Nowadays business and technology are going hand in hand more often each day. It’s hard to imagine some company doing its accounting or accepting orders without some specific software. Many businessmen or bank workers are using their laptops in order to perform necessary tasks for their work. Many orders are happening online, coming to the company representatives in reports only. It seems like everything has been automated. But when it comes to communication with clients, the automatization level is way lower, especially when it comes to small and middle businesses. That’s when business solutions development is needed.
Every enterprise owner is willing to make every process as effective as possible. But as practice shows, very often each worker in the sales department left to himself. Where can he store all information about customers? How can he follow the relationship history with each of them? What should he follow to see, how effective his work is? The solution is different from one person to another: notes, catalogs, Excel’s spreadsheets etc. How much more simple and convenient it would be to establish a single system for the whole company!
There is a solution: ERP or CRM development. This is a special software, which greatly simplifies the work process of employees by automatizing most routine and cyclically recurring tasks. How?
His Majesty CRM-plier
Let me start with some short descriptions. CRM is not just some data store. It has many useful functions, which I’ll discuss a little later. It’s a kind of an instrument to optimize regular tasks and provide more clients
‘m gonna mention CRM software development as well. It’s a short name of a system, which consists of few different apps to collect every piece of information to the single database. Regardless of the type of system you’re gonna use, you have two variants to choose from: you can either buy the “almost ready” system and add few things if needed, or order custom CRM development specifically for your needs. Also, you should think about task types, that you want to correct, problems to be solved, set a list of data types and parameters to sort it and think about report system. When you get answers to these points you are ready to work with CRM development company.
And now let’s take a look at the following list of CRM opportunities:
- Create your clients’ database. Add all the information you can receive to know your customers better in order to satisfy their needs and get the best support possible. Keep the info updated.
- Follow your relations history with every customer. Thanks to custom CRM system development, it is being formed automatically in the particular contact window. But it’s still important to mention the order’s status and/or the reason of refusal. Otherwise, you are risking to lose many customers.
- Send newsletters according to your clients base. Be sure to study the segmentation of customers and actively use this function. Set specific goals for each group of customers.
- Use the local planner. The main benefit is in the opportunity to connect any task with a specific client, price or product right in the system.
- Create and use electronic documents instead of paper ones. It surely saves time and trees, as well as gives an opportunity to change anything before printing.
- Follow steps of your enterprise: analyze the statistics of your company results in order to provide best solutions. Send special attention to sales funnel. It can help you to see what you need to improve.
- Differentiate your rights. Easy to explain: managers have to see and know everything, so they have access to every task. They decide, who can receive every particular task and give him specific rights and access to the data needed.
- Use integrated telephony: perform your phone calls via the Internet browser due to dynamics CRM development. Thus manager can control employees’ work and save money from a specific equipment. Also, you won’t lose any call, because even the missed one are being fixed by the system. The manager which is free at the moment can not only accept the call but also view full information on this customer and perform different actions at that very moment.
- Connect your customers to the so-called “Open Lines” on different messengers or create chat-bots to solve common problems.
- You can also add a calendar, inner social network for company employees or disk for data storage in case your enterprise needs it.
- Change the data format if necessary.
Those are the most common details if to talk about the development of CRM. Let’s talk a bit more about ERP advantages.
Make it ERP-practical
If to talk about ERP development, its software has some general basis, which can be developed furthermore in future, after testing and maintenance results. This type of system can offer you unexpected solutions due to its seamlessness. ERP system development is understandable for everyone because it’s easy to use. Its always been elaborated according to the latest practice experience. It wouldn’t take long for your workers to learn how to work with it.
Custom ERP development is also good because it leaves an opportunity for further changes. There’s always a chance to make your system more complete with modern tendencies. ERP software design is being made according to your views, desires, and goals. The system is completely yours, you are the master and only you can decide, what should be changed or whether the changes are truly needed. You do not need to wait for requests and functional improvements.
Yet the main problem in having an ERP-system is money. You will truly need to pay a lot: you’ll need to how a professional team of many technical and business specialists. You have to be ready to lose some money during the transition period, while your workers will be getting used to new circumstances. You’ll need a lot of patience as well while all that software will be prepared for you. You’ll have to pay for the uniqueness of your project. So that’s why you need to remember: there are no big results that can be achieved in a short time and little efforts. The process of development can take few months, but it will be worth it.
Simple solutions.
The Internet is literally crowded by people ready to offer easy and ready-to-start general solutions, regardless of the business type. But what kind of business company is ready to sacrifice time and differences in order to push its work into general templates? That’s why using them isn’t a very brave and smart solution of automatization topic. The best way to higher up your business efficiency is ordering CRM or ERP development services.
How to determine the development team you need.
Here you will find an order of actions to determine the need for an automation system and to check if the team of specialists can meet your needs:
- Set the primary goal. We were talking about it already in this article. You’re gonna consider your expectations and your business’ needs in order to choose a specific CRM solution.
- Think about your weak sides. Analyze your customer’s approaches and try to find something, that your team is lacking. Don’t think, that small problem isn’t a problem. In most cases, such situations create the most part of the customers’ loss.
- Search for the simplest solution. It doesn’t mean to sit and expect a problem to solve itself. It really Twitter requires searching and considering alternatives.
- Carefully study your developer’s experience. So they understand your point of view and goals? Have they done anything similar before? What is their customer’s feedback? How did they do that?
- Check their fit. Talk to them, tell them details you have discovered are valuable for your project. Ask them about solutions they have to offer and see, how much do they know.
- Check how do they work. Do they ready to change something in the process? What is their plan in case they fail to do something important? Do they strive to do their best to create the final product that is convenient for you?
Of course, those points are not strict and necessary to observe, but that can be useful if you are ordering CRM/ERP development for the first time.
Conclusions.
Both CRM and ERP systems were created to help people with their organization processes, and there isn’t anything superfluous. Every function has its goal, and the main goal is to relieve staff of manual operations and optimize working hours.
To conclude, I have to admit: new systems development is often performed by huge companies, with specific guidelines and expectations. Small and medium business representatives can satisfy their needs by so to say “solutions from the box”, and that is a case when a standard solution is the best option. Nevertheless, managers should put their business interests first in order to see, whether they need such a huge interruption or not.
p.s. here are some examples of CRM & ERP systems we’ve developed before:
