This time next year……
2010 2011 2012 2013 will be the year that CRM is adopted by small businesses across Northern Ireland and beyond. Sound familiar? CRM has been, in the main, adopted by Northern Ireland’s larger companies but every year for the past few years we’ve expected SME’s to take the plunge into CRM adoption. Some have but a lot haven’t. This is primarily due to budget constraints throughout the economic recession.
So why will 2014 finally be the year CRM is adopted by the majority of SME’s across Northern Ireland?
- The Cloud – The ability to pay for your software on a month-by-month basis greatly cuts down on initial expenditure and a Cloud based CRM solution makes it far easier to receive upgrades and to scale up as your business grows.
- Mobile CRM – Anytime, anywhere access is another huge pulling factor. Sales and Marketing professionals need to be able to log into their CRM system from their mobile phone, iPad, tablet, whatever device they are using and get the same experience they would on a desktop computer. This is now possible and is persuading many SME’s in Northern Ireland to take the plunge into the world of CRM.
- Social CRM – The world has gone social and businesses need to understand how their brand is being portrayed on social media and engage, in real time, with their customers (and potential customers). With Social Listening you can listen to your customers and analyse what they’re saying on social networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The fact that this can now all be pulled into your CRM is a huge draw for Marketing and Sales professionals.
SME’s need to understanding the true benefit of implementing a CRM solution and the impact it will have on their organisation. CRM/technology is only an enabler, however a CRM project gives you the opportunity to look at how you currently work and reassess it. It allows you to understand your processes and automate any non-value adding stages to increase efficiencies – many companies use CRM projects as a time to strategically plan the direction of the organisation and look at process improvement. CRM can offer a range of benefits very quickly including some of the below:
Improve communication
- Internally between teams – centralising communications and reducing lots of people CC’d on an e-mail
- Externally to your customer – better visibility of what other colleagues have said as well as seeing a history of the communication. The ability to auto generate messages and improve marketing campaigns
Account Management
- Go to one location in one system to see everything you need to know about the customer. Save time moving between systems, asking colleagues and going through your notes by creating a customer centric system
Forecasting
- Gain better visibility of the organisations/your teams/individual’s pipelines to help balance work and reduce peaks and troughs
- Streamline your sales process to guide sales people from initial contact to closed sale as efficiently as possible
Increase Customer Satisfaction
- Deal with customer enquiries and complaints effectively
- Record a history of enquiries to track repeat questions/complaints
Social insight
- Use social media to engage with your customers and understand what they are saying about your brand and products
- Create cases/enquiries from social media feeds like Twitter and Facebook
With the Cloud you can implement a CRM system quickly and at a much lower upfront cost than ever before. The ability to access CRM from any device, browser, within Outlook or on your Tablet/Mobile means that your CRM can be as mobile as your workforce. Streamline apps allow sales people (and other CRM users) to get in and out of the system quickly reducing the need for late nights doing admin or spending a day a week in the office catching up on paperwork (sound familiar?). Social technology is now embedded in CRM allowing you to get an idea of what your customers are saying about you online – increasing the channels you can engage with your customers. These three trends make CRM a much more desirable and realistic solution for Northern Ireland SMEs.
So… In 2014 SME’s WILL adopt CRM in Northern Ireland.
Please feel free to leave a comment or send me a tweet with your thoughts and opinions.
