In today’s business world, it is getting difficult to stand out from the competition based on product features alone, that’s why the battleground is shifting to customer experience and satisfaction.
According to Gartner reports, 89% of companies desire to compete using customer experience as a yardstick, as compared to 36% in the previous years.
Amongst the ways to improve your customer experience is by deploying an integrated CRM and ERP software. This software combines both your front and back-office operations, giving you access to accurate and full information about your customers from all areas of your business.
An integrated CRM and ERP software drives better customer experience by
- Delivering better services and product offerings through streamlined processes.
- You can find out what your customers really want.
- It can even lead to new product or services idea generation.
- Empowering your personnel to have access to real-time information.
- Knowing your target audience and reaching them on time.
- Increasing profitability through customer retention.
Why Combine CRM and ERP Software as One
As customers’ expectations keep changing based on their needs and requirements, an integrated CRM and ERP software is poised to meet those expectations.
Ordinarily, integrating CRM and ERP systems can be a bottleneck due to software architectures, cost, risk, future upgrades, and so on. Hence, why many businesses operate them as standalone systems.
However, it is better to have a combined single system that eliminates the barrier to data sharing, which in turn leads to efficient and improved customer satisfaction.
Having two different standalone systems can lead to all or any of the following:
Poor Visibility
Because information is stored in two different systems, there is no single point of reference when it comes to information about your customer’s interaction with your business.
No Single Data Source
In a situation where your employees want a real-time complete view about a customer’s interactions with your company e.g. buying patterns, payments, order status, emails, and so on. They will need to source it from two different systems, thereby delaying answers to your customer’s queries.
Also, the information can be broken or incomplete.
Ineffective Customer Targeting
For a business to carry out targeted marketing efforts, it needs past information like buying patterns, geography, how much was spent, demography, and so on. But when this information is spread across two standalone systems, it consumes a significant amount of time to extract, align and process the two sourced information.
Customer Experience as The New Battlefield
Social media and technology have changed the way customers communicate with their businesses and vice versa, irrespective of whether it is a business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-customer (B2C) relationship.
This has forced businesses to focus on customer experience as compared to product-based features, and benefits.
According to Information generation reports, 93% of business leaders around the agreed that customer expectations had been changed by technology in the past ten years.
In order to provide a better customer experience, and to survive in a consumer-driven environment, you need to have an integrated CRM and ERP software that combines your customer-facing activities likes sales, marketing, complaints, inquiries, orders with your backend operations like financials, inventory management, invoicing and so on.
Integrated CRM and ERP Software Availability
This integrated software is readily available as a single go-to solution, this eliminates the need to carry out costly, complex, and time-consuming integrations. It also removes the challenges that come with the upgrading of any of the standalone systems.
Sage (a business management software company trusted by over 6.1 million businesses worldwide) has this offering. The CRM and ERP systems communicate seamlessly as one. To get one for your business, contact Softcodes (a trusted Sage business partner) here.
Conclusively, using an integrated CRM and ERP solution gives you access to consistent customer data, that will enable your employees to have a 360-degree view of your customer within a single software.
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