customers’ hearts, minds, and wallets. But while many business leaders understand the basic concept, they lack details on exactly how customer-centric practices deliver business value. This overview of launching and sustaining a successful customer-centric journey explains how it pays to give your customers what they want.
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Manitou, a global producer of complex make-to-order forklift trucks, wanted to optimize sales processes to overcome several challenges, including a lack of visibility into the order pipeline, and order capture that was prone to errors. After deploying Chameleon, sales channels can access current and accurate product and pricing info, and order capture is not only faster, but more efficient. Learn about other benefits.
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SDMO Industries, a global manufacturer of power generators, sells its broad product line through a variety of sales channels. Communicating accurate product feature and pricing information was challenging, so SDMO looked for a customer relationship management (CRM) and order management software solution to improve sales productivity. Find out how SDMO optimized its global sales teams’ efficiency and reduced overall costs.
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Many companies consider customer relationship management (CRM) the new frontier in marketing. But many are also trying to adapt new CRM applications, or to choose systems that best align with their business needs. But some companies have stumbled and been forced to re-evaluate their strategies to avoid repeat mistakes. Read about six problem areas in CRM software strategy and learn from others’ mistakes, not your own.
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Investing in a customer relationship management (CRM) system can increase sales productivity and represent an addition to, not a subtraction from, your company’s bottom line. But a return on investment (ROI) from CRM software depends on whether you’ve identified strategies that leverage the CRM system’s sales productivity. Find out how to formulate CRM strategies before you choose a CRM solution, and compare CRM products.
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Many companies approach customer relationship management (CRM) software as an opportunity to save money via automation. While most CRM solutions offer powerful infrastructure benefits, approaching your new CRM tool with a focus on customer loyalty can earn you more repeat business. Learn about six ways your CRM solution can help your service agents personalize customer service—and maintain customer loyalty.
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Globalization and digital technologies provide great opportunities for companies operating in business to business (B2B) markets. There are many strategies you can use to automate the demands of business communication so it is more reliable, efficient, and profitable—and delivers more value to your customers. Learn about the four key practices that can help you improve your B2B relationships with buyers or sellers.
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The constant launch of new telecommunications products creates stiff competition, and to manage increasingly complex product portfolios, you should ensure your processes are optimized, your data is accurate, and your solutions are integrated. The first business area you should focus on is order management. Find out how you can better address the challenges of the order-to-cash cycle, decomposition, provisioning, and more.
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Great service is the number one reason customers cite for being loyal and recommending companies to friends and colleagues. On the flip side, 80 percent of customers say they stopped doing business with a company because of a bad services experience—and that they’ll never do business with that company again. Learn about a proven and practical approach to delivering great service and reaping critical customer benefits.
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Are you focused on reducing costs rather than delivering differentiated experiences to your customers? Do you rely on self-serving business models, instead of the generous nurturing needed for real and lasting relationships? Do you know the costs and consequences? Find out why you should be concerned about the “cost of doing nothing,” and how to asses if your customer strategy—or lack thereof—puts your business at risk.
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The one thing you can count on today in business is change, whether it’s customers, business models, or the pace of business. To manage change, companies rely on technology. But the most effective management control and optimization of company performance can be achieved only if you have the right systems. Discover how an integrated system can help you manage data and make better decisions, for a more successful company.
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Companies often overlook telesales as a vital source of core revenue. In fact, telesales can be a major driver of software sales and can make an impact far more quickly than field-based enterprise selling. Find out how IT telesales can assist with revenue growth, discover the keys to improving your IT telesales success, and learn why telesales usually involves identifying smaller, more product-focused opportunity.
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In 2003, marketing strategies firm Piranha Marketing was rapidly growing to meet the needs of its expanding customer base. The company wanted to find a way to manage its disparate customer relationship management (CRM) software packages while continuing to increase its customer base for all services. Find out how it ended up increasing its conversion rate by 15 percent—and shortening its sales cycle by 50 percent.
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Until recently, there has been no solution to help manage the complex tasks involved with multistep, multimedia follow-up. People have been forced to come up with
“creative” ways to get the follow-up done—which is why we now offer you … Six Highly Effective Ways You Can Effortlessly Destroy Your Business by Mismanaging Complex Prospect and Customer Follow-up!
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The Glazer-Kennedy Inner Circle is a well-known sales and marketing consultancy. The marketing strategists were seeking a customer relationship management (CRM) system, not only for their growing business, but for all their clients. The challenge: “I genuinely dislike computers. I refuse to use e-mail, surf the Web, use a cell phone, let alone deal with software programs.” (Dan Kennedy, co-founder of Glazer-Kennedy)
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Whether you’re a heavy e-mail marketer, or thinking about using e-mail to market to prospects and customers, there are plenty of challenges to work through, including anti-spam compliance, single- and double-opt-in methods, text vs. HTML formats, white-listing, black-listing … In order to increase your success as an e-mail marketer and not get tagged as a “spammer,” learn about the ten rounds you’ll need to fight through.
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My Wedding Film is a growing small business media company that specializes in capturing elegant one-of-a kind weddings. The company was looking for a customer relationship management (CRM) solution that could accurately track and automate the contacts they had with their clients, prospects, vendor relationships, and partners. Find out what they chose, and why.
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Apply these seven secrets to your marketing, and you’ll get two to four times the number of deals from a batch of leads. Sounds outrageous? Well, how about this, then? You don’t need an army of telemarketers or a team of slick sales people to do it, either.
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In today’s global marketplace, subtle and complex changes in consumer relationships can directly impact your brand equity, owing mainly to an unprecedented glut in information. Add to this consumer expectations for seamless, consistent service, and you’ll find it a challenge to attract, serve, and retain your customers. So how can you transition intelligently to the e-customer relationship management (CRM) model today?
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Companies that build customer loyalty through exceptional service are finding themselves insulated against an uncertain economy. They know you can’t afford to lose customers, especially since they cost considerably more to replace than to retain. Download this white paper to learn more.
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As customer experience initiatives take center stage, many companies are appointing a dedicated executive to lead the effort. Download this new Forrester Playbook for insights and lessons learned from customer experience executives who’ve been there.
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Nearly 60 percent of Australian businesses with more than 100 employees do not respond to web-generated sales enquiries (such as e-mail or web forms) within seven days. But the bad news doesn’t stop there. Find out why your customers may still be waiting for you to respond—and what you can do about it.
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Transpromotional marketing blends marketing messages with must-read printed material such as invoices, statements, and other notifications. The goal is to influence behavior and drive business volume—but not by stuffing brochures with a statement into the envelope. Instead, promotional messages can be targeted directly to a prospect s purchase patterns and known interests. Sounds great, in theory. So how do you do it?
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To achieve the top level of sales success, you need tools that work. First, you need to be able to leverage data to plan for the future. Customer relationship management (CRM) software can provide your company with a way to accurately manage customer relations, allowing all departments across the organization to use the same data. Learn more about how to overcome the challenges of boosting sales with a CRM solution.
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Power disturbances might be the cause of unexplained office equipment breakdowns and damage. The office products industry could save itself numerous headaches—and much money—by examining open sources of data regarding power disturbances across the US. Discover more about the opportunity that exists to redefine the interface between the power grid and the machine with communications-enabled power manager devices.
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The sales lead generation process for technology companies is very different from lead generation in other industries. Technology sector needs are more precise, and the target market is almost exclusively business-to-business (B2B), with the individuals often being decision makers high up the corporate ladder. Find out how to reach this difficult target, with prospecting methods and tips for making more complex sales.
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Organizations are relying more and more on customer information to drive business processes. You probably spend a lot of time trying to make sure you get the right information to the right people at the right time—but is your data capture process as efficient as it could be? Learn about the issues surrounding data capture and data processing, and about a solution designed to help you address specific processing problems.
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One way to streamline the increasing amount of data related to the employees, clients, products, services, and functions of your organization is to implement enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Businesses without a central ERP system waste time performing redundant tasks and reconciling duplicate data. Learn about a step-by-step process that can help you ease into ERP implementation, including training your staff.
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Microsoft Dynamics customer relationship management (CRM) software is designed to help enterprises get a 360-degree view of their customers across marketing, sales, and service. Scalability testing of Dynamics 4.0 shows that the solution can achieve sub-second response times running user transactions against a database of over one billion records. Learn how these results can impact the success of your organization.
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The latest customer relationship management solution from Microsoft, Dynamics CRM 4.0, is engineered to meet enterprise performance and scalability requirements. Focusing on performance and scalability, application flexibility, and network configurability, this CRM solution can help you keep costs under control while you maintain the value of customizations—so you can react quickly to changing market demands.
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Your customer relationship management (CRM) solution must be able to deliver across marketing, sales, and service while offering user scalability, data scalability, and network performance. But you may not have considered how network performance can affect other aspects of your company’s performance. Learn about a solution that has been enhanced with functionality for network bandwidth use improvements of up to 94 percent.
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The user scalability of your applications can be key to your organization’s success. Benchmark results show how a next-generation customer relationship management (CRM) system can meet the needs of an enterprise-level, mission-critical workload of 24,000 users while maintaining high performance response times. Learn how CRM can help you achieve a 360-degree customer view, adapt quickly to business change, and more.
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Gunther Gifts, a California (US)-based company, engraves and ships unique gifts nationwide to over 200,000 customers. An integrated solution that could efficiently manage accounting and inventory was crucial. And with several web sites taking information from the same inventory pool, the company needed a system to track inventory across multiple channels. Discover the company’s chosen solution, and the benefits gained.
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Many marketers are continuing to improve subscriber engagement levels in their e-mail campaigns. But sending more e-mail doesn’t necessarily drive more revenue in the long run. Sending more relevant e-mail does. Learn about nine key strategies for e-mail marketing success, including best practices for reactivation techniques, automatic message-based e-mail, and the all-important preference center for your subscribers.
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A service business should be managed and measured based on the maturity of the business and the specific requirements of its customers. To take this approach, you need a framework for understanding how a services company and its customer engagement should be measured. Learn about the various ways to support strategic account management at each stage of your company’s evolution, which metrics are most relevant, and more.
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Software as a service (SaaS) is known for its relative speed to deployment and low up-front cost. Less well known are the business advantages of SaaS for enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, especially for small and midsized businesses. Learn how a fully integrated SaaS solution can help you improve your business operations, as well as better meet the challenges of growth, competition, and regulatory compliance.
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Companies in the Americas should lead the world in growth through operational excellence—but they don’t. A 2008 survey shows that less than half promote insight into operations by investing in enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) software. Companies in the Americas also lag behind Asia-Pacific firms in revenue growth and customer satisfaction. Read more of the survey results.
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It’s common to hear that master data management (MDM) projects are difficult to initiate. But pairing up an MDM project with another initiative already on your organization’s priority list might be easier than you think. Find out some of the basics surrounding MDM itself, including what MDM can refer to, as well as how to couple it with other projects that may already have momentum in your organization.
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The Linc Group, provider of infrastructure and technical services, knows that client prospecting and retention are key to long-term success. To optimize the success of company and franchise offices, the company implemented customer relationship management (CRM) software from Microsoft Dynamics, recently upgrading to version 3.0 for enhanced workflow features. Learn more about how the company benefits from the solution.
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ProCurve Networking delivers wired and wireless enterprise networking solutions. With nearly four times the market growth rate, ProCurve needed a new customer relationship management (CRM) system to increase its sales force efficiency, facilitate information-sharing, and enable customization. Read how the company implemented Microsoft CRM and built a custom demand-forecasting module that improved customer service.
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Real estate firm The Norris Group was holding ten years of customer history with an online e-mail marketing vendor. Costly errors, data loss, and the lack of vital features convinced the firm to find a new solution that would store data and make it available whenever needed. Find out how the new online solution safeguards, analyzes, and shares customer data with employees, while easing the IT administrative burden.
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A residential and commercial junk removal company with a toll-free call service was using an industry-specific customer relationship management (CRM) solution that couldn’t be customized. The company needed a CRM system that could capture, share, and use customer data specific to its operations, to acquire and retain more customers. Discover how the hosted CRM solution helps ensure business continuity and other benefits.
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Nucleus Research reports that NetSuite, a leading integrated Web-based business software suite, can deliver a positive return on investment (ROI) in fewer than nine months, by automating processes, boosting sales, increasing productivity, reducing or avoiding headcount, increasing data visibility, and retiring costly legacy systems. Learn how NetSuite business management software provides a positive ROI to businesses.
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SumTotal Systems recently surveyed 10,000 directors of training from primarily US-based companies to learn how they’re pushing outside their corporate walls to their partners and customers. Over 35 percent are currently training customers and partners with learning management systems (LMSs). Find out why they’re using LMS functionality to help drive their business globally while maintaining performance standards.
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For large organizations, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems promise big gains by helping grow revenue and increase productivity. But can ERP benefit small to medium businesses (SMBs) in the same way? With the increasing number of SMBs, tailored mid-market ERP solutions are now emerging. To reap the full benefit of ERP, however, SMBs must be ready to use it to its fullest capabilities. Find out how.
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Before you commit to an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, you should answer several questions about what your company needs and wants to accomplish with its ERP strategy. The answers can help you determine which applications and what kind of functionality you need from your ERP solution—which goes a long way toward easing the implementation process. Discover the key questions now with this convenient checklist.
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If you’ve already implemented Sage Saleslogix for your customer relationship management (CRM) process and CRM analytics needs, this guidebook can help you achieve more value. And if you’re considering Saleslogix for your new CRM solution, you’ll learn best practices, including how to integrate and customize; how to move from sales to support, service, and marketing; and how to think strategically about training.
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As companies expand—often globally—they may operate multiple customer service call centers. Unifying these geographically dispersed and discrete contact centers creates a single, virtual contact center operation that is more efficient, easier to manage, and has better customer service. Learn about contract center trends and the five key elements to consider when outsourcing your customer service center business processes.
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Great service is the number one reason customers are loyal and recommend companies to friends and colleagues. But on the flip side, 80 percent of customers say they stop doing business with a company because of a bad service experience—and that they’ll never do business with the company again. Find out how you can gain the essential service capabilities, both online and at the service center, to keep your customers loyal.
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A company with a global presence can easily face “double trouble” with regard to financial reporting. Each division needs to keep books, pay employees, manage accounts, and pay taxes in the currency of its region. But all accounts must be consolidated, which involves processes that can cause inaccuracies and use up valuable time. Find out how to more effectively close your books, and manage your disparate sales teams.
