For UMC, a century-old construction firm known for taking on some of the most complex, ambitious, and challenging projects in the business, from Seattle’s Space Needle to Amazon’s Spheres, there’s no settling for “good enough.”

That standard applies not only to the quality, aesthetics, and safety of the built environments UMC creates, but also to the systems its people use to manage and grow the business. And it’s why UMC’s leadership decided it was time to move away from the clumsy, outdated, and ill-fitting generic customer relationship management (CRM) product the firm had been using.

“It was far from an elegant solution for a lot of the things we were trying to do,” Bob Frey, UMC’s Director of Sales and Operations, says of the big-brand, off-the-shelf CRM product the firm had been using for about six years.

Having grown weary of the system’s high cost, unreliable overlayed customizations, disjointed user experience, data blind spots and spotty vendor support, sticking with the legacy CRM product became untenable for the firm. Frey and the UMC executive team needed a CRM system designed specifically for construction firms that would reinforce the firm’s culture of innovation and collaboration.

The CRM Solution

A thorough due diligence process led UMC to choose Unanet CRM by Cosential, a solution purpose-built for architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) firms, and one that is highly rated by users across the AEC industry. “I was familiar with Unanet,” says Frey, “I’d seen it work really well for other companies in our business.”

Unanet CRM emerged as the best choice for UMC because:

• As a system purpose-built for construction firms, it’s well-suited to rapid implementations. Following the selection of Unanet CRM, it took a mere four months to get the system integrated and fully operational.
• It’s a fully integrated CRM, providing a single, stable environment and data resource for the entire enterprise and its multiple divisions, without cumbersome third-party overlays.
• It provides all the capabilities and visibility that marketing, sales, and business development teams need to work efficiently, from contact management to proposal generation to pipeline visibility and beyond.
• It offers the strong reporting, forecasting and account planning tools and capabilities that UMC sought, as well as a products module that enables quoting for the firm’s reality-capture and manufactured products directly from the CRM.
• It’s dashboard-driven to cater to a visually oriented business, enabling people throughout the firm to measure performance, identify trends and draw insight from key data in real time.

Benefits

UMC quickly saw benefits for bottom and top lines of its business, including:

• At least one fewer full-time employee – no longer did the firm require a full-time employee to maintain its CRM system, nor did it need to invest in a third-party overlay to make its CRM work
• Improved communication, collaboration, and inter-departmental support – thanks to modern automation features for proposal creation, résumé trafficking, and more
• 30% growth of the firm’s contact base
• Zero reporting lag time for dashboard-based reporting (vs. the usual 24-hour wait with the old CRM)
• Organization-wide alignment

“People are finding uses for CRM that they could never imagine before,” Frey said. “Every bit of information that people need to know about what’s happening within the company is there, at their fingertips, in Unanet CRM.”

Keys To Success

Frey offers the following suggestions to guide AEC firms that may be considering a similar CRM upgrade:

1. Look for a CRM solution you can roll out and use enterprise-wide. Don’t settle for piecemeal products — a contact-management product here, an e-mail marketing product there — when an integrated end-to-end solution could well be your best, most cost-effective option. A patchwork approach could drag a firm right back to the inefficient, siloed and opaque world it sought to escape.

2. Seek a purpose-built solution. As UMC discovered, a CRM that’s designed specifically for AEC firms should be simpler and faster to implement, and, because it maps directly to the processes and workflows unique to project-based construction businesses, more readily embraced by users.

3. Find a true CRM partner, not just a vendor. The best CRM outcomes are those in which the provider of the solution supports its clients with service that’s as high-quality as the solution itself, that invites, listens to and acts upon customer feedback, that is attentive and accountable rather than indifferent to customers, and that provides guidance to customers long after the initial sale and implementation — in short, all the things a generic, off-the-shelf CRM product and vendor typically aren’t.

4. Prioritize tools that make it easy to measure, analyze and act in real time. Having a single source of trusted data, along with powerful tools to analyze and provide newfound visibility into that data, helps to sync marketing, sales and business development — and the entire firm — to goals, strategies and values. “It helps people stay on track, so they know where they need to head for the whole company to be successful,” Frey says.

5. Prioritize a solution that comes with robust, ready integrations. Plug-ins and prebuilt integrations between Unanet CRM and other key software systems on which the firm relies are enabling UMC to build an entire integrated digital ecosystem.

More than 3,700 project-driven organizations depend on Unanet to turn their information into actionable insights, drive better decision-making, and accelerate business growth. For more information, visit www.unanet.com.

When Calabrio surveyed over 300 contact centre professionals, the most effective way to improve employee engagement moving forward was quoted to be giving people the ‘right tools and tech’. This comes as no surprise as agents regularly contend with 20+ different desktop applications to serve customers. In today’s connected world “my system is running slow today” is no longer a tenable excuse to hide the Alt-Tabbing that agents do to cycle through open, disconnected applications. Simplifying and boosting tech efficiency is fast becoming a top priority for customer service organisations, both for agents and operational users alike whilst consumer expectations continue to rise.

