Customer relationship management (CRM) software has finally come of age both in terms of usability and cost. That's the opinion of David Meyrick, Sales Manager at e-business solutions company, Epages.net.
"For the past five years, CRM has been a hard-sell to companies," he said. "Using customer information to improve service, predict trends and increase sales has been seen as a large and time-consuming project, which invariably falls by the wayside."
Part of the lack of enthusiasm for CRM has been the perceived difficulty of using CRM software: "Clients tell us it is difficult to ensure that information is recorded and stored for later use, but with products like Microsoft CRM, this difficulty has been overcome.”
Microsoft CRM is tightly integrated with the Microsoft Office suite, particularly Microsoft Outlook. Microsoft looked at how people work and what businesses need to achieve. It realised that having to launch and learn another program was a barrier to successful data capture and have made its CRM software part of the Outlook toolbar.
"Customers using Microsoft CRM have a reduced adoption phase as the software works just like any other Microsoft product," comments Meyrick. "Users don't even have to remember to open the program as it is launched with Outlook and works with it."
Epages.net has just concluded sales with three KZN companies for MS CRM solutions. A financial services company, clothing manufacturer and a voice recording company have decided to implement Microsoft CRM.
"Each company has very specific requirements of the software and that is where the ease of customisation comes to the fore," said Meyrick. "The financial services company wants to manage broker sales and commissions, while the clothing company has a need to maintain customer order information and produce forecasts to ease production bottlenecks. All of the companies will be using CRM to proactively communicate with their customers and create a competitive edge," he said.
As a Microsoft Gold Partner and the leading CRM specialists in KZN, Epages.net has been working closely with Microsoft to dispel the perception that CRM is only an option for large companies.
"The solution is both affordable and scalable," remarked Penny Macpherson, Marketing Director of Epages.net. "A company can purchase licences per user and can have five or 5 000 licences, depending on the size of the business." According to Macpherson, a business without a CRM system and a small sales force of less than five reps stands to lose a large percentage of its vital customer information if a sales rep leaves the company.
"CRM takes all of the information that is contained within a sales person's head or on their cellphone and transfers it to a system owned by the company. In this way, the valuable customer information is retained even if the sales person leaves. This makes handover to a new employee a much more efficient process and reduces the risk of losing the client."
