In a lean economy, your customers are more willing to shop around (and even check with your competitors) for the best value and service available. That’s why it’s more important than ever to streamline your customer service processes, keep your customers happy, and focus on customer retention and loyalty as a means of protecting revenue.
Let’s take a look at how Sage CRM can help.
A Full Set of Tools At Your SERVICE
What tools do your service and support personnel rely on to take care of your customers AFTER the initial sale? If your answer includes ‘a collection of spreadsheets and stacks of hand-written follow up reminders’, then Sage CRM Customer Care might be worth a look.
With customizable Workflow capabilities, you can build Sage CRM around your specific customer service processes. That way, you’ll ensure that service personnel are following a standard protocol to deliver a satisfying and consistent customer service experience. Plus, automated workflow Triggers and Alerts will ensure that customer inquiries are followed up with in a timely manner and nothing falls through the cracks.
With all customer queries, support activities, and service requests recorded in Sage CRM, you’ll begin to build a Knowledgebase of frequently-asked questions and resolutions so your service reps can quickly resolve common issues.
Better Cross-Sell Opportunities
Research shows that it costs five times as much to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one. Therefore, identifying opportunities that exist within your current customer base can be a cost-effective way of increasing sales revenue. With all of your customer information consolidated in Sage CRM, your sales and service reps will have a complete view of all customer interactions and be in a better position to cross-sell complementary products and services.
Marketing AFTER the Initial Sale
For many businesses, customer relationships are considerably more profitable after the initial sale. Once a relationship has been established, cross-selling complementary products or add-on services is likely easier and probably requires less discounting. That’s why marketing programs that are aimed at current customers can play an important role in building customer loyalty and a mutually beneficial relationship.
The Sage CRM Marketing component provides powerful tools to plan, execute, and evaluate the performance of customer marketing campaigns. You can segregate campaigns aimed at existing customers as well as track and measure every phase of the campaign from initial promo to closed sale.
Sage CRM also allows you to build a detailed profile of customers over the course of your relationship to ensure that marketing communication is relevant based on previous purchases, product preferences, and other important characteristics of your existing relationship.
Tools That Help You Stay in Touch
While some companies make contact with customers only when they’re placing an order, the best-performing companies take a more customer-focused approach. They stay in touch often and realize that relationships are strengthened through a consistent presence and ongoing dialogue.
Using Sage CRM to schedule reminders, calls, meetings, and send holiday greetings can help blur the line between relationships that are “strictly business” and those that are more personal and ultimately foster stronger customer loyalty.
Access To Customer Account Data
All of that customer data within Sage CRM is rendered useless if it isn’t easily accessible by the people that are the face of your business – customer service reps and sales personnel.
With Sage CRM Mobile, your staff will have information they need in the palms of their hands to resolve customer issues quickly, place orders efficiently, and keep customers happy – whether in the office or on the road.
And because Sage CRM shares data with your Sage 100 ERP accounting system, sales & customer service staff can access information that’s typically stored in the “back office” – like shipping status, accounts receivable, and credit limits. They remain in the familiar Sage CRM interface and avoid “waiting in line” for an answer from accounting or fumbling around in the accounting system.
Technology That Strengthens Relationships
While you may be using Sage CRM to track leads and manage communication related to new business, don’t forget to leverage the same technology to strengthen existing customer relationships and turn customer loyalty into a competitive and profitable advantage!
Analyze and Improve Customer Support
Insightful reports are an important part of effective business management… and the customer service department is no exception. Sage CRM provides analytics and dashboards to help you assess important metrics like support volume, average time to resolution, and case escalation which is particularly helpful if you offer technical support or run a call center. Enabling management to quantify the performance of service reps can be an important part of maximizing efficiency and getting better results with fewer resources.
Customer Communication and Response
No doubt your accounting department gets regular requests from sales and customer service regarding the status of customer orders, shipments, credit limits, payments, and endless other accounting and operational inquiries.
When Sage CRM is integrated with Sage 100 ERP, all of your company data – from sales to accounting – is centralized in one single database. That means everyone in your company (using ERP or CRM) has access to customer information and can get answers quickly by performing their own inquiries.
Not only does your accounting staff benefit from fewer daily interruptions, but your customers get a faster and more direct response from the people they deal with
More Than Just Raw Data
As a sales executive, you may have 20, 200, or 2,000 potential interactions that you can choose to invest time in. But how do you determine which interactions hold potential for the highest return?
The ability to draw meaningful insight in the context of previous patterns of communication can help sales professionals better allocate their time and maximize revenue for your organization. That’s where the difference between Leads and Contacts comes into play … and where CRM software can help make that important distinction.
For some organizations, providing a list of contacts with demographic information (i.e. raw data from InfoUSA) might be a decent enough start given where they are today. In some cases, providing a set of tools that helps to manage interactions with those contacts would be a step up.
But what if your sales reps could track all previous interactions those contacts had with your organization over time?
- Visits to your website
- Responses to marketing offers
- Previous purchases
- Customer service requests
- Details of human interactions in digital (email and social media) and real life channels (face-to-face meetings)
To extend the vision, what if you could benchmark these insights against what you’ve discovered about the typical journey your customers take during their purchasing cycle? You’d have the potential to know exactly where they are in the process and what they need in order to move to the next stage.
Providing visibility to where the greatest opportunity for success lies is like gold for your sales teams.
That’s where CRM software comes in, surfacing a short list of qualified leads that are ready to buy versus a generic sea of contacts… an important distinction that can mean the difference between sales success and spinning your wheels.
Contact DWD to learn how CRM can help your sales team stay focused and produce more revenue.