Aiming for a single pane of glass

What agents, supervisors and other operational team members want is a common, consistent experience using one interface for all their desktop applications. Think of a “single pane of glass” where complete customer journeys are reflected, from the channels used, to previous purchases and past conversations. So far, this single view has proven elusive as the contact centre provider ecosystem is entrenched in a battle for the desktop.

Competition v co-opetition

The reality is, currently, no one provider can be all things to all contact centres.  For example, traditional telecommunications companies are still struggling to throw off the shackles of their voice only heritage to transition to an omnichannel world. Contact Centre as-a-Service (CCaaS) players might have the specialist cloud contact centre expertise and Unified Communications (UCaaS) players additionally offer voice functionality, but both lack the CRM capabilities necessary to fully understand the customer. On the other hand, many larger organisations opt for CRM as their go to desktop technology platform. However, CRM specialists like Calabrio’s partner Salesforce, while able to support modern omnichannel interactions, also require voice and contact centre know-how to bring all that customer context to life, hence the strategic partnership Salesforce recently formed with Amazon Connect. It’s a complex business with many silos but no outright winners. That’s where co-opetition comes to the fore.

Close the gap with all-round intelligence

The first step towards closing the gap is to forge a spirit of co-opetition rather than overt competition, encouraging each technology provider to embrace and integrate with the best of their partners, or even competitors, to improve their own value proposition. The next critical step lies in capturing data from inside and outside the contact centre and then applying it intelligently in three key areas:

• Customer Experience Intelligence – for CRM, CCaas and UCaaS providers, understanding what actually happens across 100% of customer interactions is like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack.  Achieving full customer experience (CX) Intelligence comes from tapping into unfiltered Voice of the Customer (VoC) conversations using evaluation tools and/or the latest analytics. CRM and CCaaS solutions cannot do this alone, creating a void that needs to be filled. The secret to closing this gap is to work with vendors that can truly help to tap into VOC data, not just a subset of it, as can happen when only surveys are used.

AI-driven quality management (QM) and speech analytics help identify the one word that keeps cropping up in customer conversations to flag up issues, categorise calls and then prioritise them. Meanwhile, agents receive the near real-time constructive feedback they require to deliver high quality customer conversations, whatever the channel.

When demand for online orders soared as the result of the pandemic, telephone, Web Chat and email volumes rocketed at one of the UK’s leading health food retailers. They adopted Calabrio QM analytics to accelerate customer contact resolution and restore service levels.  Knowing where the problems lay and what customers were saying was integral to dealing with levels of demand not experienced before.

• Employee Intelligence – at Calabrio, we understand that good customer experiences start with good employee engagement, especially when that engagement is with the youngest demographic, Generation Z. This is the first generation of digital natives to expect speed and flexibility from their mobile-enabled devices. Powerful self-service resource planning capabilities, when integrated into a CRM, CCaas or UCaaS environment, allow agents to state their preferred schedules, move their break times, trade shifts, request time off and overtime, leading to lower sickness and attrition rates among employees and therefore happier customers.

• Digital Intelligence – when organisations start planning a new contact centre or CRM implementation, they stimulate digital and business transformation by introducing new channels to support their customers.  However, new multichannel environments inevitably lead to more complex workforce planning needs, in particular when deploying the people required to meet customers across new channels. The transformation process is at risk if vital intelligence relating to workforce management (WFM) data and people management falls through the cracks.

Adopting a single view desktop strategy and avoiding siloed products, agents and contact centre leaders can see critical data via a “single pane of glass”.  Therefore, consider an all-in-one WFM solution that seamlessly integrates with voice and CRM but also includes call recording, quality management (QM), interaction analytics and business intelligence.  Applying the latest analytics tools also helps contact centres understand the “why” behind the “what” of operations to identify root causes of operational issues and drive meaningful changes to the business.

Smarter approach to Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) leads the way

The question is, are you looking in the right direction to find the “missing link” between CRM and CCaaS solutions? At Calabrio, we are continually developing new ways to engage with all parts of the contact centre ecosystem to enhance the agent and customer experience.  To find out more about WEM and how Calabrio is adding value to Salesforce’s Service Cloud solution, including new QM connectivity, visit Calabrio.com.

About the Author

Richard Pinnington is Director Of Strategic Channel Partnerships at Calabrio.

About Calabrio

Calabrio is the customer experience intelligence company that empowers organisations to enrich human interactions. The scalability of our cloud platform allows for quick deployment of remote work models—and it gives our customers precise control over both operating costs and customer satisfaction levels. Our AI-driven analytics tools make it easy for contact centres to uncover customer sentiment and share compelling insights with other parts of the organisation. Customers choose Calabrio because we understand their needs and provide a best-in-class experience, from implementation to ongoing support. Find more at calabrio.com and follow @Calabrio on Twitter.

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. CRM software provides users with access to a range of technologies that track and report metrics related to customer interactions, sales, productivity, and much more.

Companies that do not leverage CRM software may struggle to produce accurate data on the state of interactions between the brand and the customer base.

We will now look at some of the main advantages of using CRM software – see CRM systems such as this for extra information.

Understand Your Consumer Base

This sounds like a basic place to start. However, it’s important to understand that supply cannot reliably and consistently meet demand where the demand is unknown.

CRM software is a communication tool that acts as a peek behind the curtain at what your audience wants, needs, and expects from your brand. How can the software help you to increase levels of engagement? CRM software stores details such as email, home address, phone number, social media account information, and even shared business links.

Sales and retention teams can use this information in building a better picture of who is engaging with your business and what motivates them.

Customer Retention

CRM software can help you to understand what drives your audience to interact with your products or services. Where you understand the key aspects of promise-fulfilment that excites your audience and keeps them coming back for more, you can reasonably direct your resources towards ensuring audience expectations are met.

CRM technology also allows you to track which customers have not engaged with your brand recently, which may suggest your message has excluded certain sections of your audience. Reaching out to customers to extend your gratitude for their ongoing support can help consumers to feel appreciated and can help drive loyalty.

Future Proofing Your Offering

CRM software can help you to predict shifts in the market. Where your consumer base is disengaging with your products or services, a careful analysis of how your brand is failing to meet consumer needs can help to outline solutions. By monitoring buying habits across key demographics, you can maintain the customer experience and grow with your audience.

Instantly Connect with Groups

CRM technologies include digital communication templates. This means that you can expedite your communications with large groups of customers. For example, you may wish to communicate via email templates, letters (or newsletters), invitations, or by providing online access to relevant documents.

These communications can also be sent out automatically as a response to receiving an email. A rapid response to let your customers know that their message has been received and the subsequent actions will be taken in a timely manner can help you to maintain high levels of customer satisfaction.

Lastly … Data Protection

Data protection and GDPR are big news. CRM software can help you to stay on top of your customer obligations regarding the secure storage of sensitive data. For example, CRM software can quickly help you to gain permissions over customer data usage and storage. The alternative is to manually and painstakingly gain permissions.

CRM software is the medium through which you can build connections with your existing customers and prospects in a personalized manner rather than the old and traditional contact management practices.

Businesses nowadays can’t ignore the benefits of the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software altogether.

What is Customer Relationship Management software?

A database in which the information regarding customers like contact information, records of customer interaction, and transactions data are stored to help the sales and marketing team of the company to acquire as well as retain more customers. Such software is known as CRM software.

CRM can assist you with optimizing the sales processes, customer services, marketing campaigns, and technical support as it tracks the leads and customer interactions. You can anticipate your targeted customer behavior and their needs using CRM software and then work to meet them.

Customer service: A part of CRM Enterprise software

Many of you may be wondering about whether CRM is a part of enterprise software applications or is it an entirely different product from it? Well, the answer is: it can be both.

CRM can work on both fronts. As a unique software, it comes with a package of sales force automation, marketing automation, and customer support. Meanwhile, as a part of enterprise software,

CRM is one of the five pillars of ERP whereas the other four are financial accounting, supply chain management or distribution, manufacturing, and human resources respectively according to an expert from an Enterprise Application Development Company TatvaSoft.com.

CRM is a system that helps you develop and deploy a strategy to manage your interaction with all past, present, and future customers. From potential market identification to customer loyalty retention, CRM covers all types of customer-oriented activities. It also includes information generation and distribution as well as data capture, and analysis. CRM is a technology-enabled system. Though CRM has its own database, it can integrate with other channels of interactions like an ERP system very easily.

Advantages of CRM Software for Better Customer Service and sales

Customer support through personalized communication

As per the recent survey, approximately 41% of the customer churning happens because of poor personalization. However, CRM allows you to personalize each new interaction with your customers as it puts all the information at your team’s disposal.

For example, your team can pull up the records of the previous interaction with the customer immediately when they contact your team. Now, suppose the customer had a history of poor experience with your brand, then acknowledging that your team can act or take decisions accordingly to avoid potential customer churn. Also, if the case is exactly the opposite, then your team can track their purchases and reward the customer for their loyalty.

Strengthening Relation with Customer

When customers start trusting the company, only then customer relations can be built. CRM system can help the companies with that. CRM software has a database that stores customer information which companies can easily use at relevant times. And there can be many interactions that might take place between the customer and the company. So, it is recommended to keep the log of each interaction for any future references.

It can happen that certain detail or a piece of data that might seem small at the time. But can turn out to be critical to find a solution in the future. This is beneficial for the customers as well as for the service teams too that work on long-term support cases. Therefore, it is necessary that you store the customer data in a more organized manner, which your support team can easily access whenever and wherever they want to. Such practice strengthens customer relations over time.