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Customer relationship management (CRM) solutions can help you achieve success by managing your company’s customer-facing processes and implementing a customer-centric vision. But to make the most of CRM’s benefits, you should weigh and consider the options by answering key questions about your processes and CRM solutions’ capabilities. Find out key CRM principles, and how to best mitigate the cost of CRM implementation.
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A data storage company planning to become a major player in the field needed customer relationship management (CRM) software that would scale to the company’s growth and integrate with its other business software. Learn about the solution that integrated accounting and manufacturing packages affordably, and that helped the company—through a flexible and secure Internet portal—to share vital information with its partners.
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Roland, a worldwide provider of graphic design and digital music services and products, was relying on several systems for leads distribution. As a result, the process often took weeks or even months, and there was no feedback into what happened with leads once handed to a dealer. Learn about the solution that helped the company create a centralized repository of customer data and significantly reduce lead time.
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During a period of rapid growth, MSI—an IT solutions provider—found its business software applications couldn’t keep up with the amount and diversity of information pouring into the company. The lack of a centralized customer relationship management (CRM) system also caused problems with MSI’s partners. Learn how MSI found a solution that integrated its CRM and enterprise resource planning (ERP) processes and information.
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In today’s global economy, organizations must strengthen customer relationships to maximize performance. UNICEF needed customer software to support a feature-rich Web store allowing real-time flow of order data. With a new e-commerce solution, UNICEF rerouted more than 30 percent of its sales to self-service, with online orders up by an average of 50 percent. Learn more about how the Web retail system benefits UNICEF.
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A survey of professional services firms shows a serious disconnect between the desired operational state of the firms and their current ability to achieve that state. But firms are recognizing that automating resource planning and management, including human or talent resources, is crucial to continued success. Learn more about how to improve the management of your talent inventory to improve service-line profitability.
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Effective CRM deployment can bring many productivity gains. And although free customer relationship management (CRM) tools may sound great to overburdened company directors, there are five reasons why free CRM tools should be avoided. For one, free isn’t always free, as hidden costs can undermine your budget. Find out about the other reasons why it’s better to tighten your CRM budget now, rather than go bust later.
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Many frustrated executives find that despite the fortune spent on managing servers, networks, and applications, there are still complaints about the performance, usability, and availability of their customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. How do you know if your CRM system performs for each user? What does it mean when users say the system is slow? An experience management solution can give you the answers.
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Staffco, employing nearly 20 high-level sales engineers, sought a customer relationship management (CRM) system to free itself from the manual processes of its 2- to 3-year sales cycles, with lengthy design and test processes and associated reporting needs. Maximizer CRM’s functionalities, including automated reporting and a project management system, resulted in time and costs savings for Staffco. Learn how.
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Georg Fischer, a global provider of fluid-handling systems, was using a simple database to manage customer contact information. But the company couldn’t effectively track the progress of customer relationships, opportunities, and projects, and so key data was often lost. By implementing an integrated enterprise application, the company now has centralized customer contact information, and improved customer relationships.
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Although Active Voice is a global provider of business telecommunications, it didn’t have a dedicated solution for sales automation or customer service. Sales reps lacked what they needed to follow up on leads and were losing valuable opportunities. But when the company implemented an e-customer relationship (e-CRM) solution, its users gained mobile access to valuable customer information. Learn about the other benefits.
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PropertyInfo, a provider of real estate information solutions, needed a unified view of its 20 different global customer support centers in order to provide more consistent quality. A customer support solution enables the company to manage incident information, automate service ticket processing, and give end-to-end views of the customer experience. Find out more about the how the company improved customer satisfaction.
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As the banking industry goes global, the need to be available 24/7, increased demands for customer service, and reduced budgets have introduced new pressures to small to medium banking firms. And with the ongoing challenges of regulatory compliance, firms need financial services software that can reduce the risk of noncompliance while addressing the scale of their operations. Find out how an integrated solution can help.
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Even if your company is facing budget cutbacks in other areas, you should consider how a well -implemented sales force automation (SFA) suite can significantly improve both customer satisfaction and your revenues. When looking to update your SFA suite, focus on five critical areas of functionality, including workflows, communication tools, and storage capacity. Find out how to reduce your SFA total cost of ownership (TCO).
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With so many customer relationship management (CRM) marketing systems to choose from, sales managers may be overwhelmed when selecting potential vendors, resellers, and other value-added providers. Industry experts suggest you should focus on five critical factors when evaluating marketing automation systems, starting with scope of service. Discover how these factors can reduce the time and complexity of choosing CRM.
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Food and beverage manufacturers must aim to keep up with customer demands for a wide range of products, while managing the complex global supply chain and taking advantage of growth in new markets. For fast-growing or midsize companies, the challenges are even greater. Find out about a solution that can help optimize sales and marketing, and enable consumer-driven supply chains by speeding collaboration with suppliers.
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It is essential for durable goods companies to effectively manage multi-tiered distribution network and supply chains, to ensure the right products are available in the right stores at the right time—and the right price. What can you do to differentiate your products from your competitors’, control customer value, and accelerate order-to-delivery time while your supply chains become globally more complex? Find out now.
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The effort needed to manage a non-durable consumer goods company is more strenuous than ever. Business issues such as expanding product portfolios, complex distribution channels, and compliance requirements can impede your ability to compete in the global supply chain. Does your current business application enhance your sales and marketing, and enable demand-driven supply chains? Learn what you need to compete—and win.
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Efficient procurement and sourcing. Storing and moving inventories. Attracting and retaining customers. Such challenges have an impact on wholesale distributors’ revenues, competitiveness, and profits. To make timely and informed decisions that can impact your business, you need answers to questions like “How can I offer value-added services to improve customer loyalty?” Get the answers to this and other key questions.
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Having insight into the real needs of individual customers helps maximize their loyalty. To meet these needs, companies must identify how to achieve higher levels of integration between the supply and demand chains internally—and among partners, suppliers, and customers. Learn how to connect all facets of your company to create value networks in your supply chain that can bring supply and demand systems together.
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Web 2.0 and social networking tools and trends are having a huge impact on business today. But to realize the benefits of social networking, you need to understand the roles and expectations of your customers, and how to use those tools to position your company appropriately. Get tips on how to empower your customer engagement with Web 2.0 and customer relationship management (CRM) 2.0 social networking tools.
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Do distributors always have to settle for a trade-off between cost management and customer service? Is it impossible to keep costs down, yet still respond to customer needs and provide high-value products? Cost control needn’t impinge on customer service, and in fact, efficient processes can result in happier customers. How to use an integrated business management system to promote efficiency isn’t a secret—learn more.
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HSB-Stockholm, a property management firm, manages more than 200 client work orders daily. The company realized its back-office solution couldn’t address customer satisfaction, and that a new solution would have to keep up with the growth of field operations. Learn how HSB implemented a mobile, Internet-based solution that increased the speed of service delivery and maintenance operations by 50 percent.
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Teen purchasing power is enormous, but teens are a fickle demographic. As online marketing strategies shift from customer acquisition to customer retention, understanding teen purchasing behavior is vital for companies wanting to establish long-term relationships with teens. Discover how online retailers are using live chat to address the expectations of teens—keeping them loyal and boosting return on investment (ROI).
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Dramatic progress in communication and media industries are pushing service providers to seek new differentiation strategies. Next-generation services can play a major role in your future as a service provider. But first you need to understand the implications for your operational- and business-support systems—in particular your billing system. Learn how to make the most of next-generation services to generate revenue.
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Personalized and higher-quality network services, such as customized or performance-sensitive services, can help you stand out from the competition. But can you give customers any range of those services without undergoing a complete system transformation? Yes: by using mediation to deliver advanced service management. Find out how mediation can help you offer unique, wide-ranging services—without sacrificing quality.
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Today’s reality for service providers is about dealing with falling voice revenues—and keeping existing customers. Some providers look for alternative sources of revenue via digital content and gaming. But as this happens, the product offerings become more complex, and the role of partners more and more important. Automated partner settlement solutions can play a very crucial part in your partner strategy. Find out how.
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To promote fast growth, small businesses often sacrifice process control for creativity. But sooner or later, unstructured creativity compounded by fast growth leads to the inability to make fact-based business decisions. Learn about four steps to developing a business strategy that can help you run your business more effectively by applying better control over your cost structure, minimizing risk, and anticipating change.
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Many companies now combine services in pre-packaged, high-value bundles to reduce customer churn rates. And these bundled services have proved to bring returns. But they also bring complexity—some major service providers may have over 150 product catalogs. Get tips on how to overcome the problems of bundling, and avoid catalog duplication in your product or service offering, with product information management (PIM).
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By implementing a job costing and enterprise resource planning (ERP) system designed for discrete manufacturing, Young Electric Sign Company (YESCO) was able to save almost $250,000 (USD). Managers now have more accurate views of job completion and employee performance. Plus, the system’s ability to sort service contracts by region enables YESCO to be more responsive to its customers. Learn about the other benefits.
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For most businesses, the subject of regulatory compliance and risk management usually evokes feelings of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. But it doesn’t have to. By taking the right approach, you can turn risk management and compliance into a proactive process that will put your business at the forefront of your market and set you apart from your competitors.
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What does it take to give your clients a better customer experience? While there are many answers to that question, a common answer these days is “through a customer relationship management (CRM) portal.” Learn everything you need to know about CRM portals, including their key characteristics, the different kinds of CRM portals available, who is using them—and most importantly—how they improve customer service.
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To be successful today, companies must form and maintain strong profitable relationships with their customers. Failing to maintain a complete 360-degree view of all customers’ interactions can leave a company in a weakened competitive position. While customer relationship management (CRM) can improve customer interaction, it’s important to know which system will provide you with the best total cost of ownership (TCO).
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In today’s competitive market, creating and maintaining successful customer relationships is vital. That’s why everyone involved with the customer must work together as a team. In most companies, sales, engineering, and marketing often use separate systems—causing communication gaps in customer support. Discover how sharing information through integrated customer relationship management (CRM) can help bridge those gaps.
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Most businesses recognize the strategic importance of customer relationship management (CRM), but some small to medium businesses (SMBs) continue to use basic contact managers or simple spreadsheets to track customers, manage leads, and collaborate on sales. Achieving great results requires more than just installing CRM software. Learn how assessing your business’s CRM maturity level can help build your road map to success.
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The evolution of interfaces to web content has changed the way companies manage their web sites. On one hand, it's easier than ever to manage digital content. But on the other, with the advent of Web 2.0, there's still a lot you need to know to maximize your web content—and your sales and customer relationships. Learn how software-as-a-service (SaaS) can play an important role in your web content management strategies.
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You've made the effort and created a great brand—but how do you ensure it stays intact as you diversify across multiple marketing channels, and product and service lines? Combining Web operations into an integrated marketing tool for acquisition, retention, and cross-sell can provide your company with many benefits. Learn how with 7 tips for centralizing your Web management strategy with a content management system (CMS).
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As a fast-growing company, you have the same objectives as any business. But you’re probably finding it challenging to gain the control you need to achieve these goals without sacrificing your IT budget. And when you try to achieve control, it’s often at the risk of slowing down your business. Find out how having enterprise-wide visibility of your business processes and activities can put you back in the driver’s seat.
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This report identifies the major IT issues faced by small to midsized businesses (SMBs), including information silos, lack of IT staff, and outdated business applications. Because they lack the right information to meet customer expectations, SMBs have difficulty reacting quickly to fast-changing market dynamics and growing their revenue. Find out how the elimination of information silos can create a more consistent effective customer experience.
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Most companies are aware that the buying processes of the world and its buyers are changing, but many have yet to recognize the need to make changes within their own sales force. Often sales professionals don’t have the proper skills or tools needed to be successful. But by integrating the four sales process components, they’ll be able to capture information that can be used to place them high above the competition.
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Today, financial services firms are increasingly focusing on organic growth—forcing contact centers to drive cross-selling efforts as well as strengthen customer relationships. But in order to contribute to profitable growth, they must be able to quickly identify and address customers in a personalized fashion and present offers that are highly relevant. Discover how a customer interaction optimization solution can help.
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Some managers have concluded that strategic planning is nothing more than an exercise in futility, to be taken out and dusted off at annual meetings. However, strategic planning can still help direct your company and improve earnings. The trick is strategizing well—which means having all the information you need, when you need it. Find out how to hone your competitive edge with integrated business planning capabilities.
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You've analyzed and compared the functionalities of dozens of customer relationship management (CRM) applications, and finally you ve chosen the best solution for your enterprise. But the hard work's not quite over yet: before you sign on the dotted line, make sure your CRM plan offers terms your company can live—and grow—with. Take your seat at the negotiating table with this list of contract-signing essentials.
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There's a customer relationship management (CRM) solution for every business. But which one is best for yours? With so many variations in CRM modules, such as sales force management, marketing, and analytics, it can be difficult to find the one that meets your functional requirements. Read this checklist for five steps that can help you choose the CRM solution that aligns with your company's budget, scale, and goals.
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In the public sector, where it’s often more about process than the business case, recompeting a current outsourcing relationship doesn’t always make the most sense for ensuring continued value. Due to the cost and time investment in the recompete process, it can often cause more problems than solutions. In many cases, outsourcing agreements simply need to be updated to meet changing business requirements. Find out how.
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A contact center is a mission-critical component of any organization’s operations—regardless of who they service. Yet stakeholders often remain dissatisfied with its performance. In the past, contact centers benefited from advances in information and technologies, yet many companies struggled to determine how they could take advantage of these benefits. Find out how embracing both old and new technologies today can work.
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When buying customer relationship management (CRM) software, it s important to know what functionalities are offered in the wide range of solutions available. But just as important is your need to define your company's requirements in sales force management, marketing management, customer support, and analytics. Find out how to match vendor offerings with your needs with this concise guide to CRM essentials.
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Customer relationship management (CRM) software can work as a strategic business initiative to help companies accelerate sales while enabling staff to satisfy every customer. But your software is only as good as your business processes, which are good only if employees adhere to them. Monitor your team’s performance with four crucial steps—for a successful CRM implementation, and a successful and growing business.
