05 Apr
Sage CRM
offers many positive benefits, but one that’s guaranteed to make a sales and marketing manager smile is its ability to provide a seamless multi-channel customer experience. No matter where a customer chooses to connect with your company, be it through phone, email, or social media, they receive the same response and service, period.
Many legacy systems offer only one inbound channel. Most companies use inbound call centers to handle customer service. Yet customers today expect more. When your competitors offer instant chat or responses to Facebook queries, it sets a whole new standard for your company too. You can ignore it only at your own peril. Now with Sage CRM, it’s actually easier than ever to embrace multichannel CRM.
How Much Is CRM Worth to Your Company?
Forrester Research offers assistance to help your company evaluate the potential value of a CRM system to your business. Look at the following metrics as you evaluate Sage CRM and other CRM systems:
- Revenue: What opportunities does Sage CRM offer to increase revenues? With add-on sales, special communications, and targeted marketing, you can evaluate the impact of your CRM system on revenues by assessing the many ways in which it can be used to enhance value and offer up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.
- Operating costs: If you have a legacy CRM system, consider how much you’re spending now to cover all potential communication channels. That’s your current operating cost estimate. Monitoring an inbound call center, sales team dashboards, marketing data, social media, and inbound emails can take considerable time and staff resources, all of which can increase costs. Multi-channel CRM available through Sage CRM potentially lowers operating costs if you’re switching from single-point CRM to integrated CRM.
- Improve efficiencies: Legacy systems often require more frequent updates, tweaks, and patches to ensure they continue running. With every new software purchase for your company, integrating them with legacy systems can be cumbersome and require custom programming. A new Sage CRM system improves operating efficiencies and integrates well with other Sage products, offering a comprehensive approach to business systems that improves many areas of your work.
A thorough examination of the costs, benefits, and risks of updating your CRM system may make it clear that a new system such as Sage CRM offers more benefits than your current legacy system.
Integration Paints a Complete Picture
The more data you gather and the better it’s integrated, the more complete the customer portrait you can draw from the data.
- Accounting data will help your team understand the average dollar value of a customer and their purchasing history.
- Return data shows you any problems they may have had with merchandise.
- Sales, warehouse, and fulfillment data can show you the status of any open orders so that you can give customers an accurate shipping estimate.
- Marketing data shows you which promotions were sent to customers and when.
Data is like colors of paint on an artist’s palette. Mix a little of this and a little of that, and you can paint a data-based customer portrait that helps you see your customers in a new light. With this new picture, you can then improve marketing and sales to increase revenues.
Sage CRM at IWI Consulting Group
IWI Consulting Group is a Canadian-based provider of software and service for businesses and nonprofits. Sage CRM when integrated with Sage EM (formerly known as Sage X3) and Sage 300cloud (formerly known as Sage 300) are just the start of a more productive and profitable business. To learn more, visit IWI Consulting Group or contact us today.