 Sending out Automated Business Mails to Customers

One of the top advantages of CRM tools is Automation. It is used by companies to streamline their business processes. One such function is communication. Nowadays, business owners are streamlining their communication with clients through automated responses.

Getting an instant confirmation for their request makes customers happy. But that is just one of the major use of automated responses, there are more of it. You can also add links to request forms, price lists, FAQ pages, wikis, and other relevant documents with the help of canned email responses. You can also create different canned responses for each departmental email address.

This will not only automatically sort the basic questions from customers to employees, but it can also effectively reduce them. Sometimes companies spend so much time generating resources and documents that no one uses, but automated emails are an effective way to direct the audience to the resources you have already created before.

Automating Customer related Tasks

I don’t have to explain to business owners how converting leads into a customer is a challenging process. You need to address their needs properly, you need to sort the onboard issues, you need to create and send reports. Every task needs to be executed with the utmost excellence and a touch of personalization. Though all these tasks are necessary for the business, not all of them are an effective use of your time.

You can get your hands on a powerful CRM solution designed to automate those mundane everyday tasks. Automating such tasks will not only save your time but will also improve the efficiency of the work while allowing you and your team to focus on more important business activities.

Enhance Customer Experience

CRM can help you improve the customer satisfaction rate of your company. because the CRM tool is basically a roadmap to the customer’s specific requirements. Reps can easily analyze past engagements as every interaction is stored in a centralized software to discover the best route to approach a customer. This method can be proved very effective for high-value clients.

Studies show that the top 10% of customers that are most loyal to your brand, spend on an average three times more than an average customer spends. This might look like a good thing but the businesses are also under pressure in such conditions where they have to satisfy their customers’ needs before they take their business anywhere else.

CRM offers data and resources that are helpful for your business to create positive customer interactions. Businesses can easily optimize their data management system and enhance the customer experience if it uses CRM to their advantage as discussed above.

Final words: what do you need: Enterprise CRM software or Standard CRM software?

What is better? Enterprise CRM software or Standard CRM software?

Well, the answer lies within the size of your company and its requirements. Also, your vision for the near future.

If you are the owner of an SME business that doesn’t have any plan of entering into the global market domain anytime soon then a standard CRM software is the best solution for you. Though it has a lower price on its price tag, it can effectively increase sales for your small organization.

On the other hand, if you own a company that manages different departments with different teams that regularly interact with the customers but work with the same information, then enterprise CRM solutions is the perfect pick for you. Though this option is expensive, eventually it will pay for itself by enhancing your customer services and boosting your sales.

When deciding on a CRM application—or for just about any software application—many companies consider “service” to be synonymous with “ease of use”. 

C-suite members often fail to consider an organization’s culture, and how this would impact their ability to embrace a tools UX and service. If your team isn’t on board, they’re not going to stick with that solution very long.

Getting Your Team on Board – the Challenges

Technology is not the hardest thing to change within a company—it is the human beings who need to shift behavior in navigating new prospects, tools and customers. That is why a company must embed transparency into its DNA.

When selecting a CRM, look around and see how other customers and company teams respond to it. How did management get their team’s buy in? In this case, how excited is your team is about the tool? Hold staff meetings to discuss the pros and cons of a tool. The more you will be paying for that CRM solution, the more important it is to look for detailed feedback on it.

Your employee’s recommendations are your company currency. They follow a company and its products everywhere they show up – long term team members switch jobs. Recommendations are either gained through great service or lost through bad service.  For that reason, it is incredibly important to train that service culture into every aspect of your company, especially those that touch its prospects and customers in any way.

Transparency

Another vital aspect—related to cost as well—is transparency. Share with your team exactly what they’re getting, what features and service will be provided for the money paid. Hold company training seminars. This is another very crucial factor when it comes to our digital world, because a reputation for non-transparency will spread rapidly, and potential customers will soon know about it. People sometimes are, but often they’re not, capable of putting themselves in the shoes of their customers. That is why they must be trained, and management must constantly put attention on it.

Of course, this service culture begins at the top; management must set the ultimate example. It’s like parents setting the example for children—if the parents set the example, the children will follow. Management are the “parents” in the company.

The Service Culture

Service and technology are very much two different things. An application can have the best possible technology, usability, and functionality in place and running smoothly. But unlike technology, service is something that is delivered to the customer. It’s not something that the customer is using, it’s something that the customer experiences.

When it comes to CRM, an important question is: should the support ticket system be part of the CRM application?

Service—along with functionality and usability–is related directly to cost. When a company provides provide great service, people will generally pay for it. Just think back to the last time you were in a restaurant: if you had a great experience, you left a good tip. If not, you most likely didn’t.

Cost correlates with what the customer receives. This means the technology, usability, functionality, and how customers are treated, which is service.

Simplicity

Cybernetics, the science of simplicity around UX, is a topic widely spoken about in CRM tools today. To make it possible for users and potential users to easily understand the CRM application as well as the charges. Simplicity certainly makes for transparency, and for cost-effectiveness.

