CRM: It's Not Just For Sales Reps

Employees need tools that allow them to focus more time on building relationships and growing sales, and less time tracking down simple information or dealing with unnecessary requests. The quick-fire solution for many companies is to purchase a traditional CRM software, designed to empower your salesforce with a customer management tool.

But what if the information inside this tool is not accurate or valuable?

And what about the rest of your employees?

When CRM is not integrated with an organization's ERP system or other business applications, there is an inherent risk for massive data gaps that deem the tool useless (i.e. wasted money). Studies have shown that 63% of CRM initiatives fail (Source: Merkle Group Inc.), and a common reason goes something like: “The CRM we bought is ineffective because nobody uses it.” What many of these CRM defectors lose sight of is that nobody uses it BECAUSE there was no valuable data in it. 

All employees, not just your salesforce, can draw valuable business insights on where and how to best spend their time if CRM functionalities are powered with business-critical data. 

Customer Service Reps

Customer Service Reps spend all day addressing ad hoc customer needs. However, problems arise when they are not empowered with the information or capabilities to successfully address these needs, often leading to unhappy customers. They need an ability to quickly dive into different points of customer interaction to identify where and why problems may have occurred; without having to log into their ERP system.

Unless your CRM is aggregating customer data from all sources, your Customer Service Reps may face the same issues that your disgruntled customers are; they don’t have the ability to efficiently address needs.   

Sales Managers

For sales managers, it is important that they are able to track performance for individual sales reps, sales teams, and their entire sales force as a whole. Therefore, they need customizable reporting that allows them to see aggregate and individual performance, allowing them to effectively manage large groups of employees. Additionally, they need a CRM that presents accurate, real-time data to ensure that they are fairly evaluating performance.

C-Suite

Like managers, C-Suite personnel need real-time, accurate reporting to evaluate performance across their salesforce. They have even less time to spend digging through reports, therefore it is vital that reporting be customizable, accurate and easily accessible. However, as the leaders of the organization they need the capabilities to get as much or as little information as they want, exactly when they want it.

Accounting

Your accounting team is responsible for handling a multitude of A/R needs, but finding the information they need isn’t always a piece of cake. Whether they need to access all aging and payment history or view invoice and order information, it’s vital that they have the needed tool to quickly access accurate information.

IT

There is no need to maintain a separate ticketing and tasks support system when your IT department can manage all of this on a single, connected platform. Allow them to view/manage support requests and tickets on the same platform where other customer management functions take place. 

Nobody benefits from a tool that isn’t used or doesn’t provide value, so give all your employees (not just sales reps) the tool they need to better manage customer relationships.

These employee tools are just a part of the entire CIMcloud offering.