|
Although they have implemented IT solutions for customer relationship management, more than 50% of the Romanian companies, with over 100 clients, do not use the management features of requests, offers and orders from their customers effectively.
This is the conclusion of a recent study, made by Advantage Software Factory, among approximately 100 key companies of the Financial and Banking, Real Estate, IT and Telecommunications and Consulting Services. However, over 90% of the companies keep complete information about customers, including interactions with them, in such applications.
The same study reveals that the least used CRM functionality is the approval flow for offers deviation. Only 9% of the surveyed companies use a transparent approval flow of the customized offers. It seems that for the rest of the companies, offers to certain customers are made almost secretly, based on discussions, most of them informal, between the sales representatives and the director of sales. The immediate disadvantage of this practice and of not using this feature is the impossibility to create knowhow about non-typical or personalized offers, at department level, thus keeping this experience only to managers or senior vendors’ level. Basically, it obstructs the possibility of standardization of the process for personalized or sensitive offers.
The module dedicated to marketing campaign management is used by 20% of the companies; it is an essential component for marketing departments, which offers the possibility to administrate a campaign and decide on targeted customers. The first conclusion to the absence of a marketing campaign management is an unproductive marketing campaign, in which almost all clients receive the same promotion, although only 10% of them could be interested in it.
Among the important but not sufficiently used functionalities, with only 35% of users, is the CRM module that supports inter-departmental communication (sales - marketing - technical support), with effect in enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty. Effective use of these features would allow sales representatives to have detailed knowledge about the problems and customers issues signalled to the technical department, which affect future sales, in a positive or negative way. Moreover, if companies have different sales teams, which are responsible for different groups of products, the management of the same customer relationship should be transparent to all sales people.
On the contrary, data collection about customers, tracking sales process (sales pipeline) or running available sales reports have a 100% usage.
"Although the CRM application modules facilitate decision making on a much wider area, such as forecasting sales in the next period, the analysis of the sales force or customer relationship management efficiency, Romanian companies are still not familiar with looking at the CRM application as a "one-stop-database" from which all hierarchical levels and business departments will benefit, by extracting information. Salespeople and technical support have not understood yet that CRM is not a form of monitoring daily activities by their superiors, but rather a tool by which they can manage their business themselves, more efficiently. On the other hand, the managers have not yet reached the level to use CRM functionalities in order to extract those data that help to analyze the relationship with customers better," said Marian ?tirbescu, Sales & Mkt Manager Advantage Software Factory.
Advantage Software Factory is a Romanian company with an experience of about 5 years on the Romanian market of CRM; the company provides consulting services and implementation of their own solutions, AnytimeCRM. |
