 |
Customer Relationship Management Solutions
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a multifaceted process, mediated by a set of information technologies that focuses on creating two-way exchanges with customers so that firms have an intimate knowledge of their needs, wants, and buying patterns. In this way, CRM helps companies understand, as well as anticipate, the needs of current and potential customers. Functions that support this business purpose include sales, marketing, customer service, training, professional development, performance management, human resource development, and compensation.
Succeeding with CRM
While there are numerous reports of "failed" implementations of various types of CRM projects, these are often the result of unrealistic high expectations and exaggerated claims by CRM vendors.
Many of these "failures" are also related to data quality and availability. Data cleaning is a major issue. If the company CRM strategy is to track life-cycle revenues, costs, margins and interactions between individual customers, this must be reflected in all business processes. Data must be extracted from multiple sources (e.g., departmental/divisional databases, including sales, manufacturing, supply chain, logistics, finance, service, etc.), requiring an integrated and comprehensive business processing system to be in place with defined structures and data quality. If not, interfaces must be developed and implemented to extract data from different systems. This creates a demand far beyond customer satisfaction to understand the full business-to-business relationship. For this reason, CRM is more than a sales or customer interaction system.
The experience from many companies is that a clear CRM requirement with regard to reports (e.g., input and output requirements) is of vital importance before starting any implementation. With a proper demand specification, a great deal of time and money can be saved based on realistic expectations of systems capability. A well operating CRM system can be an extremely powerful tool for management and customer strategies.
For more information regarding our Accpac CRM solutions, please contact AccTech Sales Division on Tel: +27 12 664 0200 or email: sales@acctech.biz