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With the number of vehicles worldwide expected to triple in the next few decades, the toll collection market will need to adapt to meet demand. Increasing traffic will make the use of conventional toll plazas unfeasible. Electronic toll collection (ETC) systems can help by supporting multilane, free-flow tolling that can be tailored to specific standards and processes. Find out what you need to know, before ETC passes you by.
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Service excellence alone is not enough to ensure future growth and profitability in today’s challenging market. Streamlining IT processes is essential to your business workflow. Whatever your professional services software needs—from customer relationship management (CRM) to human capital management—it’s time to learn your lessons: find out key strategies and best practices that can help your company grow profitably.
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As supply chains continue to grow in size and complexity, companies are focusing more of their energies on managing supply chain risk. While the topic is gaining prominence in boardrooms, many companies do not yet fully comprehend the risks they face. But understanding risk is the first step to managing it—and using the right IT tools can help. Learn what steps you can take to better address your supply chain risks.
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Lufthansa, one of the world’s leading airlines, wanted to improve the way it trained its Miles & More loyalty program customer service staff. Traditionally, training was a five-day, classroom-based workshop, but the company now wanted more flexibility in its training approach. By moving to a blended learning content management system (LCMS), Lufthansa experienced a 65 percent savings on course development costs.
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Customer relationship management (CRM) is being adopted by businesses worldwide. But the key question for many executives as they create their CRM strategy: how can they gain strategic advantage if their competitors are implementing these same CRM systems? The answer: through integration. Find out how leveraging your existing information assets can turn CRM from a tactical project into a key strategic initiative.
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In today’s fast-paced business environment, providing customers with timely support when problems occur is critical. But in order to do so, information must be readily available throughout the enterprise. By integrating your customer support, defect tracking development, and knowledge management systems, your business will benefit from improved customer satisfaction and retention, as well as increased staff productivity.
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The world of business is constantly evolving, often making it difficult for midsize businesses to keep track of their leads and contacts. While larger companies have benefited from increased efficiency with sales automation (SA) and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, midsized enterprises haven’t been as fortunate—until now. Learn about their challenges and discover how SA and CRM software have helped.
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With the emergence of the Internet, the business environment has changed for many organizations, and will change to an even greater extent in the future. Indeed, in an increasingly dynamic and global environment, the Web has become an important source of competitive differentiation for companies of all sizes. In this comprehensive white paper, you’ll find out how to design a Web channel strategy that works for you.
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Midsize organizations across many industries must engage and influence customer purchasing decisions. New technologies, higher customer expectations, multiple sales channels, and a price-sensitive global economy are driving organizations to rethink how and when they interact with their most valuable customers. Find out which tools can help you optimize your marketing investments by targeting your most profitable customers.
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While most organizations have some integrated sales and marketing (ISM) elements in place, few have adopted a comprehensive approach. To achieve this, they must identify an ideal goal, establish a supply chain strategy, and then work methodically toward that objective. While the appropriate path to achieve ISM differs from company to company, there are a few key steps that can help simplify the process.
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To address evolving market demands, companies must take new approaches to marketing activities and integrate all company functions. Customer relationship management (CRM) can empower your marketing organization to support growth and demonstrate value to customers. Find out six factors that can allow your company’s marketing team to make intelligent decisions and drive effective end-to-end marketing processes.
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A productive sales force must concentrate on acquiring, growing, and retaining profitable relationships with its clients. This requires clear, detailed views of prospects, customers, and the market—and the ability to turn insight into action. The right sales force automation (SFA) system can help you determine priorities and action plans to achieve the best results with your customers—and boost your profit margins.
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As businesses become increasingly dependent on technology, service quality becomes more important. With so much riding on IT’s performance, a new service-centric model has emerged: service lifecycle management (SLcM). Based on the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) principles, SLcM provides a framework that enables organizations to optimize business outcomes and facilitate continual service improvement.
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Unlike most other business, transmission and distribution companies do not have the flexibility to adjust their prices independently based on demand-supply dynamics. Given the practice of performance-based rate-making, these companies must continually strive to reduce cost. To achieve this, supply chain managers must create a blueprint of their processes by systematically analyzing their supply chain practices.
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Customer information system (CIS) projects in the utilities industry have earned a reputation for being disruptive to business, very expensive, and always behind schedule. As a mission-critical cash register for utilities, it pays to examine CIS more closely. Learn about the perspectives on strategic CIS assessment frameworks and how a structured solution can help you improve the agility of CIS without a huge investment.
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Given intense competition and thin margins, more and more retailers are struggling to execute their corporate vision at the store level. Unfortunately, many attempt to tackle these industry realities without a strategy or supporting system. As a result, many leading retailers are turning to advanced workforce management (WFM) solutions to ensure proper staffing levels, combat employee turnover, and reduce payroll costs.
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When implementing customer relationship management (CRM), organizations often lose sight of their customers and focus on efficiency gains instead of looking at the bigger picture from a customer perspective. But organizations that can build a business-centric system flexible enough to quickly respond to changing customer needs will have a sustainable competitive advantage and enjoy profitable growth for years to come.
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Choosing the right professional services automation (PSA) solution may be one of the most important decisions a billable services organization will ever have to make. It’s a decision that can clearly impact your company’s bottom line, so it’s crucial that you get all the facts—up front. When talking with PSA vendors, knowing what questions to ask in order to make an informed selection is vital. Read here to find out why.
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MIFAB, an Illinois (US)-based manufacturer, is an innovator in the design and production of custom plumbing solutions. However, it was finding its existing order placement system inefficient and frustrating, and sought an automated solution to streamline the process. Find out how MIFAB implemented a Web-based ordering system that allowed its sales reps to manage their own customer accounts—and focus on generating sales.
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The number of leads captured from conventional channels is steadily declining due to the increasing importance of web sites. While Web analytic and e-mail marketing solutions provide useful data, they do nothing to capture leads. If there was a service that could prospect all your web site visitors, would you use it? Find out how LEADSExplorer is helping businesses convert their web visitors into potential leads.
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Ensuring customer quality is the key to customer loyalty and retention. When a company treats its customers like it doesn’t know them, it’s bad for business. This occurs when companies work with disparate data—using one database for sales, another for marketing, and a third for operations. Developing a real-time solution that provides a single view of the customer is by far the best way to increase customer satisfaction.
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Recent surveys have shown that 76 percent of respondents rated customer loyalty as extremely or very important to top management. Many companies feel they exercise due diligence in this area, but as global competition increases and markets mature, they’ll have to go that extra mile. To better measure customer’s attitudes and behaviors, companies must make loyalty management an integral part of their business strategy.
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Customer relationship management (CRM) has become increasingly popular, and provides enormous benefits to businesses that adopt it. So why does it encounter so much “what’s-in-it-for-me” resistance from frontline salespeople? Often, the reason is because they view CRM as strictly a management tool. With Oracle CRM On Demand, however, you can minimize data entry—allowing your salespeople to spend more time selling.
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While virtually all hosted customer relationship management (CRM) applications support sales force automation, marketing campaign management, and customer service, providing front-to-back-office integration has become a clear differentiator for small to medium businesses (SMBs). Read this white paper—which includes a handy table of evaluation criteria—to find out how to select the right hosted CRM software for you.
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LeasePlan Norway, a large automobile fleet management company, needed an alternative to manual entry of incoming invoice data, while still maintaining complete accuracy. The company implemented AnyDocINVOICE for invoice data capture, because of its ease- of- use and ability to capture data without templates. Find out about all the other functionalities that prompted the company to install the solution in its Swedish office.
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Inadequate data management, the result of a system that hasn’t been properly integrated—or that can’t be integrated—has serious ramifications on customer management and service, especially in financial services and health care. Master data management (MDM) solutions allow key customer data integration. Accuracy is one of the four elements vital to the success of MDM. Before implementation, learn about the other three.
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Have you ever received a call from your existing long-distance phone company asking you to switch to its service and wondered why they are calling? Chances are the integrity of its data is so poor that the company has no idea who many of its customers are. The fact is, many businesses suffer from this same problem. The solution: implement a master data management (MDM) system that uses an accurate data matching process.
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Ensuring the quality, accuracy, and security of customer data has never been more important than it is today. The growing potential for privacy breaches and tighter compliance regulations have created unique challenges and responsibilities for many data providers. Here we discuss some of the key privacy issues surrounding data management, and how partnering with a provider of master data management (MDM) software can help.
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For increased revenues and improved profitability, customer data integration (CDI) should be a vital part of your business processes. CDI, unlike customer relationship management (CRM), can deliver a valuable single view of a customer, without necessitating yet another complex system needing vast technical and organizational effort. Learn about CDI’s core capabilities, and which style of CDI is your best match.
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In order to meet the increasing need to extend services around the world, companies must be able to consolidate data centers and business applications while adhering to compliance rules and security regulations. While SAP addresses these business needs through its enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions, the question of how to test these global enterprise SOA deployments still needs to be answered.
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Customer relationship management (CRM) solutions have changed. What was once used to help sales personnel maintain records of contacts, sales-related activities, and individual team progress has now become so much more. But since CRM is now intertwined with other sales management solutions, it has left businesses that have implemented it in a bit of a quandary when it comes to the global sales market. Find out why.
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A clear customer focus is an essential part of improving business effectiveness and efficiency. But how can businesses achieve global customer visibility in today's competitive market? With the implementation of a master data management (MDM) solution, businesses can gain multidimensional, real-time visibility of their customers, resulting in improved competitiveness, higher profit margins, and reduced business risk.
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To understand the complex relationship between business and customer, there are several questions companies must ask. How much do we spend on advertising to reach out to customers? How much do our customers spend on purchasing our products? With customers scattered all over the globe, it’s difficult to know. With an organizational hierarchy management solution, finding the answer to these questions just got easier.
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DiscountBeautyCenter.com, an online supplier of brand-name beauty products, wanted to test the viability of using dynamic content to generate e-mail campaigns. Although the company previously had good results with Listrak’s batch and blast e-mail campaigns, it hoped that dynamic content e-mail would increase customer response and return on investment (ROI). Find out how it launched its most successful campaign ever.
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A call center can be so much more to your enterprise than a costly necessity. By carefully selecting an on-premise contact center solution, your company can boost revenues, retain customers, and discover customer service strengths and weaknesses in the long term. But before making a purchase, do you have the information you need about your current situation? Find out what to ask before you buy.
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When it comes to business-to-business (B2B) communications, two of the basic requirements for regulatory compliance are having a reliable network and a high quality dial tone. So why would you want to settle for anything less? To ensure that both are obtained, many companies are entrusting their data—and their compliance responsibilities—to the Inovis Multienterprise Expert Services Hub (MESH) platform. Find out why.
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To adapt your supply chain communication process to the demands posed by changing customer expectations, volume increases, and multiple communication formats, automating your supply chain is essential. Business community management (BCM) integrates the technology, business processes, and communication of the entire trading community to create end-to-end supply chain visibility. Learn how to use BCM for your enterprise.
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It’s no secret that there is a bevy of deployment options available with most customer relationship management (CRM) solutions today—ranging from customized to out-of-the-box. But with choice comes complexity. In order for CRM buyers to choose wisely, they must find a deployment approach that best matches their needs while delivering superior performance, application integration, and functionality. Find out how.
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Wi-Fi has become the access method of choice for users at the office, at home, and on the road. According to research, nearly 200 million Wi-Fi chipsets were sold in 2006 alone. But can Wi-Fi work effectively in a wireless local area network (WLAN) environment? Yes it can. To deliver Wi-Fi more reliably to increasingly diverse devices requires a self-configuring platform that covers larger areas and higher user densities.
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For consumers, fixed/mobile convergence (FMC) means a world where integrated voice and data services are available anywhere through a single mobile handset. For carriers, FMC represents a lucrative opportunity to leverage inexpensive technology. This technology, however, has its technical challenges, making performance hard to predict. To be successful, carriers need to understand the factors that influence this behavior.
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Identity theft and credit card fraud affect all businesses—and the problem is only getting worse. In order to combat these threats, credit card companies have joined forces to introduce the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). For financial institutions, complying with PCI DSS by using real-time monitoring and selective enforcement software can help to relieve the burden of unauthorized changes.
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Maybe you’ve already invested in an e-commerce site for your business. However, to fully maximize its potential, it must be integrated with your accounting system. If not, your staff may be wasting valuable time re-entering inventory and customer data from one system into another. Save time, reduce labor costs, and boost your competitive advantage with an e-commerce solution that allows full integration.
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Corporate IT organizations are struggling to satisfy the demands of a constantly evolving business environment. Lowering costs and responding to changing markets are a few of the challenges they face. Another is understanding how to leverage mission-critical applications as they develop new composite applications. Find out how deploying a service-oriented legacy architecture (SOLA) can help—and save you time and money.
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Having the right IT infrastructure is critical to consistent growth and profitability for midsize companies. Sadly, many business applications don’t support changes to both business processes and a company’s organizational structure. In fact, many are inflexible and create disconnects between departments. However, there is a solution that’s built to enable growth and adaptability in all business functions and operations.
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“It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack!” That saying and Internet site searches go together like ham and eggs. To help maximize search effectiveness, many online retailers are now establishing competitive advantages through site search analytics. By manufacturing and analyzing search content, they’re improving the relevancy of search results, thus closing the gap between searching and finding—and buying.
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The security provisions of the US Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) are complex and process-intensive, and non-compliant financial institutions and their officers have suffered penalties as a result. With QualysGuard’s vulnerability management and policy compliance solution—including on-demand auditing capabilities—financial institutions can easily meet the key security guidelines that are detailed in the GLBA.
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As with all things, there’s a good side and a bad side—the Internet is no different. Although it improves communication between businesses and customers, it can also overwhelm customers that are bombarded with marketing e-mails on a daily basis. Customers want more convenient contact channels. Smart companies understand this and are responding by adopting a multichannel approach to customer relationship management (CRM).
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One of the largest expenses for distributors and wholesalers is stock. Many have difficulty finding the perfect balance between ensuring products are available when they’re needed and not holding too much inventory. So, how is it possible to increase profitability while lowering inventory costs? By exploiting an inventory optimization system, businesses increase automation and collaboration—allowing greater profitability.
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With a vast global network that supports over 60,000 employees, vulnerability and risk management programs are crucial for Oracle GIT. To further enhance its IT system risk management capabilities, Oracle deployed QualysGuard’s on-demand software vulnerability and compliance management solution. Since its deployment, Oracle has optimized its scanning capabilities and automated its demand security auditing processes.