A great quote along these lines, attributed to Albert Einstein, is, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

About the Author

Nikolaus Kimla is the CEO of Pipeliner CRM and the author of over 100 ebooks, articles and white papers addressing the subjects of sales management, CRM and business.

He has founded and run several software companies. He and his company uptime iTechnology are the developers of World-Check, a risk intelligence platform eventually sold to Thomson Reuters for $520 million. He is currently the founder and CEO of Pipeliner Sales, Inc., developer and publisher of Pipeliner CRM, the first CRM application aimed squarely at actually empowering salespeople.

The company also found that a quarter of SMEs have yet to be persuaded of the benefits of CRM and have not yet bought any system at all.

The research found that the main reason for changing supplier was a poor fit in terms of the business requirements – 48% of respondents thought this was a problem.

“The responses show that there is much to consider when looking at CRM including business strategy, technology, budget, change management etc,” explains John Cheney, CEO and Founder of Workbooks. “A CRM project requires a focus on technology, people and processes; only when all three are in harmony will you truly maximise your ROI.”

Related to this were the 38% of businesses who thought that their chosen CRM system was not able to scale according to their needs.  The issue of cost was a less significant factor with 28% of respondents having changed CRM software because the cost was too high, the same proportion that switched because their choice didn’t integrate with other business applications.

There were some concerns around cost, however. The Workbooks survey revealed that SMEs found it difficult to ascertain the return on investment of their CRM applications: three-quarters of British companies surveyed found it impossible to quantify the value of their CRM investment. US companies found it even more difficult: 85% of them couldn’t accurately calculate their ROI.

“Very often companies find it difficult to measure ROI as CRM allows them to do things they never could before. There is no baseline to compare activity against,” explains John Cheney. “Companies can see it has made the business better but find it difficult to quantify. While it is great that so many SMEs appreciate what CRM brings to their organisations, there does need to be more work to ascertain this value.”

There was widespread appreciation of the benefits of CRM: even among those companies who had not chosen a CRM system at all, 46% said that they intended to at some time in the future. Reasons for not adopting CRM included the belief that it would not be an effective way to manage customers and failure to provide value for money.

Other key findings include:

• The primary motivation to implement a CRM platform remains improving productivity of customer facing staff (53%). This is followed by attracting and acquiring new customers (49%), keeping and retaining existing ones (47%), and improving customer experience (42%).
• Features and functions and the ability to integrate with other applications remain the most important considerations by far at 71% and 58% respectively. Integrating with a marketing automation platform remains a key concern (84%), followed by integrating with the company website for lead generation purposes (55%), while 44% expected it to integrate with their quotes, finance, accounting, and order processing systems.
• Key functionalities required are contact management (75%) and pipeline management and forecasting (57%). Analytics and reporting come in third position at 43%. Artificial Intelligence functionality was mentioned by only 4% of respondents.
• Data migration is the number one obstacle to CRM implementation (44%). Other concerns such as the availability of resources to get things done alongside the day job, or resistance to change among users were mentioned. Only one in ten pointed to a lack of buy-in from leadership or an inability to see the value of CRM as obstacles to overcome.
• Nearly half of all UK respondents said that GDPR has had an impact in the way they deal with data. Some have introduced procedures and policies around data collection, data ageing and data removal, security measures and so on. Others have set up secure portals to communicate with customers and partners or have moved to an opt-in model. Staff have also been trained around the proper handling of data. Many have leveraged their CRM platform to underpin their GDPR processes and procedures and track the required compliance information.

“Supercharging the adoption of CRM is an important element to the digital transformation of all industries and sectors and key to increasing overall productivity and economic growth across the UK. The good news is there continues to be a steady flow of organisations beginning to recognise the value of CRM. However, many that still have not. We must do more to promote the positive benefits and opportunities of CRM technologies while also continuing to identify and overcome remaining concerns and barriers to adoption, such as data migration and user resistance.” concludes Katherine Mayes,  Programme Manager, TECHUK.

A webinar to discuss the findings of the report will take place at 11am on November 21st, 2019. For more information and to register, click here.

To download the State of the CRM Market 2019 Report, click here.

About Workbooks

Workbooks offers growing companies a SaaS platform to run their business and engage effectively with their customers – at an affordable price. Its core CRM services extend beyond sales, marketing and customer services to include powerful marketing automation, order management and fulfilment, invoicing and supplier management functionalities – at a price which is typically 50-70% less than the alternatives.

Workbooks unites the entire organisation around data and processes, promoting teamwork and collaboration. It provides a single 360-degree view of customers and the information is accessible anytime, anywhere. Productivity and revenue increase, operations are streamlined, insightful decisions made, and the business is better equipped to differentiate against its competition.

For more information, visit www.workbooks.com

Building a bespoke CRM for your business is a complex undertaking. There are often many requirements to meet and short-term customer engagement usually takes precedence. Yet, what about the long-term possibilities? Have reporting needs been fully explored?

