Advantages of BPM/CRM combination Better data management CRM does a good job managing data that is directly correlated with customer accounts and the sales pipeline. But what about data outside of CRM? Lead generation, for example, employs diverse data sources, CRM being just one of them. BPM extracts pertinent data from these various sources to accelerate sales and marketing initiatives. Maximized selling opportunities With CRM, you get a better insight into your customers, their purchasing patterns, your communications with them, and the steps that have to be undertaken next, if any. With BPM, you have a clearer sales objective that may include new and existing products being pushed by your marketing department. These two together, you understand which products your customers might need or respond to, expanding your cross-selling and upselling capabilities. Speedier resolution of customer issues When customers call in for issues, they expect prompt resolution. If an issue is known and your customer representatives have been forewarned, they generally already know what to tell your customers. If an issue is specific to just one customer, like a product that hasn’t been delivered to his doorstep yet, a combined BPM/CRM system means easier product tracking and pinpointing of the factors hampering prompt delivery. This may be an issue with inventory, order or payment hitch with a partner supplier, for example. Accurate revenue prediction CRM tracks metrics that include number of prospects, potential customers that are already in the database, sales calls made within a sales cycle, new and prospective customers placing orders, customers being retained, leads your sales representatives are following up on, the length of time or number of calls needed to close a sale, among others. Combine all that with BPM, specifically customer information and sales data that you can utilize for accounting, invoicing and other financial processes, the ensuing revenue tracking and prediction becomes a lot simpler. Maximized returns on CRM investment Depending on the needs of your organization, your CRM software investment can range from zero to thousands of dollars. While CRM applications are now the technological bloodlines of most customer service functions, when you combine them with BPM software, you unleash the full potential of your CRM system. You get a better handle on your sales and marketing objectives and how they’re accomplished through CRM, whether or not the deployed processes are contributing to those objectives, which areas need improvement and which industry best practices can be adopted to boost process efficiencies, and ultimately, your company’s bottom line. Better mistake-versus-accomplishment insight The end goal of BPM can be to (1) to continually enhance business processes, (2) create process roadmaps, or (3) automate workflows. Integrating BPM with CRM gives you the benefit of utilizing dashboards, charts, graphs, templates and other reporting tools that accurately measure the profitability of each customer, and customers gained and lost. This way, you have a better insight into the types of customers to concentrate your marketing efforts on, which then will allow you to effectively devise plans and strategies that will help your business avoid unprofitable pursuits. This article is an original contribution by Maricel Rivera
Posted on: Thu, 20 Mar 2014 04:52:13 +0000
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