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As one of the largest Internet marketplaces, eBay proclaims that the trust it enables between buyers and sellers has been the key to its success. To ensure continued success, eBay wanted to standardize its network security auditing and remediation processes, and turned to QualysGuard’s vulnerability management solution. With Qualys’ automated solution, eBay can now quickly and easily remediate any network vulnerabilities.
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Web analytics has never been an exact science—which can make the process extremely frustrating. How can you be 100 percent certain that the data you’re working with is always accurate? To deal with this and many other questions that will arise, businesses must gain a better understanding of how well their analytics tools work with their existing data integration solutions, and how using testing platforms will help.
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For small businesses with limited budgets and IT support, customer relationship management (CRM) has been out of reach. Until now, these small companies have missed out on the benefits provided by CRM because most applications were built for larger companies. New technology, however, has now emerged that levels the playing field for these smaller businesses by providing a fully customizable and affordable CRM system.
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Software company Terra Technology’s development team often worked remotely, without a centralized development system. Managing documents manually was quickly becoming an unproductive use of the team s time—and increased its chances of making errors. Since using ProjectLocker’s document management system, Terra Technology has saved valuable time and money, and can now focus on its core competency—supply chain software.
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When crafting an e-mail marketing campaign, a few guidelines should be followed in order to maximize its effectiveness. Believe it or not, e-mail marketing is not only an art, but a science as well. Carefully balancing the needs of the audience, properly communicating your inspiring message, and using the right technology to manage the interaction are some of the key ingredients needed to make it a success.
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A customer relationship management (CRM) solution can enhance your overall business performance by integrating your front- and back-office activities, now and in the future. There are five key considerations involved in an effective CRM implementation. The first is the quality of your customer and business data. Secondly, it’s important to maximize user adoption. Learn about the other three and how you stand to benefit.
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For customer relationship management (CRM) to work effectively, departments within an organization must communicate and have access to centralized information. But integrating front- and back-office applications shouldn’t involve compromise. Learn how to automate sales and CRM with accounting systems, with key pointers in planning your integration project. And find out how to boost your CRM return on investment (ROI).
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Amcor Sunclipse realized that although it knew the importance of encouraging and rewarding employees, to actually demonstrate support for them through timely, comprehensive appraisals was becoming a challenge. Since implementing Halogen’s employee performance management (EPM) solution, Amcor has improved the speed and quality of its employee appraisals and has centralized the results to enable reporting of employee skills.
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Online advertising has grown so fast that it has surpassed billboards, magazines, and cable in spending. Local advertising is growing even faster, and the need to provide competitive services to advertisers is becoming imperative. As demand for local listings increases, a tool enabling advertisers to manage their own web site listings will not only save them significant operating dollars, it’ll provide a competitive edge.
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For many years, the various departments at Walker Foods worked independently of one another, which seriously impeded the flow of data throughout the enterprise. It was clear that an integrated system was in order, and after a few initial upgrades, the company decided on AppFinity’s WebCustomer overall online solution. Since its implementation, Walker Foods has increased order accuracy and significantly reduced expenses.
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An estimated 55 percent of users of business critical applications work in remote locations. With so many users working remotely, networks become congested and user productivity suffers. Until now, wide area network (WAN) monitoring and shaping has required special appliances, but there’s a new alternative software-based solution available that leverages the power of the user’s PC—providing unprecedented traffic control.
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In their efforts to accelerate time to market and improve business process efficiency, many marketing organizations adopt customer relationship management (CRM). But CRM often falls short in exploiting the exponential growth of content associated with product and brand marketing. By using a digital asset management (DAM) solution, however, you can increase productivity and achieve a favorable return on investment (ROI).
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In today’s business world, heightened privacy concerns and tightened regulations such as the US Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act have forced organizations to improve their workflow and archival and records management processes. That's why many results-oriented organizations are now using workflow software—bringing together people, processes, and documents to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and meet compliance requirements.
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The future of customer service management (CRM) is changing—and SAP’s CRM 5.2 is a big part of the reason. SAP is known for constantly enhancing its products—whether it’s changing its tier architecture or introducing new dimensional components. But its latest in CRM technology provides many new features and functionalities, and introduces some of the latest trends. If you want to know more about SAP CRM 5.2, here it is.
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IT is often characterized as distinct groups pursuing individual agendas and launching disconnected initiatives to increase operational efficiencies. To overcome this, organizations need a set of capabilities that can help improve coordination between IT and the rest of the business while facilitating effective service management. Adopting foundational technologies and a best-practice benchmark is a good place to start.
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Most businesses today depend on their own IT departments to satisfy corporate governance objectives and meet increasing customer demand. Unfortunately, many have failed to clearly demonstrate to themselves—and to their customers—that they are truly managing their business. Only when the IT department understands what the business wants can it benchmark itself and build continual improvement plans that can meet these demands.
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How can you get the most out of a customer relationship management (CRM) solution while reducing operating costs and increasing overall profitability? By purchasing a hosted CRM solution that’ll provide the benefits of an on-premise CRM solution without the need for a complex implementation or the assistance of an in-house IT team. Hosted CRM is a cost-effective solution that promises a quick return on investment (ROI).
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Developing a good disaster recovery plan (DRP) in today’s business world is a must. In fact, downplaying the importance of a DRP can be costly—especially if you’re a small to medium business (SMB) that is slow in adopting DRP. Recent studies have shown that 40 percent of businesses that have encountered a disaster close their doors within the following five years. To stay afloat, here are ten steps that should be taken.
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Everybody’s talking about how improving customer experiences increases loyalty, advocacy, and profitability. And you know you need to do something to deliver great customer experiences across your organization (rather than just at the retail store or call center). So now what? Download this white paper to find out how to kick-start your customer experience improvement initiative.
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Implementing customer relationship management (CRM) systems can be an expensive endeavor. That’s why you need to find a cost-effective system that’s compatible with your industry. Before purchasing a solution, you should evaluate the size of your business and your needs for industry-appropriate customization. Read this white paper for more insider tips—and the complete guide to choosing the right CRM system for you.
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The Internet and big-box retailers have changed the way products from MP3 players to garden tillers reach the market. Customers now have a direct pipeline, via the Internet, to the name on the label of the products they buy. And those customers are going back in droves to the manufacturers instead of the retailers for product support. How can you distinguish your brand, given this new market dynamic? Find out now.
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Information lifecycle management (ILM) is rapidly gaining acceptance as a process crucial to the success of many IT initiatives. The reason for this is the importance of managing data. With the growing demand for ILM comes a variety of solutions that follow a disjointed, point product approach. By choosing an ILM software designed to scale to its needs, a business can benefit from software built on a unified platform.
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The growth of application data has placed an enormous burden on IT organizations to maintain acceptable application performance and availability. The weight of managing and navigating through vast amounts of inactive data has caused outages and raised budgets, among other problems. Active archiving software, however, addresses complex data management issues and delivers lasting benefits to organizations and its users.
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Data breach is a very real problem in business today. Every day, organizations store massive amounts of data inside database tables—data ranging from credit card transactions to product inventories. This valuable information is what runs the business. In order to protect this data and stay on top of compliance, an enterprise data management solution that respects information privacy regulations should be considered.
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Fax hardware plays a crucial role in the sending and receiving of business documents. With high-volume use over time, instabilities in performance can occur. Therefore, how well fax boards and fax software applications perform together becomes an important consideration. With IQ Express intelligent fax board series, fax servers send and receive corporate documents electronically—reducing costs and improving productivity.
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For automotive manufacturers and their suppliers, consumer demands are high and global competition is fierce. To compete successfully, manufacturers must meet expectations and still generate an acceptable profit margin. By using QAD’s Just-in-time (JIT) Sequencing process together with its Manufacturing Execution Workbench (MEW) tools, automotive manufacturers will have the foundation needed to meet these challenges.
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When it comes to data, it’s all about location. Although more than 80 percent of enterprise data has a geographic dimension—such as stores, customers, and competitors—it’s rarely used in traditional business intelligence (BI) analysis. In order to react faster to market changes and to improve competitive advantage and operation efficiency, businesses should consider adding location intelligence tools to their BI platform.
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To boot or pre-boot, that is the question. There’s no doubt that operating systems (OSs) are complicated given the sheer amount of code that must be flawlessly interfaced and the potential vulnerabilities that can ensue. While full disk encryption (FDE) is one step closer to a more secure OS, encryption without strong authentication isn’t enough. For security-conscious users, pre-boot authentication is the only way to go.
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The Internet has made information transfer faster and easier. But alongside, hacking and data theft are increasing threats to organizations’ security. How can files be delivered safely within an organization or far beyond its walls? Secure file transfer reporting and tracking tools help keep sensitive data in the right hands—and help organizations comply with government regulations.
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Many manufacturers want to increase production efficiency and improve quality—but how can they ensure their efforts are successful? A process-oriented enterprise resource planning (ERP) system may be the answer. This white paper includes case studies on a variety of process manufacturing industries and provides valuable insights into the ERP capabilities required to successfully manage a process-oriented implementation.
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On top of the many challenges faced by IT managers today comes yet another challenge: ensuring efficient and secure user access to SAP. Because of the unencrypted communication between users’ workstations and the backend servers, the SAP environment—and the confidential data it stores—become vulnerable. With a secure single sign-on solution to SAP, however, you can significantly improve the security of this environment.
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Today’s business environment is more mobile than ever. With more employees traveling—using laptops, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and home computers to conduct business—vulnerabilities increase. Companies are now protecting their digital assets with full disk encryption (FDE). Recent advances in FDE allow businesses to protect data stored on users’ mobile devices, without jeopardizing intellectual property.
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With ever-changing technology, businesses often spend too much time and money trying to sustain their outdated systems. But is it possible to maintain a legacy system without the substantial costs of frequently updating it? By adopting service-oriented architecture (SOA)—which provides a suite of automated tools and services for migrating and extending legacy platforms—businesses can maximize quality and minimize costs.
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With the advent of voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) and virtual private branch exchange (PBX), phone calls are treated more like e-mail—with no loss of connection quality. Now, are you looking to update with a phone system that can grow with you, and allow for a remote data center? Find out how to generate cost savings and productivity gains with these tips to modernizing your business phone system.
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The increasing necessity of Web-based telecommunications means that businesses are choosing to streamline operations with voice over Internet protocol (VoIP). But what’s in it for you? Should you make the switch? Read about the top reasons other businesses are adopting VoIP applications—and see how the integration of voice, data, and video can open up a world of opportunity for enhanced communication.
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When considering a customer relationship management (CRM) solution, it’s critical to understand the needs of your sales team. All too often, CRM applications have too much depth and complexity—and as a result, they fall into disuse. Some features may actually increase the effort of your sales people to close a sale. However, you can implement a CRM implementation that fits the needs of your sales team. Find out how.
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When government agencies use a customer relationship management (CRM) solution for e-service, they can deliver timely information, put citizens in control, and improve the agency’s communication with its constituents. Citizen satisfaction will improve while you save budget dollars. And with the proper tools and technology, you can create the loyalty bond you need between your agency and your constituents.
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What does customer relationship management (CRM) mean to you? What is its value? Thousands of companies have ventured down the CRM path—many successfully, and others not. The reason may lie in the fact that CRM is sometimes viewed incorrectly, or may in fact be misunderstood. We provide some insights about the value of CRM in defining customers, increasing customer loyalty, and increasing your profits.
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The critical difference between industry leaders and laggards is a focus on the consumer experience. Search is a fundamental bridge between an enterprise and its stakeholders, and the quality of the search experience is a core driver of experiential perceptions. Delivering a powerful search experience builds a brand perceived as responsive, empathetic, and knowledgeable. Sounds good, right? So where do you start?
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IT organizations today are faced with the constant pressure of reducing costs at the service desk, while at the same time ensuring optimal customer service. To accelerate their IT infrastructure library (ITIL) initiatives, many are implementing service resolution management (SRM) systems. With the addition of SRM, these organizations can address the core issues required to operate an efficient and strategic service desk.
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As products become more complex and customer expectations continue to rise, service and support become increasingly difficult. So how can service and support managers transcend these problems and use each customer interaction to build customer loyalty and drive service leveraged revenue? By empowering customers with Web 2.0 technology and enabling users to manage their own experiences. Find out how.
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As a global leader of products designed for use in the manufacturing process, TigerStop LLC realized that in order to remain competitive, it would need to invest in a customer relationship management (CRM) system. After purchasing a CRM solution from a leading software developer, it has realized many benefits, and at the same time empowered its field sales team with a system it can access while on the road.
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Worldwide, various standards have been created to provide some form of structure with respect to delivering products and services. Over time, however, the adoption of industry compliance guidelines has seen many pitfalls, specifically with the advent of technology. Developing a sound compliance strategy requires a unified solution—one that includes all the necessary components, but also keeps the business users in mind.
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Whether you’re a manufacturer, vendor, or customer service company, the increasing pressure to make sales and decrease service costs affects you. The key to its success is to look at your customer experiences as repeatable life cycles. Instead of viewing sales and service as independent challenges—solved by using disconnected software packages—an integrated solution that accelerates the total life cycle may be the answer.
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Knowledge management (KM) can mean different things to an organization depending upon the nature of the initiative. KM is not a technology or set of methodologies, but a practice or discipline that involves people, processes, and technology. If implemented correctly, a KM initiative can improve the productivity and efficiency of an entire organization. With these ten basic principles, your organization can learn how.
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Today’s support organizations often face the challenge of providing efficient and effective customer service. Without the right tools, it can become an uphill battle. To gain true scale and effectiveness in service and support, many organizations are now turning to knowledge management initiatives like knowledge-centered support (KCS)—a business process that directly addresses the root causes of support inefficiencies.
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Supplemental product or technical data is typically delivered separately from the information contained within portable document format (PDF) files. This can make it difficult for users to locate the additional content for download. With the CopyFILE plug-in application, however, companies can integrate supplemental product information by using links within a PDF file—thus allowing content to be easily distributed.
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Customers, employees, and partners are an integral part of any business—each playing an important role in its success. But how is it possible to share vital information between them? In order to access information, understand trends, and build better processes, a system that enables multi-user collaborative technologies is required. Without these collaboration tools, business process management (BPM) cannot be successful.
