CRM MODULES : Functionality and Benefits
As we all know, that the changing pattern on how the organizations should operate has created a tremendous demand for Customer Relationship Management technology. The CRM application chains the CRM process, which is customer centric. It supports an extensive array of activities for acquiring, enhancing or retaining customers.
In a nut shell, CRM acts as a catalyst towards the development of any organization by streamlining processes and functionality of the company. The CRM software functionality varies from vendor to vendor. However, there’re a few modules common to most of the packaged CRM software.
Let examine how each of the CRM modules function and serves organizations.
SALES CRM
Sales CRM has a core commitment to strengthen the sale by automating the sales cycle. The application assists companies to develop, execute, analyze and strengthen sales operations. It’s also useful in finding new ways to step up buying decisions, unveil additional areas of earnings potential, and implement new methods to increase sales productivity.
The CRM key not only provides a plan for data visibility across the company, but also demonstrates its ability to provide immediate value to the sales team by improving their ability to sell, and significantly increasing their success rates.
The construction of sales CRM benefits all constituencies involved in the sales process and provides sales tools for managing the entire sales cycle. The sales management tools support the sales cycle by automating Lead Management, Opportunity Management, Sales forecasting, Account Management, Contact, Quote, Contract, pipeline, Territory, Activity, Team Selling, Workflow, Competition tracking.
The functionality of Sales CRM supports the following Sales Process:
Sales forecasting: With the use of Sales CRM, Sales Managers can improve performance with coordinated planning and implementation of sales activities across all channels. It provides a complete picture of projected income and anticipated sales volume over time. The solution also increases the accuracy of sales forecasts.
Territory management: The CRM solution will help the Sales Force to manage their territories& resources, optimize account coverage. It is also useful, in optimizing team performance, by placing the resources in the exact locations at the right time.
Account and Contact Management:Sales team can see a detailed description of their account, which will assist them in their account management activity. It also captures and tracks all necessary information about prospects, customers and partners.
Activity management: In general, most of sales professionals have to go through complex manual processes, resulting in a focus shift. By automating, the organizations can turn the collective spirit of their sales team on actions proven to develop a successful business. This will also encourage effective, team collaboration and coordination. The solution also synchronizes emails, contact, calendar entries and tasks.
Opportunity management: The functionality of Sales CRM enables managers to qualify, track, and map leads to appropriate sales professionals. It also monitors the transfer of opportunities into sales, monitor target attainment. It offers strategies to push deals through the sales cycle faster, and analyzes the quantity and quality of sales opportunities with pipeline performance management.
Quotation and order management: Sales CRM solution automates and generates accurate quotes, places orders, verify product availability, and track orders through to the fulfillment process. It synchronizes the billing activities and fulfillment of customer orders.
Pricing/Billing and Contract Management : In order to support the sales process the CRM Sales solution ensure consistent, accurate, and up-to-date pricing, Further, it develops and manages long-term customer contracts, incorporate customer agreements into ongoing customer processes, and watch the sales process from exploration to close. It provides integration with billing/finance departments to generate invoices, process payments, credit returns, and process claims.
To encapsulate, Sales CRM solution can provide an organization the following benefits: •
• Maximize profitable revenue growth.
• Reduce Cost.
• Strengthen Customer Relationship.
• Focus sales resources on productive activity.
• Optimize the value delivered with every customer interaction.
• Streamline end-to-end business sales processes across channels.
• Increase reliability with constant, personalized customer experiences across all touch points.
MARKETING CRM
Marketing CRM is a comprehensive solution which empowers an organization to achieve excellence in Marketing. It enables organizations to analyze, plan, develop and perform all marketing activities through all customer interaction points. This integrated software empowers marketers with real business insights enabling them to make intelligent business decisions and manage end-to-end-marketing processes.
The CRM solution seamlessly automates the marketing processes: Analytics, resource & brand management, campaign management, email marketing, segmentation and lead management.
The functionality of Marketing CRM supports critical marketing processes:
Marketing Analytics:The CRM solution allows an organization to achieve maximum results from marketing investments by providing the entire team with a complete, up-to-the-minute picture of consumer preferences, buying behavior, and profitability. Marketing Analytics helps one to develop closer, more valuable customer and prospect relationships and develop marketing success.
Resource and Brand management:Marketing CRM enables the Marketing Managers to perform effectively and optimize the use of marketing resources including budgets, people, time, and assets. They can align all activities and resources around strategic-marketing goals, along with accurately managing the marketing budgets and costs. This, in turn, facilitates collaboration among team members and coordinates marketing activities across the company.
Segmentation and Customer Data: It manages customer and prospect information and segments the customers based on different attribute.