When a custom CRM is well mapped out from the outset, it should provide added value for customers on delivery and well into the future.

This may seem like the sole responsibility of your chosen software development company, but all development is a two way process and if future reporting capabilities are overlooked in the planning phase of development, you may be missing out on future opportunities to add even more value to your customers.

The more you know about your customers, the more you can tailor your offerings and give them what they are looking for. So, perhaps think about your CRM as THE place to truly understand AND engage with your customers.

Choosing developers

There are many to choose from, so it’s important to spend time researching and selecting a professional and experienced software development company.

Spend time looking at their reviews, case studies, previous clients and ideally undertake a tendering process.

How development can restrict future reporting

One of the most common mistakes is the overuse of free text fields i.e. fields where the information is not selected from a pre-set drop-down list of options. Without fixed data fields, reporting on this information will be near impossible!

Another area might be the communications you send out. If you would like to know if a customer took any action as a result of the communication, you will need functionality in place to log this on their customer record.

Ultimately, if your CRM does not contain the information you are looking to report on…you won’t be able to!

Make time for data mapping

Whilst you may have considered reporting to some degree, it is extremely useful to give this area a considerable amount of attention. Don’t just think about what you need now, think about what would be useful to know in the future, for example, customer trends.

Look at this through all aspects of the business – from sales and marketing through to product or service development.

Some questions to explore might include:

• What information would be useful to know about your customers? E.g. Their location – country, town, postcode or perhaps all of the above? Their age? Their profession? How they found/heard about your business?
• How impactful is a certain feature? E.g. How often they click on your special offer communications?
• How popular is a certain product or service?
• What trends would be useful to see over time? E.g. how often customers buy from you? Why they choose to not renew/buy somewhere else (depending on the products and services you offer)? How much they spend?

Standard Reporting Requirements

One of the very basic things you will want to be able to do is analyse data based on a timeframe – by year, month, days of the week and maybe even times of the day. The best way to cover all bases here to go as broad as possible. When it comes to reporting, it is better to have too many possibilities than too little!

The value of reporting

When you can analyse specific customer data over a period of time, you can adapt and change how you communicate, what you offer and how you develop your business.

Let’s face it, the current business climate is fast moving, so it has become essential for businesses to stay ahead of the game and pre-empt change rather than just respond to it. Data is at the very core of how flexible and dynamic your business can be in the face of change.

For example, if you see overtime your customer demographic is changing, you can adjust your approach and provide more relevant information, communications, products or services to ensure they receive what is most useful to them.

Whilst it is not a complete disaster if you miss a field out, it does make it quite messy to add/change fields later, especially if they are complex and linked to or restricted by other functions. Not to mention the additional time and money you will need to invest.

It is simply much easier to do the necessary planning work from the beginning and thoroughly map out your future requirements.

The Forrester Report ‘The Insights-Driven Business’ forecasts that insight-driven businesses will grow from $333 billion in revenue in 2015 to $1.2 trillion in 2020 — making up an astonishing compound annual growth rate between 27% and 40%.

With global growth being less than 4%, that means insight organisations are projected to grow at least eight times faster than global GDP. So, where will this increase come from?

If your business is not growing in double digits, then your competitor’s growth is coming from you. True insight organisations are building market share by taking customers away from un-insightful, non-listening, non-responsive businesses. Google, Tesla Motors, Netflix, Nando’s and Bauer Media are all building brands around their fans. Customer closeness doesn’t happen accidentally.

At Vision Critical we help over 600 global brands to turn their customers into the most powerful innovators, product designers, marketers and influential buyers. We help organisations in media, retail, CPG and beyond to build vibrant customer insight communities.

A great example is Bauer Media Group, which manages a global portfolio of more than 600 magazines including Heat and Empire, over 400 digital products and 50 radio and TV stations including Kiss and Magic. The group has a 7,500-strong customer insight community called ’The Inside Panel’, which helps generate a better understanding of consumers, creating more appealing advertising and content.

For example, on a recent film pitch, Bauer found out from their community members that Kiss radio listeners were most educated on the background of the film and so found detailed information more interesting. In comparison, the Heat audience were more excited about the female lead. The result was Bauer has been able to recommend tailored creative messages to each audience to maximise the impact of the film. The Inside Panel has been used frequently to formulate film pitches since re-launch and has equated to over £250,000 worth of business in the last seven months.

From the features you would like on a new toaster, to what makes you watch a new movie or box set, to what to call your Christmas Sandwich – customers are massively powerful brand touchstones. What used to be perceived as customer survey spam can now be really engaging and help brands to grow relationships.

Vision Critical’s Customer Relationship Intelligence software improves customer relationships. Embedded within the platform is Relationship MemoryTM which enables you to uncover insight without starting from scratch every time, asking repetitive questions or even without having to ask any questions at all. The 600 insight companies using the Vision Critical platform learn more in less time, with less effort and achieve higher customer lifetime value.