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Today more than ever, retailers are faced with the challenges of selling locally while competing globally. To be successful, they must provide a shopping experience that inspires customer loyalty. Retailers that understand their customers’ shopping habits can build strategic global supply chains that anticipate demand. One way to achieve this is with a scalable technology platform based on industry standards.
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As the creator of performance apparel, Under Armour has become the fastest-growing designer and distributor of its category of apparel in the world. In 2005, to sustain growth and compete on a global scale, it needed a flexible IT landscape that could offer better visibility to data and scale over time. With an out-of–the-box scalable solution, Under Armour is on its way to reaching the $1 billion (USD) revenue mark.
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In 2004, there were 1.3 billion credit cards in circulation in the US. With fraud incidents on the rise, credit card companies are at constant risk of losing sensitive cardholder data. At the same time, strict payment card industry (PCI) requirements are forcing companies to put better systems in place to ensure clients are adequately protected. By implementing the right software tools, achieving compliance is possible.
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Benchmarking is a process where companies compare their performance over time against their competition. In doing so, they can identify where their strengths lie and where improvement may be needed. The point of benchmarking is to focus on areas that will yield the best return. For companies to succeed in their benchmarking efforts and gain a sustained competitive advantage, five key steps should be considered.
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Improving the supply chain is essential for any company that wants to gain or maintain a competitive edge. To do this, companies are adopting sales and operations planning (S&OP) strategies. Years ago—when the pace of market change was slow—S&OP was a nice-to-have; today it’s a business imperative! But it doesn’t have to happen overnight. By taking a five-step approach, companies can implement S&OP at their own pace.
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As pressure increases to reduce costs and improve customer service, many companies are outsourcing outside the US. Although India and Malaysia are the least expensive options, companies that want to build strong long-term partnerships with a call center—while taking quality, political climate, and cost into consideration—should look north of the border. Canada builds a solid case for any company’s outsourcing dollars.
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An increasing number of companies are turning to business process outsourcing (BPO) because of the many advantages it provides. In 2002, the outsourced call center industry reached $22 billion (USD) and is projected to increase to $25.7 billion (USD) over the next two years to serve the growing demand. For outsourcing to be a success, companies need an overall strategy. After that, it boils down to one question: where?
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Why do some customer relationship management (CRM) implementations fail? The answer: companies’ lack of understanding of their current CRM environments, and of what areas need modification or improvement. Companies with a clear understanding of what they need from a CRM solution—as well as of what CRM means to their business—are more likely to succeed. To clinch that success, some key elements should be assessed first.
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Spam considerably lowers user productivity, as it delivers unwanted, irrelevant, or anonymous e-mail messages. The best way to manage the incidence of spam is to measure it. The Spam Index—a tool for measuring improvement in spam control systems and for comparing spam control performance with competitors—is a method used by businesses worldwide to achieve lower spam levels and improve business performance.
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E-mail is a powerful business tool that most enterprises can’t live without. Unfortunately, along with its capability of accelerating commerce, productivity, and social interactions, there are some drawbacks—such as spam! Companies that rely on e-mail to do business simply can’t afford the negative affects of spam. However, new technology is emerging that helps stop spam and allows users to get on with business.
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In order to stay competitive, growing organizations need technology that allows them to react quickly to changing industry. According to recent polls, nearly 40 percent of midsized businesses are getting that technology through customer relationship management (CRM). With a rapidly growing market of choices, it’s important to look within your company to assess its needs and goals—before you commit to a CRM solution.
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If you could have a 360-degree view of your business, wouldn’t you want to take a peek? Most companies would say yes, but no business could benefit more from this panoramic view than large enterprises. Today, they’re getting that view—and more, from customer relationship management (CRM) technology. For large enterprises, CRM represents a powerful opportunity for positive change—and you ignore it at your own risk.
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You can’t pick up a business or IT magazine today without seeing numerous articles about the growth of mobile and wireless technologies. Why are these technologies so trendy? The answer is simple: developments in mobile computing, wireless communication, bar codes, and other data collection and communications technologies help businesses extend visibility and control over the operations that really matter to them.
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How can you establish a priority-based mobile networking system that provides workers access to company and customer records that they can manipulate from the field? By employing a total solution system that provides various methods of transmitting data. While this type of system may be more costly to implement than a stand-alone pager or cell phone, the benefits it offers can directly impact your bottom line.
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Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has retailers talking. The reason: RFID helps reduce labor and improves the ability to gather data. Retailers can use this data to make positive changes to business processes, which can be tremendously advantageous for them. With careful planning, an RFID system can provide immediate benefits, as well as long-term competitive and total cost of ownership advantages.
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Small to medium businesses (SMBs) often face the same challenges as large businesses—just on a smaller scale. One such challenge is finding a business solution that manages expansion and addresses complex reporting and compliance issues. Many SMBs are now adopting enterprise performance management (EPM) solutions—complete with tools to help them meet the current and future needs of their growing business.
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In any organization, people remain one of the largest sources of value when it comes to business processes. But providing them with tools that can be easily accessed and used has its challenges. As we move into the era of service-oriented architecture (SOA), portal and collaboration software now delivers the essential people-focused capabilities businesses need, while adding significant value to the organization.
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For a lot of companies, making the decision to replace an existing business software system can be a difficult one. The process can be so unpleasant that many organizations may be reluctant to even get started, coming up with a number of reasons why they could probably get by with the systems they already have. If your company is struggling with this tough decision, you may want to ask yourself these ten basic questions.
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Going mobile has become a growing trend, with many businesses reaching well beyond the use of cellular phones as their only lines of communication. Why? Because these businesses realize that linking the mobile workforce with the enterprise and its data resources—using mobile applications—is key to enhancing productivity, profitability, and customer satisfaction. Choosing the right devices, however, can be very challenging.
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In today’s global market, providing quality products and services is essential for any manufacturer’s continued growth—but maintaining a competitive edge is not always easy. For success, quality awareness must begin at the conception of the product and continue throughout the various stages of its development. To improve in this area, many manufacturers are now adopting the total quality management (TQM) approach.
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When considering any software solution, two things come to mind: flexibility and cost. With virtualization technology, multiple applications can now be hosted safely and securely on a single server, eliminating the overhead of running multiple operating systems (OS) per server. This capability can greatly reduce costs and help organizations deliver consistent service levels despite unpredictable workloads.
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Any organization that deploys multiple same-application servers with regularity could benefit from virtual appliances. Virtualization solutions eliminate the need to copy an operating system (OS) and application into each virtual environment, by creating a single, centrally installed master copy instead. It saves time on installation and enables greater levels of efficiency, manageability, flexibility, and resource use.
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Cox Communications, a leading cable provider, needed to find a way to centralize the IT requirements of its customer support team. With over a hundred users, its challenge was to move from single desktop applications to a centralized server which would offer many concurrent instances of the application—and minimize the cost. By deploying a virtualization solution, Cox realized a return on investment (ROI) of 300 percent.
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Businesses are built on strong and reliable customer relationships—with trust at the core. But how can you develop trust when most customers communicate only by e-mail? E-mail software does exist that emulates the interactive one-on-one relationship within a conversation. Its ease-of-use and user-centric functionality help agents focus on customer needs—without interference from technology.
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An important question facing IT professionals today is how best to harness computing power to further improve automated business processes. This is especially critical in business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce. While service-oriented architecture (SOA) delivers the benefits of IT integration to business, it needs a programming language—such as Lisp—that can optimize its capabilities and scale in size and complexity.
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The Web has become a vast potential business asset for many companies today. But while business users have the vision, it’s the IT department that actually creates and deploys the Web application. This often raises the question of Web site ownership. Empowering both parties with the right tools to match their respective skills can help address this question—and many others—for businesses in this confusing situation.
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Interactive web sites are event-driven. With each user click, a menu selection or keyboard action initiates a thread of execution that runs many lines of code. Many Web projects start as small code snippets gathered from open source sites, but as the web site grows, new developers are added to the mix. Without design and documentation tools, the project can become unmanageable, unreliable, insecure, and costly to expand.
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In 2004, Microsoft offered a midwestern-US-based financial services corporation a range of options to renew and replace its existing enterprise agreement. But without the right negotiating skills, how could it be certain Microsoft’s offer was the most cost-saving approach? The company engaged an independent consulting firm, and in less than three weeks recognized savings of 28 percent on a $3 million (USD) agreement.
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What’s the best way to know if your customers are satisfied? Simply ask them. Conducting customer surveys without the right tools, however, can demand a lot of staff time to manage and analyze the results. Indeed, response time can make the difference between keeping customers and losing them. One way to respond faster to customer issues—and save time and effort—is by investing in an automated customer feedback system.
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Small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) encounter many of the same challenges as larger companies in unlocking information from the data they collect, yet they lack cost-effective solutions. Many must choose between expensive business intelligence solutions or complicated homegrown solutions. With many hosted reporting solutions now available, SMBs have an option that may meet their requirements—at a fraction of the cost.
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What happens between the time customers begin to research a product and the final purchase? They’re likely to check out your—and your competitors’—websites, retail stores, contact centers, and blogs. And each point of contact puts your company in a competitive situation. That’s why the most important issue is how your company tracks customer activity in today’s multichannel world.
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Founded in 2001, Playground is a destination resort sales and marketing company headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada). The worldwide success of Playground is based on intellectual property—including information about resorts, selling history, target markets, prospects, and past customers. How does it capture this information and use it—safely and securely—to help sell and market real estate?
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Founded in 1989 in Richmond Hill, Ontario (Canada), Kenilworth Publishing is a full-service media company that publishes consumer and business-to-business print magazines in diverse sectors. In 1993, Kenilworth executives decided that to continue to strengthen clients’ profiles within their respective industries, they needed to implement one of the two customer relationship management (CRM) solutions on their shortlist.
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Based in Vancouver, Washington (US), TigerStop LLC is the global leader in stop/gauge and pusher systems designed to improve the efficiency of manufacturing processes in the plastics, woodworking, and metal industries. Having experienced business-jeopardizing technical issues with the company’s initial customer relationship management (CRM) system, TigerStop went to the market in search of a viable CRM system.
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Productive salespeople can make the difference between your company’s success or its ultimate failure. A new approach to sales productivity is emerging, and it focuses on the productive interaction between salespeople and customers. This sales enablement concept helps meet the needs of not only management, but also the frontline users—and it’s the key to winning, retaining, and satisfying your customers.
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Business is about the “survival of the fittest,” and in today’s competitive, global economy, businesses need to focus on market trends, and on how to better meet customer demands. A customer relationship management (CRM) solution helps manage, track, monitor, and analyze these customer trends for improved sales. It’s essential for businesses of all sizes—not only to succeed, but to survive.
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A customer relationship management (CRM) solution is now a standard business requirement. With origins as a system for sales teams, CRM has clearly evolved into a mandatory tool for providing benefit to the entire organization. However, methodology and training play instrumental roles in successful CRM implementations; if designed well, these critical components will ultimately ensure user buy-in and success.
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Poor customer experiences can happen at any touch point within your company. It could be employees responding to customers requesting information, placing an order, or trying to resolve a problem. It could be the inside sales team. Or it could be the collections department. But by deploying an advanced contact-handling application, you can improve customer satisfaction—at all touch points.
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“Get this to me ASAP. I can’t afford any delays.” Your customer service representatives hear these statements every day. Your clients are demanding speed and quality at every touch point: the days when they’d accept tradeoffs between product quality and timeliness of service are over. Organizations need to adapt to this reality—before their customers defect to the competition.
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Just as back-office automation became critical for competitive success in the last half of the twentieth century, customer relationship management (CRM) is today’s imperative for success. However, the key to creating business value with CRM is remembering that business strategy and technology strategy are linked. Companies that believe they can implement CRM capabilities based on technology alone will fail.
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Customer-facing processes are challenging to manage because they are always changing. Conventional workflow automation and stand-alone business process management (BPM) technologies lack many critical components found in customer relationship management (CRM). However, converging BPM and CRM provides the responsiveness, cost-effectiveness, and manageability to achieve optimal results. The converged approach helps align priorities enterprise-wide, reduce risks, and unblock revenue growth potential.
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When businesses commit to implementing customer relationship management (CRM), they commit to realigning their entire organizations around the customer. More specifically, they commit to collecting the right data—and using it the right way at the right time. But if you’re the manager championing CRM in your organization, how do you create the CRM buzz and obtain executive buy-in?
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Customer process management (CPM)—the convergence of customer relationship management (CRM) and business process management (BPM)—can deliver significant gains in efficiency and standardization for insurance companies. Whether it’s providing real-time quotations for insurance policies, identifying cross-selling and renewal opportunities, or managing claims, CPM extends across the enterprise to ensure that each customer interaction becomes an opportunity for service excellence.
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As competition in the financial sector increases, many financial services providers are seeking ways to improve customer service and profitability through process efficiency. By developing rich integration between customer data and allowing that data to be managed by the business users, customer process management (CPM) enables financial services organizations to adapt to changing market demands and maximize their competitive edge.
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Choosing the right customer resource management (CRM) application involves looking at its ability to solve many business challenges—both expected and unexpected. Analyzing CRM applications for their problem-solving acumen can help your business successfully select a platform that improves the way you do business, drives profits, and reduces risk, while minimizing IT resource requirements.
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Customers are the lifeblood of any business, and receiving quality customer service is a major factor in their purchasing decisions. There are six key elements that can help distinguish your organization’s product or service from your competitors. By applying these key elements, you can unlock the lifetime value of your customers and build an outstanding referral platform for future growth.
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The road to implementing customer relationship management (CRM) systems is fraught with risk and littered with failure. Paradoxically, reams have been written by industry practitioners explaining why CRM projects fail, yet the same patterns and mistakes are repeated—over and over again. While there is no magic bullet, following some simple guidelines can help assure CRM success for your organization.
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Selecting a new enterprise customer relationship management (CRM) solution is an undertaking that requires careful planning and managed execution. And in fact, there are a number of common mistakes that organizations make. Failing to execute the selection process in an objective and structured fashion can be an expensive financial mistake—as well as a fatal hit to your professional reputation.
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In today’s fast-paced, dynamic business environment, organizations need timely, accurate information to make critical decisions about their businesses, and to respond quickly to changes in operations, competition, and customer needs. However, many organizations that have adopted business intelligence (BI) tools to address their informational needs are faced with critical challenges in deriving benefit from these technologies.
