I'm an Accountant, How Can a CRM Help Me?
A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) application is an invaluable tool that can help you increase sales, cut administrative time, organise your sales activities and provide a 360 degree view of your customer data.A CRM system is an application you can access on nearly every device, iPhone, PC, Mac, iPad... Basically anything connected to the internet.
With the right CRM system, it can help you close more business deals, further your marketing efforts and keep your customers happy.
10 Years ago, CRM systems were only available if you had £1m+ ready to invest in this kind of project. Innovation in I.T and the advent of cloud services now mean that you can get a pretty good all-rounder CRM system for no more than £30 per user/month.
Competition in this sector has bred innovation and some of the systems available today would have blown your socks off 10 years ago.
How does it do all this? Well there is no magic involved. Essentially speaking, a CRM system is a huge relational database; with a polished front-end packed with features that enable you to manage your customers better than ever.
Accountancy firms, just like any business means you have customers. Customers which, when telephoning your company would like to know that the person they are talking to actually knows who they are and is well informed on their customer history.
But not just the receptionist they speak to, the next person as well.
A CRM system can help you manage your sales pipeline and nurture leads from first contact through to sale, invoicing, and support.
It also helps you identify leads or customers that you should be focusing your attention on most, so you are not wasting your time.
The ability to be able to quickly associate call records, meetings, tasks, notes, file attachments, quotes, invoices to one of your contacts in your CRM system means that you will start to generate a 360 degree picture of your customer, or potential customer.
Customers, including myself and even you, love to feel valued by the people and companies we do business with. I get a warm fuzzy feeling when I telephone BMW to arrange a service on my motor car. "Good afternoon Mr Banbury, how can I help you today?" What? How did they even know my name? Well, they probably have their telephony system hooked into their CRM system.
So when I call from my mobile, their computer screen displays; who I am, when I called last, what kind of customer I am, which car I have and when it was last serviced.
If it's a really smart system it will show exactly what kinds of promotions are relevant to me. I love this feeling and it strengthens my loyalty to the brand. Its 2013, and this is what customer service should feel like.
But you don't require the budget of BMW to offer the same level of service. I have implemented many CRM systems which take advantage of their telephony integration and come in well under budget even for a small business.
If you are still using Outlook, Excel or lost pieces of paper to manage your customers, then it is time to start looking at some great CRM solutions.
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