The importance of understanding customer relationships

Most companies know what their customers buy, when they purchase and where. But few truly understand why those customers buy and why customers choose to have a relationship with companies to begin with.

Business leaders need to step back and more clearly define what customer relationships mean to them. A clearer understanding of customer relationships helps align the tools a company uses with the strategy it is pursuing. Defining customer relationships is a necessary step in delivering what customers truly want—and driving business results.

The Oxford dictionary offers two notable definitions of relationships:

1. “the way in which two or more people or things are connected or the state of being connected,”

2. “the way in which two or more people or groups regard and behave towards each other.” We believe that the second definition is the most useful in the context of the brand-customer relationship.

Let’s consider the metaphor of personal relationships. The value of relationships with friends and family isn’t based on the amount of money they spend when they are with you. It’s not even based on the number of interactions you have with them. A colleague or acquaintance you see every day probably isn’t more valuable than a friend or a family member you see infrequently. The value of relationships is based on something much deeper.

Does more data equal better relationships?

To keep up with rising consumer and market expectations, an ever increasing number of companies are now prioritizing becoming customer-led. The race towards customer-centricity is driving some the biggest trends in business technology. The customer relationship management (CRM) market, for instance, reached $26.3 billion in 2015—up 12 percent from the previous year. Another trend is business intelligence, which experts believe will reach $20.8 billion in market value by 2018.

One motivation for adopting these technologies is the data they provide—data that, companies hope, will help them strengthen their relationship with customers. But is the underlying assumption correct? That data is key to more meaningful customer relationships?

Possibly not. As explained above, interactions alone don’t showcase the true value of relationships.

Why then do the tools companies use to get closer to their customers focus on the number and size of transactions? Many systems, such as CRM, measure the number of transactions a customer has with a brand. Loyalty programme software does something similar – tracking how much people spend with a company.

These tools are important in understanding the customer journey, but they have a blind spot: they mistakenly assume that transactions are synonymous with relationships. But, in fact, customer relationships aren’t defined by a series of transactions. A brand’s ability to meet rising consumer expectations depends on having an authentic relationship with its customers. Without that, it becomes prohibitively expensive to deliver better products, improve customer experience or create effective campaigns.

About the Author

Simon Harrington is EMEA Managing Director at Vision Critical.

Simon leads Vision Critical’s EMEA teams, overseeing all sales, marketing and research initiatives in the region. Prior to joining the team, Simon was a customer of Vision Critical, and built one of the most successful insight community ecosystems during his time at CBS Outdoor and Exterion Media.
With over two decades of senior management experience in media, retail and sales, he is an expert in delivering real business impact and developing commercial strategies using customer intelligence. Simon is transforming our EMEA business from a customer insight business primarily targeting market research professionals to a SAAS technology business offering CMO’s a customer relationship intelligence platform designed to drive customer engagement & build deeper relationships thereby increasing lifetime customer value.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a moving target of definitions and associations. Even full time professional industry watchers have to update their standard definitions to reflect the evolution of a market that Gartner forecasts will be worth $36.7 billion in 2017.

If you think of CRM as being like a whole marketplace such as cars or fashion, it becomes easier to appreciate that it’s going to come in different shapes and sizes. Some versions are suited to the complexities of a business unit within a global enterprise, while others fit the simpler needs of an SME. Some aim to provide a balanced portfolio of functionality across sales, marketing and service, while others remain firmly rooted in the sales discipline.

However what binds all the different flavours of CRM is that the solution provides organisations with a common system of recording what is known about their customers. This might begin with capturing the initial set of interactions required to become a customer. After all, tracking sales pipelines is what CRM is probably most famous for. Then over time, it might expand to include all ongoing engagement and transactions. These might be automatically imported into the CRM to provide a single view of the customer.

As the volume and quality of customer data grows, organisations naturally become interested in the broader insights that can be generated. Common and distinct customer behaviours can be identified through analysis. This leads to fresh insight into customer needs and opportunities for relevant customer messaging.

Indeed we are now entering a new phase of automated insight as promised by artificial intelligence (AI) which is fuelling deep learning solutions. These will continuously trawl through the increasingly large datasets now captured in CRM to surface ‘next best actions’ for sales team or customers with ‘ideal’ profiles for personalised marketing.

So how do contact centres benefit from smarter CRM?

First and foremost CRM can help customers reach the best resource to deal with their query. Whenever the customers’ chosen form of contact is recognised from their existing record, a set of business rules can be triggered at the initial point of interaction.

Beyond the undoubted convenience of automatically opening the right customer record on the advisor’s screen, there are smarter things that can be done to enhance the customer experience including:

• The lifetime value of a customer is used to offer different levels of service. Customers can be prioritised during busy times as a result
• Certain situations such as outstanding payments or immanent renewals can be routed to specialist teams
• Consistently low scoring net promoter score (NPS) customers are routed to another team focussed on understanding why their customer satisfaction scores are low
• Customers are offered a ‘random act of kindness’ to acknowledge their loyalty based on how long they have been active customers

Once CRM has been used for this initial routing, it often continues to play a core role until the customer enquiry is resolved. For instance, in today’s world of customer journeys, many organisations use their CRM to standardise key stages and specific tasks in order to deliver a consistent level of service. CRM solutions that offer strong workflow and journey design capabilities are best suited for this purpose.

