Microsoft Dynamics CRM

CRM software can improve customer service and help you retain business and clients while at the same time reduce the cost of customer retention. Customer service and retention is important if you believe that the cost of replacing a new customer is as high as 10 times the cost of generating a new one.

Either way, customer service is very important unless you are a monopoly and that is simply not applicable for the vast majority of businesses in todays world.

Here are some of the questions and issues you should be taking up with any potential CRM solution provider:

Call Screening for Customer Service Calls

Taking the initial phone call and creating a service ticket with initial notes is when the call is classified and given a priority rating - how will the CRM software handle this ? How will the service desk operative taking the call be able to route the call to the appropriate staff or department that can deal with the issue?

Categorizing Calls

How will the CRM software categorize the calls ? What options are available ? the reason this is relevant is that business intelligence can be gathered from trends in customer service contact for instance, if there are a relatively large number of calls asking for instructions on “how to” perform an operation with a product, perhaps you need to revise the user manual.

Queue Management

How will the CRM software monitor queues and can it rank in accordance with your Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) ? What about differing SLA’s for different customers bands dependant upon price eg Premium, Standard, Basic and so on - how will the CRM software be able to cope with that and subsequent changes ?

SLA’s often include a penalty against you if you do not meet the service standard so it is vital that your people know when that is about to happen in good time - can the CRM solution escalate a ticket if an SLA is about to be broken ?

Microsoft CRM Software Provider

Concluding the second part of the issues to evaluate with CRM marketing automation:

Marketing ROI

How will the CRM solution determine marketing ROI? Is it left up to the user to quantify and input manually the amount expended on marketing? How is sales revenue from a campaign accounted for and used in computing the ROI ? What integration with the accounting system is available ?

Telemarketing

Is there an ability to handle outbound calls? Can the CRM solution handle branching telesales scripts? Is it fast to use - remember real time telephone conversations will not wait for a screen to load up ? Can an order be taken during a call by the CRM solution?

Mass E-mails

How will the CRM solution handle mass email campaigns? How will the CRM solution handle opt-outs of the email marketing - you don’t want to be classified as a spam source by potential clients? Can emails be composed in html and plain text? What personalization is available through the CRM solution?

Market Segmentation

Can the database be segmented by the CRM solution and how is this achieved?

Lead Routing

How can you route a lead to a sales rep? How is the sales rep selected ? How will leads be assigned and followed up?

Microsoft CRM Software Provider

How will a CRM software solution handle marketing automation/ Unlike sale process automation, marketing automation is still being developed across the spectrum of CRM solutions and is still maturing.

If you are seriously considering marketing automation then start with these features for evaluation:

Lead Ranking

Is there a system to enforce ranking rules? By this we mean checking off various conditions that affect the lead or are presented by it - is the lead a call in a repsonse to a marketing campaign or a referral for instance and you may place greater or lesser weight dependant on your own business experience.

How can these rules be changed and amended as conditions and experience dictate? Can line management do this or does it require IT specialists?

Campaign Management

How do you outline the steps of a campaign and track it’s course ? How can the CRM be used to track and execute each step of a marketing campaign? What happens when there is a response to a campaign ? How will respondents be routed by the CRM solution?

Microsoft CRM Software Provider

Opportunity Management

Can you enter simple business rules for probability ranking of opportunities and is there a facility to halt opportunity progression if certain criteria are not met such as minimum order size ?

Complex Opportunities

Complex sales opportunities present certain challenges where there are different products and services involved in the sale - can the CRM solution handle differing completion or delivery dates and how will it handle an instance where a product bundled with the overall contract is actually not sold ?

Multi-user Opportunity

What happens when there is a team of sales agents involved in an opportunity - who will be able to access the information - any, some or all and can it be based on a need-to-know or authority ranking criterion?

Competitor Tracking

Tracking what the competition is up to is very helpful so how will the CRM solution actually capture competitor information - can sales reps input competitor information from client feedback ? How will the CRM solution correlate and present this information in a useable format for marketing, management and other sales reps to handle ? Especially pay attention to features of a CRM solution that will allow you to perform google type searches such as “Show me all client meetings where competitor XYZ was present and we won th edeal”

Forecasting

How will sales reps submit their forecasts? Can opportunities be ranked and weighted so a realistic pipeline can be established for an entire sales team ? How will the CRM roll up forecasts to a sales reps manager and how will the CRM know who that sales manager is?

Quote generation

How will th eCRM generate a quote and who can perform the action? Where is teh quote stored and how will it be updated ? Will the CRM integrate with the accounting and stock management software easily and if so how?

