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Bespoke CRM Software and Customer Management Software

We had a client come to us looking for a customised CRM system. In the past, they had used other CRM software, but nothing truly fitted their exact needs. While the other software worked adequately, they knew they weren’t operating 100% efficiency with something not designed for them.

 

What were they looking for?

Our client was looking for a CRM system that:

• Managed their customers in a flexible manner


• Managed prospects and partners


• Provided suitable staff tools to ensure follow ups and tasks are kept


• Included a scheduling and alerting system


• Provided bespoke features for the service they offered (event management)

While our existing CRM system could provide many of these features; further modifications were needed to match their requirements exactly. This is one of the advantages to our system – it’s flexible and extendable enough to fit a wide range of business needs and requirements.

 

Flexible and Efficient CRM Software

Many of the existing features in our CRM system already matched our clients’ requirements. For example:

1. Customers and prospects management
Our system allows you to quickly view customers and prospects, their details, main contacts, notes and who’s managing them all in one place. This includes tracking them through your sales funnel.

2. Automatic alert system
Automatic alerts are dispatched on a daily basis (configurable) to ensure your staff knows which customers need attention. This means that you’ll never again forget to chase any hot leads or prospects.

3. User scheduling
Manage your sales team and their priorities to maximise performance. At a glance you can see who’s working on what and their schedules.

 

Bespoke CRM Software

Despite our CRM software handling some of the requirements, we still had to expand to cater for specifics needs. This mainly focused around the service they offered, which was event management.

These needed to be managed much like customers. So for example, some requirements were:

• Assign event managers
  A separate area was also created here to list key personnel, like speakers and presenters if required.


• Manage supporting documents (PDF files, etc)
  For management of supporting documents like brochures, marketing materials, directions, etc. Everything is stored in one central location per event.


• Budget management
  Accurately keep track of event costs to and record where budgets are being attributed to.


• Note keeping
  Record all vital information pertaining to one event in one location. This provides a central place for people to keep up to date with the specifics.

The modular design of our CRM software allows for us to easily apply these customisations to deliver a truly bespoke offering to our client.

Furthermore, the client also needed the ability to quote and invoice events directly through the CRM software. This ensures that everything is managed in one central location, from initial contact, to quoting, to sale and to payment.

The new system matches the client’s needs exactly; providing all the advantages of CRM software tailored to their business needs at a reasonable price.

 

Get Your Bespoke CRM Software

Are you looking to efficiently manage your sales and operations in union? As demonstrated above, our CRM software is perfect for meeting this goal. Contact us today on 0800 081 1688 to discuss your requirements in detail.

 

 

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Centralised Order Management Including Amazon and eBay

Many eCommerce websites will expand to sell their products in a number of different marketplaces, including the likes of eBay and Amazon. Getting your products in front of as many people as possible is obviously one good way of increasing sales, and these marketplaces offer huge opportunities to do just that.

While the opportunities for increased sales are definitely enticing and real, expanding to cover such channels can lead to unexpected headaches in the way you manage your orders and accounts.

Entering a new marketplace means playing by their rules, especially when it comes to following the processes they put in place. This can increase the complexity of not only your order fulfilment process, but also your accounting and customer management processes.

In most cases, it’s a complicated judgement on how to introduce these new processes to your business. If this is wrong, it can result in many more hours wasted on admin tasks, rather than work that increases your profit.

 

What options are available for businesses?

Many businesses are unaware that you don’t have to completely manage your orders and accounts directly through these marketplaces. In fact, many will allow you to export and import changes in bulk, which means you can lift out your order processing, accounts and customer management and bring it to your own, in house system.

For example, we have developed a system that allows for products to be managed through a central admin system, with any updates proliferated through to external marketplaces. I.e. if you had an eCommerce site, you could update a price on this and our system would automatically adjust the price of your eBay listing.

This type of automation and synchronisation can save hours and hours over the course of a year. In the situation above, a five minute job quickly escalates to a 30 minute job when you have to update your eCommerce site, eBay listings, Amazon products and any other marketplaces.

 

Manage your business how you want

The initial investment for a system like this pays for itself in time saved through the alternative of managing all market places individually. While you may want individual prices, descriptions and options per marketplace; it’s unlikely that the way you handle orders or accounts will change depending on where the item was sold.

It is therefore beneficial to bring this into a centralised and unified system. This will have the immediate benefits of:

• Centralised order management – never miss or delay order fulfilment again


• Keep your existing processes in place for managing orders and accounts


• Less chance of mistakes happening as staff are using the same systems they always have


• Snapshot of all business activity in one location – no need to log into multiple accounts

The main benefit is the cost savings that is made through reduced admin. These can be significant over the course of a year and will allow for your business to grow and scale effectively; resulting in more profits over time.

 

Customise your system for improved efficiency

We have helped customers achieve this with our integrated marketplace systems. Whether you have an existing system or are new and looking for retail website development, it can really benefit to consider how to integrate all your channels effectively.

In addition, the systems we can supply are highly configurable so they can match your processes exactly. You won’t have to change to match the system; our development will ensure that the system works for you in the most cost effective way.

 

Centralised management for your business

Moving your admin into a centralised location is a great efficiency gain and is suitable for growing businesses looking to expand. If you’re looking to manage multiple marketplaces from one location and increases productivity, then contact us today on 0800 081 1688 to discuss your requirements.

 

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Search Engine Reputation Management for Small Businesses

People love to voice their opinion about the products they buy and the services they receive. The internet has opened the flood gates for your customers to leave direct feedback about your business – both good and bad.

No where is this more evident than with eCommerce. Product reviews are common throughout eCommerce sites across the web and their propagation and popularity proves that customers love to give feedback.