CRM can also be used for case management. This is useful when enquiries are complex or spread over time and all relevant information and interactions need to be grouped together and easily retrieved.

Voice analytics

Most CRM systems also offer great flexibility in terms of customisation. Both the core customer record and management reports can be tweaked to suit most data capture and analytical goals. For instance, voice of the customer data can either be housed directly in the CRM or dynamically connected if a dedicated solution is preferred. Some even allow automated capture of voice interactions into the customer record as ‘raw’ material for voice of the customer analytics. This can transform how individual customer interactions are approached. Or indeed how certain customer journeys or products are improved.

Of course simply capturing more and more customer data does not deliver value for either brand or customer. Closed loop decision making based on actionable insight has to guide all data gathering.

To state the obvious, if the data can be economically captured and used for the mutual benefit of both customer and brand then it is worth doing.

In summary, CRM provides the customer data, workflow and analytics that fine tunes contact centre engagement into relevant, effective and profitable dialogue. Great CRM and contact centre infrastructure go together and where better to integrate the two, than in the cloud?

A white paper entitled ‘How to Succeed in Delivering Proactive Customer Service’ is available to download from the Intelecom website.

About the Author

Colin Hay, VP Sales, Intelecom UK , is an experienced senior executive with a background in software, media and mobile communications. Following a distinguished eleven year career in the British Army, Colin completed an MBA. He has worked for mobile giants Motorola, 02 and Three and is an Associate Fellow at Warwick Business School.

Intelecom is a leading provider of cloud-based contact centre solutions. With approaching two decades of experience, Intelecom was one of the first to develop a cloud-based contact centre. Highly flexible and scalable, Intelecom can be adapted to accommodate one to several thousand concurrent agents using any device, in any location and integrates with multiple applications seamlessly.

Putting the customer right at the center of the organization is what successful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is all about.

Companies that invest in CRM systems can learn even more about their customers and offer more personalized products and services because they receive relevant information daily in a way that allows them to spot trends.

Implementing new business strategies always includes an element of risk but proper change management practices can reduce this dramatically. The reason many projects fail lies with poor project execution. Many companies have made the mistake of rushing headlong into CRM without a well thought out plan.

Here are 10 tips for a successful CRM implementation:

1. Have a CRM strategy

CRM initiatives launched without a strategy invariably cause pain. Do not think of CRM as a project separate from your overall business plan. CRM only works when there is clear understanding of why the organisation is doing it and how it will improve service and loyalty, cut costs or increase revenue.

2. Choose the right CRM partner

The best CRM solutions are flexible and have a full integration capability with any other systems in your business.

3. Understand the technology

Far too often CRM is considered an IT project – not a business initiative and it should not be thought of like this; but this means that the business has to understand the technology and what it can and cannot do for them. The greatest success will come from the coordinated efforts business users, IT and supplier.

4. Focus more on business processes than technology

CRM is about an organization’s internal and external business processes becoming more “customer-centric”. Understand your “customer flow”. The systems are merely the enablers, not an end in themselves.

5. Don’t try and design the perfect CRM system

The perfect CRM software that meets each and every person’s wish list simply doesn’t exist. Further, do not expect the new CRM solution to just mirror current business processes. Instead, accept that not everyone can have everything they say they want and use the new systems as an opportunity to invent and use new processes that improve customer service, reduce costs and provide better customer service.

6. Take a step-by-step approach

Go for the highest priority and highest return areas first. Take small, manageable steps not giant leaps and bring the whole organization along with you.

7. Think about the user interface and plan it carefully

For people to use the system, it must be useful to them and easy to use. Every extra field you ask the people to complete, especially mandatory ones, the greater the chance that they will enter garbage or only use the system under duress.

8. Get professional help

Especially if you haven’t implemented a CRM system before get help and expect to pay for it even if it is just a day of a supplier’s time to go through the issues. They’ll see the pitfalls that you can’t and you will not waste time and money on trying to do things that can’t be done, expecting them to happen in a certain way and then be disappointed or miss out on crucial issues that are essential to successful implementation.

9. Start with clean data

Make it somebody’s responsibility to own the data, and to make sure that it is correct and complete. Sounds obvious but so many projects just ignore this central detail and CRM systems stand or fall by their data integrity and data quality.

10. Get user buy-in and train well

User acceptance is the single most important success factor for a CRM system so invest in training. Training is essential to ensuring user acceptance – and a successful CRM implementation.

About the Author

Ellen Goodwright is a freelance writer and a passionate customer service advocate! You can read more of her customer service tips at Customer Service Basics.