Multi-Currency

Can the CRM solution support multiple currencies and if so how - can this integrate with

Order Entry

How do sales reps input orders ? Can it be done directly from the accounting system ? How fast is this ? (note it can be very slow for many CRM solutions - even a wait of 20 seconds is considered a very long time by users who want it done now)

Order History
Is user history viewable and if so by whom ? Where does the information come from - the CRM itself or the accounting system or are you able to run side by side comparitives of customer history? Can you view customer payment history and credit rating for order limits?

Customer Service View

Can a sales rep see customer service records and see what issues there have been ?

Microsoft CRM Software Provider

Continuing with our series on CRM features and issues for you to consider, we continue today with the third sub-instalment on issues confronting us with automation of the sales process.

Lead Analysis
How will you track your leads, where they orginate from and can you analyze the sales results from each class of lead generated ? Ask how leads will be updated and how will you manage the lead store ?

Requests for Sales Collateral and Literature

Will the CRM solution allow itself to be manipulated so a sales rep can simply identify what sales information they wish to have sent to a client or prospect automatically by the marketing department or sales support ? If you have a lot of literature going out of the door, can a pick list be created for whoever is responsible for getting the collateral sent out to clients and notify the sales rep that it has been done so they can follow up ?

Visual Organizational Chart

Will the CRM solution provide you with a visual reference of your business so you can see how the disparate contacts within your business are interacting with a client and each other?

Managing Varying Sales Processes for Different Products

If you have multi-product lines you may also have differing sales processes to handle them - you may be selling low value fast moving consumables but another part of the business may deal exclusively with wholesale orders - how can the CRM solution cope with this ? Are you able to ensure that the CRM solution will drive a sales process dependant upon the product being purchased, for instance where a risk or health warning is required with a particular product but not others ?

Microsoft CRM Software Provider

Continuing from our previous post on Sales Process Automation and the issues to consider when selecting a CRM solution and a partner consider the folowing:

Task Tracking and Managing Activities through to SaleT

Ask if you can link tasks and activities to one opportunity and obtain a composite history of how your business is interacting with the prospect.

Territory Reassignment

Can you transfer permanently or temporarily a rep from one territory to another ? Can you assign multiple territories to a single rep or group of reps ? You will need to handle such events if you have a rep away on vacation or illness, or the neccessity of a particular marketing campaign demands it. Question how users will be able to synchronize back at base so local contacts are not lost. What happens if you alter territories say decrease the number of territories or increase them - how will the transfer of client and prospect data be handled in such an instance ?

Sales Reporting

Can you choose the format for a sales reports ? Can the reports be altered to deal with the exigencies of your own operation and if so what will that cost and how long will it take ? Are there any particular coding requirements for a particular activity - if so take care as this tends to obstruct user adoption.

Key Performance Indicators (KPI) Reports

Will the CRM solution provide KPI reports such as call activity to sales made ? How detailed does the CRM reporting go in describing how sales activity relates to sales revenue ? Can you perform comparative analysis across territories, agents and product lines ?

Tomorrow we continue with the 3rd sub-instalment regarding CRM issues and Sales Process Automation.

Microsoft CRM Software Provider

Automating the sales process with a CRM solution is a wider area so we are going to break this up into four posts of which this is the first.

Automating the sales process is probably the primary reason for the development of a CRM and is the most popularly quoted reason by adopters for implementing a CRM. A great deal of development has been carried out on CRM sales automation probably as this is viewed as sales activities are the fuel for the business engine whereas accounting and customer service tend to be less well served in comparison.

Issues to consider include:

Lead Identification

Lead generation is fraught with error, mispellings of names, addresses and other information together with missing information to begin with and for every good lead there may be a 100 useless ones which you simply do not want blocking up your CRM system.

A good solution to look for is one which seperates out leads from th erest of your CRM repository so that only qualified leads who can be more accurately identified as prospects are allowed into the CRM solution itself.

Account Planning and Management

Managing and planning activity with accounts is a key element for managing sales people and their activities and is often used as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) so you will want to keep a record of this information. You will also likely want to see trend data to match up rises and falls in sales results with sales activity as well as perform analysis to see what activities are producing the actual results and which are not.

Call List and Activity

Following from account management, a good sales person will proactively generate leads, or if they are provided turn them into prospects and eventually customers providing sales revenue.

Consider what tools are being offered by the CRM solution to compile and work their own calls lists and manage their call activity.