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Organizations that implement a customer relationship management (CRM) system should evaluate software with an eye to the must-have features of the application. However, choosing the right software is just part of the solution. Businesses that intend to grow and compete must create an environment that encourages people at all levels of a company to take customer service seriously.
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Data entry and error correction are key roadblocks to return on investment (ROI) from customer relationship management (CRM) software. Manual data entry is time-consuming, and reduces staff effectiveness by taking them away from potential sales opportunities. Automating data entry is one way to reduce missed contacts and incorrect details, and to increase the volume and accuracy of contact entry.
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The contact database sits at the heart of any successful customer relationship management (CRM) program. Indeed, most CRM efforts aim at improving revenues based on the contact database. But what about the information that never made it into the database at all? The investment in these leads will often be lost—and the sales may go straight to the competition.
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Acquiring and retaining customers is crucial to an organization’s long-term success and growth. Finding new customers is more expensive and labor-intensive than maintaining a current client base. Haphazard marketing plans can be costly and ineffective, but customer loyalty solutions don’t have to be expensive. There are customer retention tools that can help your marketing teams hold on to your existing customers.
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A US-based multinational company providing end-to-end customer service via an online shipment and tracking system needed to develop an application that would allow customers to track shipment without going to the service provider’s web site. The multinational turned to Rishabh for development services.
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The fundamentals of business are fairly simple. Customers have needs, and preferences about the products and services that will fill those needs. Businesses, on the other hand, have products or services with features that offer value. Win–win business transactions provide products or services with the features that best satisfy customer needs. This builds lasting relationships—and long-term organizational success.
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For years, contact centers have used first contact resolution (FCR) rates to measure their performance. While FCR rates remain a useful metric for assessing how well contact centers handle incoming requests from customers, they do not provide an accurate view of how well your company is treating your customers. In fact, they may even be misleading.
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Client relationship management (CRM) technology can help capital-markets firms streamline investment banking activities, increase brokerage trade volume, and meet compliance challenges. As a nerve center for information about clients, prospects, institutions, syndicate partners, and other contacts, the right CRM system enables capital-markets firms to share intelligence, coordinate activities, and derive advantage from an integrated body of corporate knowledge and relationships.
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Ask 500 CEOs to define the word “customer,” and you’ll come up with 500 different answers—with a few common denominators. It turns out these denominators are the same ones used to describe an organization’s long-term strategic assets. Yet for many organizations, customers aren’t considered assets at all; and yet they’re expected to constitute the lifeblood of the business itself.
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How many of your online customers are happy customers? Today, few organizations can answer this question accurately, usually relying on customer complaints to highlight areas of underperformance. However, a significant proportion of unsatisfied online customers won’t even bother to complain. But now, organizations can track customer interactions in real time—transforming online experiences into truly effective channels for customer care.
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Since there are multiple vendors offering hosted customer relationship management (CRM) applications, the buyer’s toughest decision is finding a vendor that offers the many benefits that come from a workflow engine similar to those used in multimillion-dollar CRM deployments. Truth be told, CRM alone is not enough, as not all providers have a workflow engine which enables full process automation.
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Industry observations indicate that few enterprises have been successful in implementing seamless networks to provide consistently updated customer information across multiple channels of access, including data stored and used within and outside contact center applications. There are several reasons for this lack of success—in particular the method by which these multichannel contact centers were developed in the first place.
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For decades, solution-selling and marketing methodologies have used the principle of identifying pains associated with business processes, in order to create urgency and demand for products and services. With the foundational premise that marketers need to drive more revenue while optimizing marketing investments, successful business-to-business (B2B) companies have focused on four critical pillars needed to optimize the lead-to-sale process.
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A decline in customer loyalty has put a great deal of pressure on financial institutions of late. Thus, as banks tailor products and services to meet customer demands, they must also boost revenue. That’s why it’s essential to target your most profitable customers with real-time insight that helps you drive revenue, increase profitability, and build long-term relationships with those customers.
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Companies that provide superlative service keep their customers satisfied and loyal. It’s particularly important to deliver great customer service on the web—which is why great web self-service should be a company’s top priority. Unfortunately, many executives who would have a heart attack if their call centers were unresponsive don't show the same concern about having an unresponsive web site.
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On any given day, your interactions with a few strategic customers will make a huge long-term difference. But which few customers? A new type of analytic application, customer value management (CVM), answers the need to identify, analyze, and predict customer behavior. Using CVM enables companies to shift from campaign-centric to customer-centric analysis, and develop more individualized and profitable customer relationships.
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Your product is excellent, and your customer service department is highly responsive. Your sales force is diligently acquiring new clients. You have made retaining clients a company priority. To be even more competitive, you need to continue what you’re doing, but better—while reducing the cost of doing it. Great theory. But just how are you going to accomplish the impossible?
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Any technology tied to the financial health of a business generates heated debate, and customer relationship management (CRM) is no exception. CRM has been bolstered, burned, praised, and maligned. One of the most animated arguments has centered on the “where” of CRM: whether to deploy the technologies in-house or “rent” them, outsourcing their implementation to an application service provider.
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Customer relationship management (CRM) applications have evolved from risky eighteen-month IT projects into productivity tools that any size of business can deploy. Indeed, many mid-market companies have chosen to roll out a “hosted” solution, whereby the solution is accessed over the Internet. However, going through the selection process has become more cumbersome recently, with more options available than ever before.
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There are many articles on customer relationship management (CRM) and its benefits. These articles are usually targeted towards large organizations, and don’t focus on the needs and objectives of small business owners. However, it’s essential for small business owners to know what CRM really is, and why and how CRM can help retain existing customers and help their business grow.
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Performance support helps keep workers on track. But truly effective performance support communicates company-specific “when, what, and how” information, in the fastest, clearest, and easiest way possible—like a GPS unit issuing personalized directions for the specific task at hand. Performance support won’t teach you how to drive, but it will help you get to where you want to go.
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Assumption: Call center turnover will always be higher than you want, no matter what you do. If this is true (and a mounting body of research suggests it is), you’ll need to complement rewards such as bonus pay, flex time, and public recognition with other means of getting the most productivity from your agents before they head for greener pastures.
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Retailers stand to gain significantly by implementing critical strategic changes to the promotional advertising aspects of their business. These changes can include integrating disparate promotions-related processes and merging existing data stores with creative systems, as well as creating expedited advertising in real time—thus extending the marketing reach of their promotions. The direct result: more efficient and effective promotions.
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The airline industry is constantly undergoing change, and the ability to adjust swiftly is imperative. The need to improve safety while offering competitive prices is an ever-present challenge. That’s why the industry requires solutions in every crucial aspect of business—from accounting and finance, route profitability, human resources (HR), materials management, and enterprise management, to customer relationship management (CRM).
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For those who haven’t yet taken the plunge, the time has come: Predictive analysis will become a competitive necessity by the end of this decade. This is primarily thanks to its capacity for turning customer intelligence into actionable information for improving the accuracy and efficiency with which organizations target specific customers and prospects—effectively lowering the cost of marketing campaigns.
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Despite significant investments in technology and an abundance of data, many companies repeatedly struggle to improve results on their marketing efforts. Why? In many cases, they are addressing the symptoms rather than the causes of their customers issues. Predictive analytics can be used to uncover these root cause issues, so they can treat the disease, not just the symptoms.
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As one-to-one marketing begins to permeate mainstream business practices, organizations in highly competitive markets struggle to gain an advantage. Thus, as part of an ongoing effort to differentiate products and services, best-in-breed organizations are now using a tool called “customer lifetime value,” a metric that projects a customer’s value over the entire span of that customer s relationship with a company.
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In any competitive market, leveraging data to understand a customer s next move is essential. Thus, to achieve an advantage in customer marketing, companies have invested millions in customer intelligence systems. Despite this investment, many companies still struggle to increase marketing return on investment (ROI). This is due largely to the absence of an effective predictive analytics approach to customer data.
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Superior order management can provide you with a competitive edge across the board. To move closer to order perfection and a truly loyal customer base, you must cost-effectively eliminate the issues preventing on-time, accurate order fulfillment. This involves every process, including planning and forecasting, acquiring and creating accurate orders and contracts, handling order changes, and resolving fulfillment and post-delivery problems.
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Customer relationship management (CRM) is more than a product—it’s a philosophy. That’s why, when it comes to CRM systems, it’s important to understand all the benefits of an integrated application before beginning the selection process. After all, just as a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, a CRM solution is only as good as its implementation.
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One of the most important aspects of any business management application, including CRM applications, is its underlying architecture. An application’s customizability, adaptability, portability, scalability, and extensibility are all functions of its architecture. A well-designed architecture will thus accommodate growth and adapt to business changes—without affecting the performance of the application or requiring an exhaustive re-implementation.
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Only a handful of firms have undertaken the challenge of integrating their supply chain management (SCM) and customer relationship management (CRM) processes. A big reason for this is the practicalities of everyday business. But in today’s era of technology-fueled competition, leading companies in nearly every industry are seeking an edge by focusing on strategies enabling SCM and CRM to coalesce.
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With tight budgets and spending restrictions affecting education, there has been increased interest in using a tool that has achieved significant success in the business world—customer relationship management (CRM) for schools. This approach involves taking a "customer-concentric" view to develop strategic plans. The key, however, is to take advantage of these capabilities without creating additional "information technology" overhead.
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Competition and rapidly developing technology constantly drive new business models. Thus, success can be dependent on how rapidly you can deploy and adapt service processes to accommodate new requirements. To stay ahead of your competitors, you need to be armed with a software package that lets you make decisive decisions and implement procedures to meet the increasing demands of customers.
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Successful customer experiences change the competitive landscape by separating your company from the competition. Industry wisdom thus has companies focusing on increasing transaction efficiency. However, by executing a customer-centric strategy—with a clear process enforced along every channel of customer interaction—you will tap into the emotions and aspirations of your customers, creating a personal and long-standing connection with them.
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Exceptional customer experiences revolve around one central principle: knowledge at the point of action (KAPA). Learn how your marketing, customer service, and sales systems can work together to drive customer loyalty and advocacy.
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To be reliable, cost and profitability analysis must be underpinned with an activity-driven view of how an organization’s products, customers, and channels consume resources and incur costs. However, activity-based costing (ABC) contributes to more reliable customer, product, and channel profitability analysis. In fact, without this foundation, such analyses are critically flawed, and can result in inappropriate decisions and choices.
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Bad data threatens the usefulness of the information you have about your customers. Poor data quality undermines customer communication and whittles away at profit margins. It can also create useless information in the form of inaccurate reports and market analyses. As companies come to rely more and more on their automated systems, data quality becomes an increasingly serious business issue.
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For years, small to medium businesses have envied the powerful marketing campaigns of their larger counterparts. But today, bigger budgets and marketing departments are no longer the only keys to marketing success. Rules-based marketing is an automated strategy involving if–then rules, resulting in communications that are more timely, relevant, and consistent across multiple communication channels, for even the smallest organization.
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All organizations, across all industries, have one thing in common—a deluge of customer data idling somewhere waiting to be monetized. Most likely, the similarities end there. The accuracy, depth, and accessibility of data are as varied as the products and services offered by organizations. The use of this data is what separates successful organizations from those who go bankrupt.
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To work through all the issues necessary to improve sales performance, executives have a number of options for leveraging people and knowledge. However, an area that shows significant potential for helping sales teams meet or exceed their goals is the effective alignment of sales process and technology. Executives looking to optimize performance should consider this approach to achieve their goals.
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Do you spend all your time chasing new customers instead of taking care of the ones you already have? Most customer relationship management (CRM) projects focus on customer relationships but fail to address customer experience as a loyalty driver. In part two of a two-part series, learn about best practices recommended by customer experience management (CEM) experts, and how they can help you improve long-term loyalty.
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No longer are customers simply sideline participants. Organizations are empowering them with a wealth of knowledge to engage in more informed decision-making. A customer relationship management (CRM) solution that encompasses all aspects of your business gives customers unprecedented visibility into the actions that impact them. Ultimately, this leads to greater accountability within the organization, and greater satisfaction among customers.
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Relationship marketing is about understanding customers’ needs and building a marketing strategy around them. The nurturing process helps businesses define the process of generating better leads through a clear set of principles, tactics, and related metrics for attracting new customers. Enterprise marketing management (EMM) has also emerged as part of this process, and is critical for marketing consistency and discipline.
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Companies spend staggering investments to make and keep their offerings competitive. By providing a centralized location to store account history and detailed contact information for every buyer and automating what had been manual tasks, sales force automation (SFA) and customer relationship management (CRM) have begun to positively impact sales efforts.
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Customer relationship management (CRM) is growing in importance as a competitive tool. However, a successful CRM solution must consider many factors, including a well-defined implementation strategy, the people factor, and the need for integration with the incumbent enterprise resource planning solution. If these conditions are met, CRM can have a dramatic impact on internal processes, customer satisfaction, and company profitability.
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Countless customers are engaging in self-service, in the process helping companies save millions by deflecting service interactions to cheaper channels. At many organizations, just the cost savings make the investment in self-service worthwhile. But the self-service business case isn’t built on cost savings alone. There’s a bigger, more customer-focused picture to consider, where the customer experience plays the key role.
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Customer churn rates are higher than ever: although businesses say they are devoted to loyalty, their management systems and budgets do not support that claim. But in a landscape of similar products, cutting down on defection—or churn—is vital. There are in fact four steps to improving loyalty and retention which, if focused on the appropriate customers, will improve profitability.
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Until recently, customer interaction technologies were often considered too complex and costly for all but the largest businesses to justify. But today that picture has changed. Encouraged by declining technology costs and changing customer expectations, and pressured by competition, small and midsized companies are investing in key customer service building blocks, such as contact centers.
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In 2002, US suppliers wrote off more than $18 billion (USD) in bad checks. And the bankruptcy picture has certainly not improved since then. Companies that act quickly to secure overdue accounts are the companies that have the best chance of remaining in the black. The SYSPRO Collections Module automates debt collection, and can help address this acute need.
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Customers perceive value based on the experiences they receive—and many big-name companies have tuned into this because they’ve made a connection with customers that transcends the basic functional value they offer. In this first part of a two-part series, learn how traditional customer relationship management (CRM) has often failed in this respect, and how managing customer experiences can drive your revenues.