Lead management: Automation of Marketing CRM supports to maintain a single source of all business lead details. It automates lead system from lead generation, prioritization, distribution, and follow-up processes.
Email Marketing: The solution enables organizations to take advantage of the superior economics of e-mail while building consumer confidence, respecting their preferences, and creating successful relationships. The marketing team can plan, create, test, execute, and track targeted, personalized e-mail communications, including time-sensitive alerts and event-triggered mailings. It is a complete solution for the planning, creation, execution, and analysis of targeted campaigns across all customer touch points.
Campaign Management: This streamlines the planning, execution, and budgeting of personalized, permission-based campaigns. It provides integrated work flow, collaboration capabilities for campaign support and implementation; financial modeling to optimize allocation of marketing dollars; and a marketing command center to track campaigns across the organization. Marketers can easily create and automate rich multistage, recurring, and event-triggered campaigns that involve different offers, approaches, and channels.
The key benefits of Marketing CRM Solution are: •
• It provides deeper and relevant customer insight: One understands product chemistry for targeted promotions, profile customers’ buying behavior for successful promotions, and achieves better insight into segmentation characteristics.
• It aligns marketing venture with the corporate vision: Consistently delivers the right message to the right customer at the right time, thus builds stronger relationships.
• It integrates with all the marketing and CRM processes, supporting the Customer Life cycle.
• Boost Campaign Performance: Track and measure campaign effectiveness in real time, understand factors that drive campaign results and lead conversion rates, and compare individual campaign results to focus metrics. One can achieve better campaign response rates.
SERVICE CRM
The Service CRM Solution aims to provide quicker service, increase efficiency of service agents and enhanced customer service. The software enables agents to manage service, support, and sales interactions seamlessly across all communication channels. As a result, businesses can reduce costs while enhancing service delivery.
The functionality of Service CRM supports critical service processes:
Sales and marketing for service: Service CRM Solution, aids in developing and executing targeted, installed-base- marketing campaigns. It generates and process service contract quotations and service orders.
Activity management: The software captures all applicable, service information quickly and reliably. Service agents can easily manage service requests, track related activities, record notes and customer emails and associate known solutions to incoming requests. This information can be easily accessed by service/sales professionals, so that when they call on customers, they have a true, 360° view of the customer, including open and resolved service requests.
Contract management: The program manage service contracts, automatically verify entitlement, manage service-level agreements, and alert agents when a customer’s contract is about to expire.
Customer service and support: It provides an access to information on service histories, contracts and service entitlements, service levels, installed base, and warranties.
Service Analytics: The solid solution helps the organization to review and manage key, service issue by providing detailed information about the customer/product/service call. Furthermore, it helps them in planning ahead and management of their resources.
SERVICE REQUEST MANAGEMENT: MANAGE ASSETS, PARTS, AND SERVICES Return and repair
The software automates the entire, return and repair process, including creating the return materials authorization, billing and shipping repaired products to customers, and issuing and tracking their orders.
Warranty ManagementIt manages the complete warranty and claims process, from return merchandise authorization to receipt and inspection. It ensures timely customer credits.
Management of Field resourcesThe Service representatives can organize, plan, and dispatch service resources to meet service demands. They can execute and validate service orders as well as manage stock spare parts.
Installation and maintenance: One can track the installations, minimize downtime with planned maintenance service and provide faster, accurate service.
Key Benefits of Service CRM may be listed down as:
• The solutions’ knowledge base provides sales and service agents with consistent preapproved answers of frequently asked questions.
• Improves agent productivity and business process automation with task-based user interface.
• Effective service management with enhanced search and query for structured and unstructured data.
• Increase the speed of service delivery.
• Improve first-contact resolution with on-the-spot information and resources needed to resolve issues.
• Increase customer retention by providing service employees with the information and tools they want to prevent churn.
• Boost field utilization through optimized resources and easy access to information.
• Drive revenues by offering relevant services and products based on consumer insights.
CONTACT CENTER CRM
Contact Center CRM solution streamlines and synchronizes the processes and rebuilds an enterprise’s call center into an indispensable part of its total sales, marketing, and service delivery cycle. The solution empowers the company to maximize customer loyalty, reduce costs and increase productivity.
With the assistance of this program, organizations get empowered to communicate more effectively with their customers, leading to organizational flexibility and enhanced customer satisfaction. It is a seamless solution to handle inbound and outbound interaction /transactions and gives managers access to reporting and analytical tools for smooth running of the call center. It automates the work flow and thus creates a fruitful interaction.
