Interacting with clients is smooth and efficient when CRM and ERP are linked

11/21/2011 at 12:14 pm by The Sage ERP Team

There are quite a few metrics and valuations that go into making large-scale business decisions, but at the end of the day, companies need to be able to provide superior products and services to their clients. Without doing that, there is little that marketing or efficiency can help them to accomplish. Consequently, while CRM systems and ERP application suites are wonderful organizational tools in their own rights, they provide quite a bit more value when linked.

The main benefit of a unified front office and back of house is that employees are able to spend more time serving customers and doing so with a greater degree of care than might otherwise be possible. ERP systems allow stock items and organizational resources to be judged while CRM software governs the ways in which customers are helped. When these processes are essentially combined, many more possibilities appear.

Answering queries
There are many tasks that call center agents and sales professionals perform, but one of the most important might be answering customers’ questions. Ordering can be automated, done online or accomplished via face-to-face meetings. However, when clients need to know about deliveries, they need accurate information. Employees that have access to both customer information and ERP-generated records can give more helpful advice and data than might otherwise be the case.

Responding to demand
Enterprise resource planning may be primarily appealing to organizations because it allows them to notice trends and plan ahead. When certain processes require additional resources and materials, ERP applications help to draw attention to this in time to actually do something about it. CRM solutions give additional data that makes understanding company needs even more clear because it shows which products and items are most in demand need to be procured.

Coordinating campaigns
Companies often make business-wide pushes to execute particular plans or campaigns, which can require all of their parts to move in concert with one another. These situations, such as when new products are rolled out, can eat up a lot of the time, staff and resources of an organization. Fortunately, ERP and CRM systems that are linked to one another can make such an effort much easier by coordinating interactions with clients and the available stores of a new good or improved service.