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We have all heard the phrase: “garbage in, garbage out.” When any company evaluates a customer relationship management (CRM) system, this is always one of the first expressions to come up. And yet we see company after company for which this is the exact problem. How can you make sure that this doesn’t happen to you?
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Making the leap to customer relationship management (CRM) doesn’t have to be a difficult process. But many companies have difficulty knowing how to get their CRM initiative off to the right start. There is, however, a simple, step-by-step process which will help guide your CRM implementation project in the right direction, even if you’ve never implemented a CRM system before.
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Your company has just selected a new customer relationship management (CRM) system for your company. Congratulations should be in order. However, your work has really just begun. You know that in order for your CRM initiative to be successful, you’ll need buy-in from your users. What steps do you need to take to ensure buy-in and achieve real implementation success?
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Many of the familiar avenues for gaining a competitive edge, such as product innovation or speed-to-market, are not as effective as they once were. Customer experience is currently the prime battleground for advantage, and a company’s competitive edge now depends on delivering a consistent, satisfying customer experience. How do the leaders get it done?
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When selecting or implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) solution, a mistake or error in judgment can be extremely costly. That’s why you should be aware of the ten basic steps to a successful CRM implementation. Even if you’ve already identified the reasons why your organization needs a CRM system, where do you go from there?
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Customer relationship management (CRM) solutions can range from simple contact managers (for a few hundred dollars) to multimillion-dollar enterprise applications that take years to implement. This is why over-buying a CRM system can be one of the most costly mistakes a company can make. But where should you start your research? And what steps should you take after that?
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Customer service has long been an "island unto itself," where efficiency and volume—and not building customer relationships—have reigned supreme. But priorities are changing. The mission now is to serve better, faster, cheaper—and to make more money in the process. Best-in-class customer service organizations see cost efficiency and revenue as allies, not enemies. What are their secrets?
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Most service delivery managers and executives quickly realize that there are a number of 'pain points' involved in trying to manage service delivery efficiently, which can lead to a complete inability to manage business. However, the Service Network Optimization (SNO) model from ServicePower is a set of service offerings and technology designed to help service organizations make the right decisions.
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With today’s strategic focus on data, a significant challenge facing companies is the ability to use data to create a single customer view (SCV). An SCV means that a company has a accurate and complete view of their customers across all applications, databases, and customer touch points. The financial, operational, customer satisfaction, and regulatory effects of unreliable SCVs are overwhelming.
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Implementing technology without the proper people and processes in place only means bad service is delivered faster. Indeed, the employee brain trust is critical to succeeding in today’s knowledge economy and customer-centric environment. Yet according to numerous industry analysts, a staggering 55 to 70 percent of customer relationship management (CRM) and contact center projects fail to meet their objectives. Why?
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The frequency of breakdowns in the IT client relationship is reaching epidemic proportions. Indeed, an IT client breakdown is comparable to the onset of an illness. If caught early enough, treatment is often relatively painless. However, if left to advance to the later stages, or full maturity, the treatment will not only be invasive, but also require significant recovery time.
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Customers are a company’s true source of value creation, and maintaining their trust is imperative. When companies understand this, privacy protection will become an important business tool, rather than just a regulatory requirement (as many companies think of it). Obtaining, using, and especially protecting customer data has never been more important to the strength and positioning of a company’s success.
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The new focus for business leaders is customer advocacy, soon to become the most important strategic initiative for cutting-edge, forward-thinking companies. A crucial department in the company is thus the customer contact center, as it plays a pinnacle role in branding, corporate image, and customer lifetime value. Adopting a customer-centric culture has a direct impact on corporate financial viability.
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In less than six months, RxAmerica was able to respond to unprecedented call volume—primarily from seniors seeking information on the US Medicare prescription drug program—by increasing their service representative population by more than 500 percent, and by opening 6 new call centers. The cornerstone of their solution: a hosted call routing platform.
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The evolution of global discrete manufacturing is ongoing. How executives at manufacturing companies answer questions and anticipate what will be the right answer six months, a year, or two years from now will determine the success of their company. Infor examines current industry trends and identifies what it believes to be the seven trends producing the greatest stress and change in discrete manufacturing today.
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If you’re evaluating customer relationship management or sales force automation software, this Forrester report is a must-read. Featuring ratings on eight leading vendors based on over 150 criteria, the report is valued at over $795 (USD). Get your free copy from Maximizer Software, top-ranked in Forrester’s “current offerings” in areas such as product functionality breadth, setup, usability, integration, and cost.
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Enterprises are facing escalating challenges to personalize interaction with their customers. Unlike approaches that centralize retail technology integration, which can stifle innovation at the customer level, retail solutions should be driven from the edge of the retail experience to better serve customers.
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Retail departments enticed by software which promises to make them better and more accurate often fail to consider that they will need constant input and output of data in order for the software to work effectively. To improve the customer experience, a retail organization needs to fashion itself into an integrated enterprise that relies on a single database. But how?
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Endress+Hauser (e+h), an international group of specialists for measurement devices and automated solutions for industrial process engineering, implemented both mySAP CRM mobile sales and e-selling capabilities to reinforce its market- and customer-focused orientation. As a result, it saw a stronger field sales force and increased sales through the Internet.
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Capstone Turbine Corporation, an energy innovator, needed to implement management, business model, and strategy changes. It also needed to improve product reliability, modularize configurations, and provide visibility. By using SAP products, such as SAP BI, SAP EP, and SAP Best Practices, it realized performance measures for key business activities, and improved sales and inventory management.
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When creating a seamless value chain, it is essential to focus on the customer. However, information, data, and processes are key when planning the complex merger of processes, technologies, and culture. Additionally, a successful value chain recognizes that partners, vendors, suppliers, and employees play a vital role to ensure that customer values are both recognized and realized.
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When it comes to customer relationship management (CRM), it’s important to understand all the benefits of an integrated CRM system before beginning your selection process. This guide is designed to help you build the business case for a CRM system, form an effective project team, ask the right questions, identify the challenges involved and much more.
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Before beginning your selection process for a customer relationship management (CRM) system, it’s important to understand all the benefits of an integrated CRM system. These 17 “rules of the road” for CRM were collected from executives, managers, employees and consultants and provide useful information when choosing a CRM system.
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To build customer happiness, companies must understand what is important to them and how the organization can deliver. With this information, staff can remain focused on driving up the quality of delivered experience, thereby impressing customers enough to get them to recommend and repurchase. The success of an organization in this respect is almost never the result of one factor.
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Project-driven organizations face numerous challenges, including increasing competition, more demanding clients, and changing regulatory requirements. Many organizations also face internal challenges that range from dispersed employees and partners to disconnected business processes and disparate information systems. This paper explores the best practices that project-driven businesses should consider.
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It is essential for users to be able to create and deliver secure, professional-looking e-mail communications which present a consistent corporate image. PDF software meets these needs. However, when considering PDF, users must determine if the solution enhances communications for all network users, and whether the solution integrates PDFs with other software packages, including e-mail, accounts, and customer relationship management systems.
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The high price and complexity of traditional, installed, on-premise enterprise software has left small and medium businesses (SMB) unable to obtain true integrated customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. On-demand, software as a service is changing all that. The lower costs and the short implementation period for an on-demand customer relationship management solutions make it lucrative for smaller businesses.
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Choosing an on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) vendor can be a daunting task, especially for the price conscious consumer who lacks the budget for intensive research. A true CRM vendor should have pre-integrated sales, marketing, and customer support. Look for easy access to software free trials, and beware of hidden fees. Ultimately, researching the alternatives can save your company up to 50 percent of a solution’s total cost of ownership.
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The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires pharmaceuticals and medical device companies to comply with numerous standards. Medical device manufacturers have long embraced enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM), but primarily use them to achieve operational efficiencies. However these systems can play a significant role in their abilities to comply with strictly FDA regulations.
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Manufacturers and service companies are facing a blackhole in sales lead management: costing sales. By using a workflow for lead and opportunity management, that efficiently routing and tracking sales, sales efficiency will increase and produce a bigger pipeline, and more sales will be closed.
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Deploying voice self-service (VSS) is undeniably attractive to enterprises because it improves the speed, consistency, and convenience of information sent to customers, and decreases costs. Knowledge bases play a key role in helping enterprises achieve greater return on investment because they link web- and speech-based self-services together. In particular the emergence of VoiceXML has truly shifted speech and IVR platform hosting options.
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Enterprises must collaborate or they will surely stagnate. Guarded proprietary information has given way to collaborative approaches where information is shared both inside and outside the enterprise’s walls. To survive, an enterprise must be flexible enough to collaborate externally with suppliers and partners while fostering the same environment with its employers.
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Vission XXI, S.A. de C.V. fue creada en el año de 1991 con el objetivo de ser la empresa líder nacional en venta y renta de soluciones con equipo audiovisual y de servicio. Es representante en México de los principales fabricantes de equipo audiovisual. La dirección de Grupo Vission requiere monitorear las
variables críticas de operación y realinear todos sus procesos en base a mejores prácticas y sus prioridades de negocio, a la vez, necesita integrar todos sus procesos para mejorar sus niveles de servicio, tanto en la matriz como en sus siete sucursales. Para esto Intelisis le ayudó
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A partir de éste artículo analizaremos la problemática del mercado ERP a fines de los noventa y paralelamente el gran surgimiento del CRM, lo cual nos lleva a reflexionar sobre el rol de cada uno y los límites de la integración. Ante esta situación, podemos encontrar otra manera de encarar el problema, que es a través de la generación de un marco de trabajo de objetos de negocios en el cual al momento de definir los objetos la diferencia ERP-CRM queda casi nula y para lo cual Calipso ha creado Biframe.
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By integrating data from disparate systems and delivering data in a management dashboard on a personal digital assistant (PDA) or cell phone, Persistent enabled service engineers to collect and update data related to tire usage. This solution seamlessly integrated approximately 1,000 dealers in more than 15 European countries to central data servers and a CRM solution. The result? Improved customer end acquisition and satisfaction.
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Despite intense price competition for its volume products, the electrical products industry remains healthy and dynamic. World-class companies are succeeding by marketing innovative products, scaling up and outsourcing production, expanding into new geographic areas, implementing more efficient business systems, and focusing on ever-closer relationships with suppliers, partners, and customers. This white paper explores the issues of manufacturers, wholesalers, and distributors and the current state and future of the industry. Industry specific technological are also discussed.
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Companies implement a customer relationship management (CRM) system to balance increasing revenue, decreasing costs, while enhancing the customer experience. However, many implementations fail to do this. Companies, however, can meet these goals by implementing a customer-centric CRM. In this system, all business processes throughout the extended enterprise are optimized around customer life cycle care, which builds stronger relationships.
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Dropped by its application service provider, Onsrud Cutter, a router bit manufacturer, decided to replace its enterprise resource planning system with a scalable, flexible, quickly installed solution. Further narrowing down its requirements to include customized reports, real time information, and e-business capabilities, the company selected Sage ERP X3. The installation took less than five months.
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Quality data in the supply chain is essential in when information is automated and shared with internal and external customers. Dirty data is a huge impediment to businesses. In this article, learn about the four critical success factors to clean data: 1- scope, 2- team, 3- process, and 4- technology.
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DNA Group, Inc. is the North American distributor for Defond Manufacturing Limited, Inc, a major supplier of switches and electronics to the appliance, marine,
transportation, power tools, white goods, lawn & garden, and consumer electronics industries. DNA Group serves the global marketplace by emphasizing responsiveness and the
ability to focus on the needs of each individual customer and project.
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Upgrading to CRM solution increases value of relationships for financial services firm. ScotiaMcLeod (www.scotiabank.com) is the investment arm of Scotiabank, one of Canada's largest financial organizations with over $280 billion in assets. ScotiaMcLeod's financial advisors specialize in helping individuals and small business customers plan financial solutions for trusts, estate planning, borrowing and banking services. ScotiaMcLeod has more than 800 financial advisors working in 84 branches across the country. According to Chris Carter, Associate Director and Branch Manager for ScotiaMcLeod's North Vancouver office, the financial services sector is a people-driven business where customer service is critical to success.
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The Surado CRM Sales module empowers sales teams by providing an intuitive system that presents a comprehensive single view of the customer across your entire organization. Combine this with a powerful knowledge base and automated business rules to create a consistent sales methodology throughout your entire team. With Surado CRM, your sales teams are enabled to manage the complete prospect to customer life cycle with efficiency and effectiveness.
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ECS Imaging, Inc., the world’s leading authorized value added reseller for LaserFiche, has been designing complex network and imaging systems since 1990. Specializing in LaserFiche’s industry-standard software, hardware, scanning services, on-site training and turnkey document imaging services selected by over 1,400 government agencies and 17,000 sites worldwide, ECS imaging helps organizations reduce costs and improve efficiency through cost-effective and innovative technological solutions.
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Business Bank of California, a subsidiary of Business Bancorp (NasdaqNM: BZBC), has served California businesses since 1984. With assets of more than $620 million, Business Bank of California is ranked fifth of 25 locally based banks in the Inland of Southern California and offers retail banking, commercial, construction, and SBA lending. Business Bank of California operates in 15 locations in California. The branches are strongly focused on providing high-quality, personalized services to small businesses, professionals and consumers.
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Workflows can increase efficiency, standardize processes, reduce costs, and increase return on investment. The key is to understand your customer, your products and services and your business processes. Learn how easy-to-design workflows can help ensure that best practices are carried out consistently and efficiently. Streamline daily tasks and make learning new operations simpler. Workflows help you reduce churn, boost productivity and increase customer satisfaction.
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Microsoft’s US Partner group manages relationships between the company and its 12,000 Microsoft Certified Partners. It needed an integrated solution for partner relationship management to reduce redundancy and replace the personal spreadsheets and custom tools its account managers were using. Learn how Microsoft deployed PartnerCentral by Click Commerce and implemented a single tool to manage all aspects of Microsoft’s partner relationships.
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Tellabs is a $1.3 billion (US) corporation that designs, manufactures, markets, and services optical networking, broadband access and voice quality enhancement. Tellabs was faced with a high volume and high cost product returns process. Improper documentation, lengthy processing times, and insufficient returns documentation was affecting customer service and limiting profitability. It worked with Click Commerce to implement their product returns application. The solution provides an efficient and transparent process, which allowed the business to be realigned for significant savings and improved customer satisfaction. The savings include reducing in-transit inventory by $1.76 million (USD) per month and reducing spare parts stocking levels from $7.5million to $1.9 million (USD).
