Facing Company Challenges with CRM Software

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, when it successfully integrates across a business in Toronto, Canada or beyond, brings together customer data to achieve many benefits including integration, productivity, and streamlining. To learn more about the objectives meant to be achieve by CRM and it benefits, visit here.

In order to achieve the intended outcomes and benefits of CRM, a CRM system must be integrated throughout the company’s departments, other software systems, and cycles. This is the cause of many of the challenges for businesses when the integration doesn’t occur. Let’s take a closer look at these challenges:

Challenge #1: Different departments, different applications

It is often the case that different departments use different application types when managing the information they use about customers. In the front office, employees use CRM applications to support the activities that are customer-facing. These include sales, marketing, and customer service. In the back office, employees rely more on ERP applications that support activities that include invoicing, accounts receivable, cash flow management, and financial reporting. ERP software allows them to support transactional, reporting, and compliancy activities without them realizing the need for CRM data as well. Typically, the desire of the front office to integrate applications collaboratively, the back office typically uses more independent applications. The challenge is further complicated by the finance department that often is slow to release data and applications from its department to others.

Challenge #2: Separate CRM and ERP systems                          

Many businesses purchase separate CRM and ERP systems from specialized vendors and don’t even think about the need for these systems to integrate. Without integration, there are many struggles faced in addressing business process needs that cross over sectors of the front and the back office. These require extra steps, time, and often lead to more errors, too. These struggles result in departmental silos of information, unnecessary administrative overhead and inefficiencies, verbal sign-off requirements, and process duplication.

Challenge #3: Interruptions to Quote-to-Cash Cycle

Given the number of potential parties involved in the process of taking an initial quote all the way through to completing and being paid for a transaction, mistakes and omissions can be costly and time consuming regardless of when in the process they occur. The cycle spans across account management, sales order processing, shipping, and accounts receivable. Account managers and customer service representatives in the front office are also impacted. Errors in the cycle may cause them to struggle to provide the information customers are needing including order status updates and transactional information.

The good news is that Sage CRM and Sage ERP integrate with one another to solve these challenges and to introduce exceptions monitoring and mandatory fields that remove the need to recheck information. Learn more about out IWI Consulting’s CRM software offering: Sage CRM. It is an easy to use, fast to deploy, feature-rich CRM system providing enterprise-wide access to vital customer information—anytime, anywhere. With Sage CRM, you can better manage your business by integrating field sales, internal sales, customer care, and marketing information. Download our whitepaper “Sage ERP Front-to-Back Office Integration” for more information about CRM, challenges it solves, and more.

Our small and dedicated team specializes in helping small-to-medium size Canadian businesses and non-profits select and adapt Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Human Resource Management (HRMS) and IT services. With IWI’s 15 years in business and 100 plus years of combined experience, IWI has helped hundreds of manufacturing, distribution, and financial service companies gain efficiency, grow, and lower their operating costs.

With the unique combination of industry knowledge and diverse technology expertise, IWI provides cost-effective solutions to help clients gain a competitive edge.  As a Sage business partner, servicing the Greater Toronto Area, we support evaluation and implementation of operations and finance systems to optimize technology, ensuring high return on investment with a quick and painless transition to new software.