This type of feedback is no longer just for eCommerce sites. For businesses that don’t have inbuilt systems to manage customer feedback, your customers may just turn to another source to have their say.

 

Online Reputation Management

Many sites like Yelp, Review Centre and even Google provide a forum for your customers to leave feedback about your business and their experience when interacting with you. It’s easier than ever for your customers to voice their opinion; so the pressure to deliver a great experience has never been higher.

Online Reputation Management (ORM) is the process of managing how your company or brand is perceived online – and will directly involve gathering and interacting with these customers leaving exactly this type of feedback.

In most cases, a business or individual looking for ORM is probably suffering from overexposure of bad reviews or negative feedback and is looking to address this. Perhaps when searching the company name or brand name, the search results are highlighting pages that aren’t flattering to you.

This scenario can have a huge impact on your bottom line. Research suggests that 1 in 3 visitors to your site will research your reputation online before engaging with you. Imagine if a third of your visitors find negative reviews while deciding to purchase – see how easily this can affect your sales?

 

What can I do?

Every situation is different, but there are a number of things to look out for. The main goal of any reputation management would be to reduce the visibility of these negative reviews as much as possible. There are various ways of achieving this, all of which will depend on your personal circumstances.

However, not all negative reputation is equal. For example, what if a competitor of yours was purposely spreading this false info across the web? It doesn’t happen very often, but the possibility is there and spotting it can be difficult.

Ideally, the solution is to optimise the search results for your keywords in a way that promotes positive reviews and feedback and eliminates the visibility of any negative pages. Of course, this isn’t as simple as it sounds.

 

Own your feedback loop

Another tactic is to own your feedback loop and capture as much negative feedback internally as possible. If you can achieve this, it can be an extremely powerful way of developing positive feedback that is far more useful than your typical, generic, overly praising “I love this company!” style of reviews you often see.

Consider the following example:

A customer has a complaint about your business, but your feedback loop is well prepared so this is directed internally (rather than them leaving feedback on other, public websites). You go above and beyond to fix their issue and deliver outstanding service – as you typically would.

At this stage, the customer is now impressed and happy with you, and is more likely to leave positive feedback. This may include the initial complaint, but it will demonstrate how you solve issues and this will go much further in establishing trust than the above example.

 

Online Reputation Management for your business

If you’re in a similar situation or experiencing any of the above issues, contact us today. We can help in managing your reputation and ensuring your business is viewed in the best possible light. Contact us today on 0800 081 1688.

 

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Enhance Productivity with Paperless Online Business Applications

As pointed out by this BBC article, the NHS is on a mission to reduce waste caused by inefficient processes. This should be a goal that all businesses aim towards, but is often held back by a desire to keep comfortable and stick with the ‘status quo’. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it, right?

Well, according to the BBC article:

"PwC suggests a potential £4.4bn could be put back into the NHS with better use of information and technology."

That’s a huge amount of money which can be saved by becoming paperless. Take a look at your own processes; are they as efficient as they could be?

Realistically, most businesses are not operating at optimum efficiency and this leads to wasted time and effort on processes that are not profitable.

The NHS is a primary example of this and by modernising their systems; they expect to save a fortune.

In fact, we’ve done our bit in helping the NHS meet this goal by developing a new and efficient booking system for the Birmingham and Solihull NHS Cluster. This is a totally new booking system built for maximum efficiency that has already transformed their work processes – successfully delivering value and savings.

 

Moving Away and Becoming Paperless

Recently, we worked with a customer that was processing orders through a sales department. Their sales team would work collecting all orders made that day (through various means, including phone) and build a central spreadsheet with all the appropriate details.

At a designated time, orders for the day were cut off and the spreadsheet was printed. This could be quite large and span multiple pages depending on how many orders came in. The next step was to fax this over to their warehouse for processing.

The warehouse would pick and pack the orders and individually mark down on the faxed sheets the status for each order. When the warehouse was completed, they would fax back to the sales department so they could manually alert each customer to the status of their order and when to expect delivery.

As you can see, the process is very manual and there would be no real time updates. If the sales department needed to know the status of an order, they would have to call the warehouse and hope the office was manned and that they had the paperwork nearby (i.e. not on the opposite side!) to check… realistically, this meant they couldn’t determine the order status until the warehouse were finished.

 

How an Online System can help you

This inefficiency was costing the business money and sacrificing the level of service they could provide their customers. They asked us to step in and with our knowledge; we were able to deliver a system that:

• Used a central online order tracking system where all orders would appear alongside their status (e.g. payment processed, packaged, dispatched, etc).


• Was able to filter orders by status, type, location (and any number of other ways) to display a customised screen suitable for business needs.


• Allowed all members of the staff and warehouse to use a real time list of orders. The warehouse would then process orders as they came in (as apposed to waiting for the sales fax) and the sales team could see real time updates.


• Automatically alert customers to the change in their order status, so the sales team no longer had to manually take this action. This means they can concentrate on what they need to do; sell.

These were some of the bottlenecks in efficiency we solved for our customer. We developed a system that worked for their business and by helping turn them paperless, we saved them money.

 

Choosing the Right Partner for Moving to Paperless

It is precisely this reason that we were picked by the Birmingham and Solihull NHS to develop their new paperless and efficient booking system.

We were able to aptly identify where improvements could be made in their current process and translate this to an application that is reliable and delivers on everything such a large organisation needs. This is us playing our part to help them become a little less paper dependant!

If you would like to see similar improvements for your business, be sure to contact us today on 0800 081 1688. We have worked and developed many systems that have saved businesses thousands, including warranty systems, online CRM software, staffing recruitment software and more...

We can do the same for you.

 

 

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