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Arrow Electronics, Inc., a leading distributor of electronic components and computer products, supports more than 600 suppliers and 150,000 OEM and commercial customers with 200 sales offices and 18 distribution centers in 41 countries. Employees at Arrow were using spreadsheets and manual processes which made it difficult to support its large original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partners (HP, IBM, EMC, Sun) and 1,500 member reseller network. Arrow worked with Click Commerce to build and implement Information Support Services, a centralized, easy-to-use platform that creates a company-wide view for Arrow to manage multiple channels and business units. It also enables OEM and reseller partners to work together on customer solutions.
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With product lifecycles accelerating and pricing pressures increasing, organizations must focus on delivering unique customer experiences to differentiate themselves from the competition. Customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning technologies play a critical enabling role.
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When The Clientele Group of Epicor Software Corporation was faced with scalability and performance limits in their CRM software, they redesigned their application around the Microsoft® .NET Framework. A server architecture based on SQL Server™ 2000 and XML Web services removes their scalability limits, and supports multiple client applications. A smart client built with Windows® Forms gives customer support personnel a responsive application that is easy to deploy and update. A Web portal built with ASP.NET Web Forms gives authorized customers access to the same records as customer support sees internally. The new architecture can support 500 users on a single dual-CPU server, and offers many ways to scale up and out.
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SKF (AB Svenska Kullagerfabriken) was founded in 1907, with headquarters and a laboratory in Gothenburg, Sweden, and an R&D center in the Netherlands. SKF is the leading global supplier in its field, offering products, customer solutions, and services for rolling bearings, seals and specialty steel, claiming 20% of the world market share. SKF has 80 manufacturing sites employing about 40,000, and an additional 20,000 distributors in 130 countries worldwide. Revenue in 2001 reached 24.6 billion U.S. dollars, and for the first 9 months of 2002, SKF Group’s revenue showed 25.3 billion, grossing 2.04 billion.
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"By itself, the Clientele support component was great; it had consistently done exactly what we wanted it to do over a significant period of time," says Hooper. "In choosing the new solution, we knew we needed to integrate it with our support group. Our support group was using a well-tested product that was essentially problem-free. We didn’t have to call Epicor’s support team frequently to help us fix issues, it ran well and we had a lot of confidence in the product."
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Customer service is more than a department; it's an essential strategy for growing a business. No one knows that better than TruServ Corporation, an organization formed in 1997 by the merger of Cotter & Company and ServiStar Coast to Coast. Today, the $2.2 billion Chicago-based cooperative supports over 6,400 independent retailers worldwide working under identities like True Value, Taylor Rental Center and Home & Garden Showplace.
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The company had been using a homegrown software system that was limited in functionality and flexibility and hindered productivity for users company-wide. Joyce McNemar, chief technology officer for MEDEX, formed a multi-departmental task force that, after eight months of detailed evaluation, chose Epicor’s Clientele CRM.NET software over two other vendors. "Clientele offers MEDEX a very competitively-priced system that can be customized to our unique business requirements," said McNemar.
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When it comes to marketing, sales and customer service there’s no question that the second approach delivers higher value—especially in an age when companies are combating unprecedented competition while being forced to do more with less. The reality is this: choose the second example or risk being second best.
This white paper explores why actionable business intelligence is so critical in today’s business environment and how Maximizer Software’s customer relationship management (CRM) solution can be used to deliver actionable intelligence when and where it’s needed most.
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This CRM spotlight will help you understand specific ways your organization can adopt a four-phase approach based on sales effectiveness best practices that can be automated using Maximizer Software’s customer relationship management (CRM) solution to boost your bottom line and remain competitive year after year.
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Decison support systems range from simple electronic filing cabinets to complex data intensive and analytically sophisticated executive information systems. This primer provides an overview with real case studies.
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Companies everywhere have realized the need for greater efficiency and improved quality within the enterprise to stay productive and competitive in today's business environment. In order to obtain these efficiencies, corporations have turned to the successful model used by manufacturers for years known as lean, just-in-time (JIT), or kaizen. The fundamental goal of lean manufacturing includes the reduction of waste increase in productivity and improved quality. Most manufacturers launch their lean initiatives in order to maximize work flow and obtain dramatic improvements in performance.
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An enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is a significant investment for any enterprise. A functional ERP system that benefits a company should contain the following essential components: A to Z modular functionality, high value proposition, your way of doing business, leverage technology; and proof with a configured demo. Learn the basics about these components and how they can benefit your enterprise.
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With the globalization of business and the ubiquity of the Internet, virtually all media used by large businesses need to support a multilingual environment to effectively serve internal and external customers. There are a number of factors that routinely complicate business efficiency in multilingual and multinational organizations. This paper will address a number of these factors and how they can be mitigated by sophisticated IT systems and database structures.
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This workbook is designed to help firms that are in the process of investigating their need for more advanced business management and accounting software. Companies have a wide variety of potential software and system needs based on their size and industry. Determining exactly where a company stands in terms of needs and current technology will be necessary for deciding the exact approach it should take toward upgrading. This document has two types of information designed to make this process easier: interactive self-assessment tools and educational text based on IDC research covering the small and medium business (SMB) and enterprise applications markets.
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The challenges that face the manufacturing industry today are also opportunities. Manufacturing is being revolutionized in its processes, routines, and ways of doing business through the growing emergence of order driven production methods. This shift towards demand driven manufacturing is emerging in tandem with the larger currents caused by globalization. This cross industry brief focuses on the manufacturing industry from the standpoint of a demand driven IT solution and is aimed at manufacturing and distribution businesses. It describes some major market trends and issues, provides an overview of IBS supply chain solution, and offers details on how the IBS solution for demand driven manufacturing can address current needs of the industry.
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There is a real cost associated with buying and using a customer relationship management (CRM) software system. Licensing, implementation, integration, and adminstration, are just some of the challenges companies face. Learn the secrets of twenty-one experts in CRM, IT, business and management consulting on getting real value from CRM software.
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It’s all of these, plus more. Read this new white paper, Any Color Including Black: A New Guide to Demand-Driven Manufacturing, to find out how successful manufacturers—enterprises of all sizes, in industries as varied as consumer goods, industrial, life sciences, high-tech, and process manufacturing—-are using principles of demand-driven manufacturing to successfully compete again low-cost competitors.
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Food giants and technology providers work together to improve the efficiency of food processing, and storage and distribution operations, so that food products can be harvested, stored, and moved to the dinner table quickly and at less cost. This vertical brief focuses on specific issues within today's food distribution industry, explaining how IT solutions can help food distributors improve efficiency and reduce overall costs that drive up profits in an extremely competitive, low margin business.
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Customer demand has pushed customer relationship management (CRM) business solutions to higher levels of technological innovation and integration resulting in more user-friendly and cost-effective solutions that deliver measurable results to both the users and the organization. In this paper we outline how CRM has matured both technologically and as a strategic business initiative to deliver organizational CRM success supported by real ROI.
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Employee self-service (ESS) is an online technology that automates workflow, and allows both employees and managers to view and update human resources (HR) and payroll information. It often includes time-off management, and can serve as a central portal for communicating company documents and announcements. ESS disperses routine tasks back to the level of origination--employees and their managers.
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Customer relationship management (CRM) is more than just software or a set of processes--it's a business culture solidly focused on winning and keeping the right customers. A good CRM solution builds value to your business. Learn about the value of an integrated CRM suite.
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Learn how Alltech, a multinational biotechnology company, overcame poor standardization resulting from rapid international growth, to have a common view of financial and sales data, track product through the international supply chain, and cut implementation time from 3 to 4 months to 2 to 4 weeks.
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Learn how Altman Lighting Inc., a family-owned and operated international manufacturer of architectural and theater lighting fixtures overcame isolated customer information and business records by replacing their paper-based order processing system. Read how they improved productivity, centralized data, and gained real-time access to customer information and critical business information.
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Learn how PADI Americas, an international recreational company that develops and encourages public interest in scuba and snorkel diving worldwide, maximized employee knowledge and improved customer service by integrating multiple departments to promote seamless knowledge sharing, and collaboration on one platform.
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This document provides system administrators and technical professionals an overview of how Surado SCM SQL Enterprise CRM Solution can be used in a High Availability Environment. This document assumes that you are planning on installing the Surado SCM SQL System on Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 Advanced Server and will be using Microsoft's SQL Server as the primary database.
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This white paper introduces customer self-service and how using Surado Web Self-Service can increase customer satisfaction, reduce costs, and increase return on investments (ROI). The key is to understand your customer, your products and services, and the tools available to deliver service to maximize customer satisfaction and reduce customer service costs. This paper will discuss the various self-service options available, how to utilize best practices, delivery technology and how customer self-service is tied to the "big picture" of customer relationship management (CRM).
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CustomerFirst contains the service support, help desk, problem resolution, and call center functionalities of the CustomerFirst Enterprise Software Suite. It manages the flow of work through the organization from the time a request or issue is reported, until it is completed or resolved. CustomerFirst also allows you to track the history of every touch point that you have with your customer.
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SalesFirst is the sales force and marketing automation component of the CustomerFirst Enterprise Suite. SalesFirst provides functionality that manages the marketing and sales process within your organization. It also allows you to track information about your prospects and gives a complete 360-degree view of each potential and existing client.
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WebFirst enables customers to dynamically access the CustomerFirst database utilizing standard web browsers. Through a secure portal on a corporate web site, customers can perform a variety of functions related to incident reporting, as well as customer and contact information.
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Model-based architectures are conceptually superior on all fronts to conventional approaches to development. So far, they have not yet attained high levels of maturity and robustness and hence most organizations are living with conventional approaches. This paper compares the next generation of architectures, called model-based architectures, with current generation architectures from these perspectives. The extent of improvements in model-based architectures over current generations of applications is evaluated based on the above listed criteria for sustainable competitive advantage.
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What does it mean to be a world-class competitor? It means being successful in your market against any competition—regardless of size or country of origin. It means matching or exceeding any competitor on quality, lead time, cost, customer service, and innovation. It means picking your battles—competing on the terms dictated by you. But how do you get there?
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Without strong system controls in place, job shop and make-to-order manufacturing environments can be extremely challenging. So where do you begin to make improvements? The Sales and Profit Growth Strategies report will help you evaluate your business and make that determination.
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When a company is selecting any piece of enterprise software, there is invariably someone assigned to "look under the hood" and evaluate the application's architecture. While this is a critical step, many organizations do not have a clear understanding of how their short and long term application needs can be directly impacted by an underlying architecture. This white paper serves as the foundation for understanding how Clientele's next generation application architecture shatters traditional enterprise software boundaries.
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Boeing Autometric required a system that not only provided a singe view of its customers; it also needed to be flexible. The company did not want software that would force them to change the way they did business. They needed to be able to easily tailor the application to suit their processes.
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Wilden began to investigate several customer relationship management (CRM) packages in the market including: Maximizer Enterprise, PeopleSoft, Siebel, Pivotal and Oracle. The Company knew it would require some customization assistance from the vendor but it also wanted the capability to manage the new technology in-house. Maximizer Enterprise was the only one that was flexible enough-it fit their sales channel model and had the knowledgeable Professional Services staff that the Wilden team felt comfortable with - along with the overall package to fit within their budget.
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Since they implemented Maximizer Enterprise, the sales people have found it easy to learn, and the marketing department has taken advantage of its flexibility to customize it to their business and marketing needs. Having recently upgraded to Maximizer Enterprise 7 with the implementation, installation, and training services of Certified Multiactive Business Partner, Wintec Group, the users and administrators have seen increased reliability and speed in the daily use of its customer database.
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Stockgroup includes accountability, integrity and open communication, within its set of core values, to achieve its objectives of being a financially strong and profitable business. That's why when it came time to replacing its CRM system to better manage accounts, schedules, sales forecasting, and marketing, Stockgroup selected Maximizer Enterprise as its CRM solution of choice - an easier to use system with a lower TCO.
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Before purchasing a complete CRM solution, StemCell's, sales and marketing managers met with the sales team and support staff to discuss their requirements and to gain insight into what information each department needed, how they wanted to work, and how their working styles impacted each others departments.
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With the assistance of a Maximizer Business Partner, Senior Flexonics deployed Maximizer Enterprise to its global sales force to manage the distribution of leads and collaboration on complex sales opportunities. Today, it collectively manages over 2500 ongoing opportunities at a time, each with a sales cycle of three hours to five years, amongst four or more sales districts and over 300 different sales teams.
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As one of the largest resource suppliers for Christian churches and bookstores in the United States, LifeWay Christian Resources needed a comprehensive corporate solution to facilitate effective internal communication and to better serve its vast and growing customer base. It needed a solution that was advanced and powerful, yet user-friendly and cost effective that would track customer interactions, analyze sales, track orders, store competitive data and deliver geo-demographic customer information. It needed to establish a customer-centric strategy built upon CRM's (Customer Relationship Management) premises for its call centers.
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With the help of On-Line CRM Solutions, a Certified Maximizer Business Partner, GrowthWorks upgraded from Maximizer to Maximizer Enterprise 7 running on a SQL database. This enabled the company to integrate the customer database with the transaction database.
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Cash Converters was utilizing an earlier version of Maximizer to track contact details, basic phone notes and other communications. With its small team of sales, marketing, accounting and operations managers that managed the day-to-day operations of the business and its franchisees, the team began working out of the office more and more often. To assist them with this, they needed a solution that worked seamlessly with their business structure and processes, allowing them to work with updated information whether they were working at the office, at home or on the road.
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Learn how Fabcon, once a small manufacturing company and now the premier sheet metal shop in Southern California catapulted its 55 percent on-time rate in 1993 to a 97 percent on-time rate a year later through business vertical integration and the help of Global Shop Solutions enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions.
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As Wiltshire Precision has grown, it has faced challenges common to manufacturers—controlling costs, constant efficiency improvements, competition from abroad, and expansion of customer base and shop space. After implementing an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, Wiltshire’s newly automated processes resulted in greater efficiency—and a near-perfect quality rating. Discover the ERP solution’s other benefits.
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Learn how Cubic Defense Systems improved their overall product quality and government compliance, while conforming to support mission-critical processes by using Cincom's integrated quality management solution.
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