You get the greatest value if your CRM-ware combines the flexibility of sales and marketing software with the structure and control of ERP.
I have had the opportunity to interact with global companies for nearly 20 years, and one of the most important requirements is their ability to manage the entire customer lifecycle. By entire, I mean every interaction or transaction wherever it occurs, by whom and when. The way to achieve this is a customer relationship management (CRM) solution that can present all your customer interactions—not some of them, but all of them.
In an increasingly more complex business environment with business units, partners and deliverables spread all over the world, it’s a huge challenge to present a single, instant view of your customer operations. You get the greatest value if your CRM-ware combines the flexibility of sales and marketing software with the structure and control of enterprise resource planning (ERP). Which is exactly what Embedded CRM from IFS does.
A critical instrument that facilitates – an integrated CRM and ERP
As a sales representative, your focus is on developing customer relations and driving new business opportunities to meet your quotas. Therefore, CRM software is a critical instrument that facilitates administrative routines, such as capturing customer activities and opportunities, and allows easy access to any type of customer data as you need it—anywhere and at any time. Moreover, for management, business decisions must be based on up-to-date information in the CRM system, so opportunity values and due dates need to be correct to present a correct pipeline.
Embedding CRM system in your ERP gives you the best of both worlds. And it’s easier to use because of its single user interface. I think we’ve all experienced the fact that large volumes of data and features can increase complexity, but as IFS CRM comes pre-packaged with seamless workflows, you can benefit from other smart innovations in IFS Applications such as IFS Lobby, IFS Streams, Microsoft Office integrations, and the Google-type free enterprise application search.
Tune to meet your unique requirements
No two businesses are exactly alike, so you need the capability to add fields and to configure and tune the system to meet your unique business requirements. To use software language, you benefit from the power of a dynamic and extendable data model that lets the system behave and respond the way you want.
IFS CRM comes, of course, with smartphone apps with off-line capabilities that offer you access to customer data right in your pocket.
My final comment is about cost. We all know that integrations and diverse user interfaces and basic data structures drive complexity, risk and cost. A built-in—not built-on—embedded CRM system means that you reduce implementation time, complexity and TCO.
