Blog: In today’s business world, few phrases are truer than “Time is Money.”
Are you fully aware of the time savings a modern CRM can offer your workforce? Today’s multifaceted architecture is the epitome of intelligent design. Ask any sales rep, any operations manager, marketing director, or VP: what are some of your most important long-term goals? The replies will all have something to do with“how do we work smarter, how does my team become more productive?” Where do you find the next level of harmony between the completion of routine tasks while saving time to accomplish more in every day? Today’s CRMs are designed to reduce time for routine tasks and make companies more efficient.
Managers in these companies would also agree efficiency improvements will likely lead to increased CRM adoption and a more satisfied workforce. Give any manager more ROI and they will gladly spend the cost to gain precious hours every year for better time management. CRM has already done the thinking for you, and the innovations created in the last few years are aimed directly at your bottom line.
Email Logging:
Today’s fast-paced world requires many steps by your teams to ensure a smooth-running sales and order operation to build and maintain customer satisfaction. Let’s agree while every company might have different procedures, this is no small task list. But what about tracking all those steps?
CRM makes it easy to manage email uploading. What requires multiple steps for anyone using Outlook today can be done in one shortcut using your CRM synced to your existing Outlook. Emails can be logged quickly, and they can be pushed directly into your CRM. Your users will save steps for each event simply looking up and attaching an email record inside of Outlook to its proper place in the CRM. The user can also pick and choose which attachments per email, if any, need to also be part of the logging event so you don’t add unnecessary items and documents. Not only will there be a date and timestamp record, it will make any document immediately available to whoever needs it. This will help teams quickly record every communication with a contact even if no attachments or specific orders are being given by that person. This is a small-time saver if you count the individual steps, but these steps are repeated hourly over the course of a year meaning big time savings for all involved.
VoIP Phone Services:
Today’s phone services are well integrated with CRM to a point that is beyond simple click and dial links. VoIP telephony is already accessible inside most CRMs. Your company can use this feature for many shortcut time savings, but some have advanced features that also speed up prospecting time for your sales team.
Once you build out a lead list for your morning tasks, these advanced features can auto dial right down the list when you are ready to move on to the next call. Even better is the prerecorded voicemail message feature that some tools offer. If you don’t get the intended contact and you connect to a voice mail, with a mouse click you can leave a message that you recorded moments ago. While that first call is being left an up-to-date voicemail, your selection will switch to the next call and dial at the next click of the mouse. If your voicemail is recorded as your name and the date you can use that same prerecording for any number of calls you make while moving on to the next call at that same moment.
Customer Communities:
We all want repeat business. We all seek ways to give our customers an easy choice when placing orders again and again. How can CRM help make you the vendor of choice? For smaller customers, simple communication by voicemail or email will suffice for account management. However, the larger and more important a customer is to your business, this method of contact may not work.
Today’s enterprise level business demands bigger answers to the cold email autoreply or simply leaving a voicemail. What if you could give your customers a customized tool? CRM Customer Communities allow you to build out specific, pre-designed features they need. This can include every site and contact who needs access to access information and process requests.
CRM tools today allow you to carve and build out sections of the data you routinely access and create a Customer Community database. This web-enabled portal tool is perfect for large customer interaction and asset management. Everything you manage in your own CRM for an account can be moved into a separate area for viewing by the customer. Clearly you would need to build and choose what to share. The access is a huge benefit for so many potential services your customers will want to stay with you for making their business processes so easy.
Whatever the reason you choose to investigate CRM expansion or engagement, make sure you review all the best options that can make this truly a time saver for your user groups. Remember the more time you save, the more ROI you generate!