The functionality of Contact Center CRM supports key contact center processes:
Agent Management: The Contact center CRM streamlines the user interface for handling multiple channel interactions. The agents can manage their calls in an efficient and professional manner. They get the ability to record track calls and interactions. The solution allows call transfer to other agents or skill work groups, instant callbacks and dial out. Hence, empowers the Agents to serve customers with Web-based access to detailed customer interaction records which consists of agent notes, call recordings, emails and chat session details.
Supervisor Management:A Supervisor management tool provides the relevant information on time, enabling supervisors to make real-time decisions that increase customer satisfaction and contact center’s performance. Integrated real-time dashboards, historical reporting, and robust quality management capabilities simplify reporting and management across centers and agents. In addition, supervisors can easily monitor, collaborate, and manage agent calls.
Customer Service: The solution enables the contact center employees to communicate with their customers by phone, email and online chat sessions. It provides agents an access to precise customer information enabling them to research and diagnose problems, handle complaints, ratify contract entitlements, address consumer complaints, help with returned products, answer technical questions, make exchanges, and even schedule field services.
Sales and Marketing: CRM solution orchestrates all call centers’ efforts; including call lists, agent scripts, promotions, and other channels, and coordinates them with broader- marketing activities to establish a focus on qualified prospects. Agent gets an access to the relevant information they want to give to the prospects, resulting in more- qualified leads into the pipeline and therefore more- selling opportunities.
Contact Center Analytics: This solution empowers the organization to determine, predict, plan, and optimize the operations of the centers by analyzing customer interactions, business processes, and business opportunities, and use the knowledge gained to enhance customer-focused operations.
Key Benefits of Contact Center CRM:
• Improve operational efficiency through streamlined reporting and supervision across centers and agents.
• Increases the call center agent’s output with multiple interactions handling across channels.
• Supports employees across multiple locations.
• Provides means to route calls to the official agents for faster- call resolution. Increase sales and expand market reach by making more- relevant offers.
• Enhances and strengthens the customer contact center experience by resolving customer issues during the first call.
• Drives customer loyalty and demand through targeted, personalized telemarketing campaigns provides a regular customer experience across all communication channels.
• Helps to gain insight into contact center operations and trends.
PARTNER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMEN CRM
Partner Relationship CRM solution is a Web-based effort to improve partner relationships life cycle .The functionality of the software provides the organizations a comfort to manage and collaborate with partners on leads, opportunities and capital requests. It brings exceptional value for both trademark owners and partners by supporting the processes. The application becomes a base to recruit and retain partners, effectively, in order to increase sales.
The functionality of the solution supports the dominant partner relationship management processes:
Partner management With the assistance of PRM trademark owner gain an insight into partner channels. They use the system to facilitate data entry and manage partners, programs, leads, opportunities, funds, fund requests, and collateral. The partners and agents use one method for all interactions. Furthermore, the solution enables the company to absorb net new partners, plan and predetermine sales revenues,. It allows to sector partner base for more effective partner programs by tracking their trainings, certifications and most importantly compensation plans.
Channel marketing: The software acts as a platform for providing the partners with accurate information, supports consistent branding, manage joint-marketing campaigns with partners, and control channel- marketing funds and partner incentives. The functionality of the software acts as a catalyst to increase the demand of products. Consequently, it streamlines the entire processes in order to manage the campaigns, catalogs, content and leads. It also provides personalization features and a partner locator.
Channel sales: The partners gain an access to the knowledge base, tools, and expert advice. This motivates them to sell more and shores up the channel- selling process. The management gains insight into demand and can effectively forecast future business .The functionality of the software supports an array of channel sales processes, which consist of contact , account, activity, opportunity management, deal registration, and pipeline forecasting.
Partner order management: PRM solution streamlines the partner ordering management processes. It backs channel order life cycle which consist of quote & order life cycle, interactive selling, pricing, contracts, point of sale and channel inventory management.
Channel service: It empowers the partners with tools to resolve the problem and ongoing service relationships. PRM automates entire channel service life cycle which comprises of information management, planning of service resources, management of service order, live support to partner s warranty, return and complaints management.
Partner and channel analytics: PRM CRM solution acts as a strong-reporting tool. One can process different kinds of reports and conduct analyses in order to determine the coverage of the partners, their performance, sales and revenue figures, the return on your partner investments, your gross margins with partners, and partner utilization. Partners can also generate reports and do an analysis relevant to their business.
Key Benefits of PRM CRM Solution:
• Increase Channel Effectiveness.
• Gain visibility by track partners throughout the partner life cycle.
• Recruit and Manage partners.
• Increase channel revenue.
• Strengthen lead response and closure time.
• Optimize use of Resource.
• Share Best Practices.