Microsoft CRM Software Provider

In this third feature on CRM assessment and questions to consider, we are going to look at the issues to be concerned with over user friendliness - a bad system can be made to work if employees are motivated enough to use it but a good CRM system will fail unless users adopt it and like it.

Consider the following closely:

Ease of Task Flow

Is there a lot of moving from screen to screen, back and forth in order to deal with a task ? Simplification of complex processes is a sign of a good solution.

Conditonal Lookups

This is where the value in a secondary field changes as a consequence of an input in a primary field - if that has confused you take a look at eBay or Amazon - if you select a main category to browse say “DVD’s” the fields below will automatically populate to describe different movie genres - this is a conditional lookup. Now say a customer contacts your service department with a query - taking the product reference in th eprimary field should pre-populate the product information adn common issues for the user to narrow doen the issues and appropriate resolution.

Data Entry

A CRM solution that anticipates what is being typed into a data entry field can save a great deal of time and effort as well as avoiding data input errors. Ask if the CRM solution supports this and practical examples of this form of automatic population of data fields can be found in texting on your cell phone where. A business example would be inputting a state code e.g. AZ for Arizona would then automatically populate the country field as “USA”.

Navigation

A CRM solution acts as a data capture and repository and how this is all organized and presented to a user has a huge effect on adoption by staff. Look for a CRM solution that is going to be easy and simple for staff to train up on and use without wasting time skipping back and forth and presents information in a format they want.

Search Tools

Sales agents in particular need to be able to search and utilize the capabilities of a CRM to store and present client histories as well as the ability to search and organize contact information into groups and apply filters that they can use and fel comfortable with.

Documentation

Ask what documentation will be coming with the CRM solution which is especially vital in the event you start to tailor the solution away from any out-of-the-box CRM offering otherwise you will be reliant on the CRM partner for the life of the product or be faced with unneccessary further expense if you change partners.

Alerts

Does the CRM solution alert users when a certain condition has occurred or is about to arise, say servicing an equipment installation, sales call or a renewal date for a subscription ? Will it identify and notify who needs to take the appropriate action ?

Tomorrow we shall tackle the issues connected with the Automation of the Sales Process.

Microsoft CRM Software Provider

CRM Personal Contact Management

CRM software solutions not only manage a business process, they are used to make individual staff members more effective by coordinating activities between users such as scheduling meetings and conferences for example.

When you are considering a CRM software solution consider the following Personal Contact Management features to make the most of it - as a minimum it should include the following:

Private notes and activities

In order for users to manage their schedules you have to allow for personal blocking out of time in the scheduling for instance to accomodate doctors appointments, flexible working standards and vacations. This should allow privacy to be enabled so others who share thae users calendar can see they are not available but the reason for it is not disclosed.

Group Scheduling

Ask whether the CRM solution being proposed can enable coordination of meetings within the business ? What happens if changes are made to group meetings and will all attendees be notified of these changes ? Can attendees be invited as optional or mandatory and can attendees accept the invitation ?

Resource Scheduling

Consider whether the CRM solution can be used to allocate meeting rooms or company equipment used for instance in presentations. It makes sense that if you are using the CRM solution to manage staff scheduling that it can also be used to manage resource allocations as well.

Shared Calendar

Can the CRM solution share calendars across a work group or across the company, and how easy is it to look up another staff members schedule ? Is it possible to restrict access to a users calendar and how about being able to look at several calendars side by side for ease of use in setting scheduling dates ?

Task Delegation

Is it possible to delegate a task and monitor progress to completion with the CRM solution?

Private E-mails

Depending uppon where you are situated, privacy is an issue - can a CRM solution that is capturing emails have the ability to highlight those that are private emails if they make their way into the CRM database ?

Hopefully this will have given you an array of questions and issues for you take on board and consider - asking a potential CRM partner such questions will help you determine how experienced they actually are before you take on board their advice or commit to using them.

Microsoft CRM Software Provider

Welcome to the first introductory instalment of a series of posts explaining the key features of a CRM solution, what it does, how to implement it, what you realistically can expect from the solution and the pitfalls.

In the daily posts that follow we will explore the CRM Software solution features in practical terms - if you read a marketing brochure you’ll get the picture that a CRM solution is a universal panacea for everything - that is the first step in failure with implementation - unrealistically high user expectations.

We believe that if you are equipped with the appropriate information you will be better positioned to make an informed decision as to what CRM solution should be implemented and also how to go about selecting a CRM partner that you are comfortable with.

Tomorrow we shall tackle personal contact management using a CRM software solution.

Microsoft CRM Software Provider