Welcome to my blog. Here you will find blogposts about things that keep me busy. I am a Dynamics CRM Lead Consultant with a passion for customer stories and solving customer pains. In my free time I am a amateur photographer. I am extremely keen of gadgets.
CRM Good practices: Obvious?
This blog was written for Centric.eu. I have translated from Dutch to English for my personal blog:
In this day and age enterprises are obligated to have an added value. Not only your shareholders and employees want it. Your customers demand it!
But in what way does your customer want to see your added value? Your company can only answer this question correctly when you have implemented Customer Relations Management throughout your company. Obvious, you say? Unfortunately I see too many organizations that don’t think about how they want to communicate with their customers and what their customers are trying to communicate with them. So even though this post might contain nothing you don’t already know, I want to dedicate this post to the mere basics.
CRM as a strategy
CRM is more (much more) then just software or just a process. It’s a business strategy: a concept implemented throughout every department of your company (departments with direct customer contact are essential for the success but it doesn’t stop there). This is where successful strategies differ from unsuccessful strategies: A companywide acceptation of the importance of CRM. That is the only ways your customer will see you take your relation with him/her seriously and would be willing to help your company get even better!
When implementing this business strategy a few questions should be answered:
- Which clients does your company want to have?
- What are the requirements these (potential) clients have or your products or services?
- Which departments within your own company have direct customer contact?
- How do you put CRM in the attention of all your employees as a business strategy?
Integration
After you have appointed CRM a business strategy and have implemented this strategy within your business, it’s important to search for points of contacts with other processes. Data used in the classic CRM processes (sales, marketing and service) is reused in other processes. For example: A lead, created in CRM becomes a customer. This means that the data about your customer must travel from your CRM process to your billing process.
U might use your CRM system as a standalone application but integrating your CRM system with other processes and data from other systems prevents double records, dirty data and time loss.
Future challenges
So now we have a business strategy and we know where our CRM data is reused so we integrate with other processes so minimize administrative tasks as much as possible. But that is just the start. In future blogs I will go into achieving customer loyalty, loyalty programs and integrating social media into your CRM processes.
Succesfully implementing Social Media into your Retail CRM processes
Just received a benchmark report from a colleague of mine. This is nothing that I have produced. It has been written by Retail Systems Research LLC and is sponsored by SAP. I do not believe SAP to be the most flexibel or complete application to implement your CRM processes in. Yet I want to share this report because the business conclusions are very valid.
Main Conclusions:
With Social Media (as in real human dialogue), listening is key. Retailers are challenged to bring about the necessary two-way dialogue, but Winners have made more progress. While they identify “understanding and accommodating how different customer segments engage” as the biggest challenge, Winners are also more aware than other retailers that they are being judged by their Social Media presence. Non-winners however, seem to be reacting to the realization that their e-commerce presence isn’t enough. Determining which set of capabilities ultimately emerges as important to retailers and their customers is the meta challenge for all retailers.
and
Winners see Social Media’s potential to create new demand signals, and believe that the
effectiveness of product marketing and services is more important than ever. Winners understand that consumers want to connect with each other and see an opportunity to facilitate that dialogue through the Brand. They connect opportunities to identifying customer needs. Laggards are not interesting in maintaining a dialogue, and “want to influence shopper decisions.”
You can find the complete report here on my skydrive
Microsoft Dynamics CRM offers for Non-Profit Organizations
What seemed to be a simple question from a potential customer turned out the be a journey of a few days. But with a little help from Microsoft we have an answer!
The question at hand: What is the offer from Microsoft for Non-Profit Organizations that want to use Dynamics CRM?
The complete answer:
On techsoup.org you can find the complete list of Microsoft software that Microsoft offers for a reduced price for charitable use. Customers have to sign up and be approved by techsoup to see the offers and buy. A Extended User CAL for CRM 2011 will cost about 40 euro’s of administration costs. Keep in mind that licenses bought via techsoup are for the on premise installation of Dynamics CRM so don’t forget your Windows Server 2008 licenses and SQL Server 2008 R2 licenses aswell.
For organizations that want to use Dynamics CRM anywhere and anytime (especially with the R8 release) having to build the solution On Premise is obviously a hassle.
I have good news and bad news. There are offerings based on CRM Online depending on the country of request.For the EMEA this means that if you the organization is located in the UK or Germany there is no problem. For other countries in the EMEA area: No offers you, right now.
For The Netherlands there is some news: The existing offer might be extended to The Netherlands. When this will happen and what the offer will be, cannot be said at this time.
About me
Welcome to my blog. Here you will find blogposts about things that keep me busy. I am a Dynamics CRM Lead Consultant with a passion for customer stories and solving customer pains. In my free time I am a amateur photographer. I am extremely keen of gadgets.
