Bridging the Gap

Making the case for CRM
How do technologists and financial officers bridge the gap to find the value in customer relationship management? They do it by involving those people who understand the day-to-day reality of the customer experience, and who can speak directly to the risks of poor management, and the benefits of a well thought out system.

One such person is Steven Bowles, who heads up Pelagic Solutions Inc. and is a Certified Microsoft Business Solutions Consultant.

Partners help bridge the gap
When asked what Customer Relationship Management (CRM) means, Bowles explains:

"Traditionally, business systems have been handled by back office systems, offering only transactional information. CRM brings the front office into play. This involves tracking communications, organizing things into lists, e-mailing out to customers to market to them, and generally having the tools to manage accounts."

Bowles points out that CRM empowers marketing, customer service and sales groups to engage the customer. This is the sort of language that an executive can understand.

"CRM empowers the knowledge worker inside an organization to quickly find and organize information relating to that customer/prospect," says Bowles. "Without CRM these organizations have to rely on islands of information such as Excel-based spreadsheets, back-office ERP systems, website data collection systems, e-mail, sticky notes, shared network drives and, last but not least, traditional file folders with paper notes."

In one example scenario, a core enterprise application like CRM can connect the ERP and back office applications to scheduling systems in a single interface to get a 360 degree view of the customer. Such a total solution, according to Bowles, can help an organization "centralize its data, offering one place to go to see everything about a customer."

Result? Faster access to customers' critical data, yielding greater productivity and shorter sales cycles. Flexible deployments adapt to an organization's current IT infrastructure and can be put in place quickly, allowing the value to be realized immediately. And a familiar, consistent user interface, namely Outlook, allows for a minimal learning curve.

Real results for decision makers
Bowles highlights that a CRM driven environment helps decision makers and managers to know what's going on. Effective activity-based selling can be complicated by team management challenges. Now leaders can report on such things as the number of calls per month, enabling them to make more informed decisions.

In addition, Bowles argues that an organization can benefit from the many roles that a partner can play. A partner can be a facilitator, a product expert, a doer and/or mentor to a business. From the instant 'ON' hosted solution to the in-house on-site deployment, a CRM solution can be tailored to an organization's budget and IT infrastructure.

Proactive, informed decisions based on business intelligence rather than guesses - now that's something we can all understand.