Year: 2017

See Who Opens Your Email With ConvergeHub (The #1 CRM for Small and Medium Businesses)

We all know being in sales is not always an easy job. Nevertheless, users of ConvergeHub are equipped with the right tools, which help you to start your day guiding you through your most pressing tasks. Taking a step further, how would you feel if you can also see who has opened your emails? ConvergeHub email tracking and delivery status update keep you informed on all emails sent from ConvergeHub, CRM for Small Businesses.

We all know being in sales is not always an easy job. Nevertheless, users of ConvergeHub are equipped with the right tools, which help you to start your day guiding you through your most pressing tasks.
Taking a step further, how would you feel if you can also see who has opened your emails?

ConvergeHub email tracking and delivery status update keep you informed on all emails sent from ConvergeHub, CRM for Small Businesses.

Once your customers have opened the email, using ConvergeHub you will be able to see how many of them have viewed the email.

Pretty neat, right?

Using ConvergeHub CRM, once you know your engaged prospects who have interacted with your email message, you can easily interact with them for cross-sell or up-sell activities.

CRM ConvergeHub

So connect your email account to ConvergeHub now and start tracking your emails to customers. With email tracking, we have left behind those days when you had to speculate if your customers are opening the emails, you have sent to them.

Every email in ConvergeHub has an open and delivery status:

Sent/Attempted: Total number of email sent to recipients.

Viewed:  Number of recipients that opened the email any number of times.

Opted Out: User has chosen not to receive any promotional emails.

Bounce/Invalid: The total emails sent that could not be effectively delivered to the recipient’s inbox.

Click-thru Link: The number of email recipients who clicked on one or more links contained in a given email.

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Hope you find these email statuses helpful. Happy Selling!

Tips to follow for achieving 100% CRM adoption and engagement

We are all aware that CRM is good for business. In fact, the truth is, while CRM increases sales by 29% (SalesForce), according to Nucleus Research the average ROI of any CRM is $8.71, for every dollar spent on this platform. However, having said that, one fact we cannot choose to ignore, is that not all CRM implementations are successful. The main reason behind lagging implementation of CRM is poor user adoption rate. Employee resistance, insufficiency in funds and time, lack of preparation and planning are certainly other reasons that escalate the poor adoption rate of CRM.

We are all aware that CRM is good for business. In fact, the truth is, while CRM adoption increases sales by 29% (SalesForce), according to Nucleus Research the average ROI of any CRM is $8.71, for every dollar spent on this platform.

Therefore, as cost-cutting measures are the need of the day, in order to survive in businesses companies has no other options but to outperform their competitors without inflating their budgets, which has made CRM more important than ever nowadays.

To improve productivity and fine-tune business processes several small businesses and enterprises have accepted the gaining widespread popularity of CRM for retaining and finding new customers, as cloud-based CRM software applications are pretty simple to use.

However, having said that, one fact we cannot choose to ignore, is that not all CRM implementations are successful.

The main reason behind lagging implementation of CRM is poor user adoption rate.

Employee resistance, insufficiency in funds and time, lack of preparation and planning are certainly other reasons that escalate the poor adoption rate of CRM.

Moreover, as many CRM vendors have done a good job of touting the simplicity of their applications, many customers have taken the user-friendliness of CRM implementation of their Customer Relationship Management platform for granted.

But, just because something looks apparently simple and easy you must not take it for granted. Since, if you do not learn to implement and neglect the best practices, it will almost inevitably lead to a failure in reaping the maximum benefits from your CRM.

For an example, although brushing your teeth is relatively simple, but if you neglect to brush or do it altogether in the wrong way, this can lead to several maladies and even tooth loss.

Similarly, using your CRM software inefficiently or not using it consistently can cause detrimental consequences for your business.

Ineffective use of any CRM may not only lead to failure in follow-up on scheduled tasks and appointments, but it can also mismanage customer relationships, fail to capture important customer data and insights and in severe cases end up with the loss of potential customers in your business.

Here are some of the crucial low adoption rate statistics on CRM:

  • According to CSO Insights, 43% of CRM customers use even lesser than half the features they have in their CRM.
  • According to Really Simple Systems, 4 out of 5 senior executives say that their biggest challenge was getting their staffs to use the CRM consistently.

Hence, before you buy a CRM, remember employees of your business organization may always have different preconceived notions and perspectives about CRM system. While some may love it, others may hate using it too.

Therefore, before most of your employees get reluctant towards CRM, it is best to make them understand the benefits of this software and show them how it will make their work a lot easier every day.

Here are 7 awesome golden tips to make your CRM implementation a success story.

Give value to business needs and requirements

To make your CRM implementation worthwhile for your business, you must not only possess a good understanding of your business but also understand how your business interacts to satisfy your potential customer’s needs. CRM is more than a mere software solution. Rather Customer Relationship Management is a process of dealing with your customers through intelligent communications that call for a holistic approach. CRM consists of people, processes, and technology that combine to manage business relationships with your customers.

Involve employees from the beginning

Your employees are the ones who are going to use your CRM, and so they play the most significant role in successful implementation of your CRM platform. Hence, it is always wise to involve your employees from the very first stage of your CRM implementation itself. Exhibit to them how the new system is going to diminish their workload and make them understand how CRM is going to take their work on the upbeat.

As an additional gesture for early adoption of your CRM, encourage your employees to provide their opinion and feedback on the system. This will not only help in trimming down uncertainties of the software but also help you to acquire necessary support for proper utilization of your CRM system.

Hire a CRM Project Manager

It is always a good idea to get a CRM project manager on board in your company, who will act as a technical ambassador and a problem-solver of your employees in respect to your CRM system. As your CRM project manager is the one who will be responsible for overall implementation and management of your CRM platform, the person must possess good communication and IT skills. It is the project manager whose steps your employees must follow, as he/she will drive the project and also measure the achievement levels of your CRM related goals.

Remain patient and move one-step at a time

Once you buy the software, do not attempt to achieve too many tasks with your CRM at once or implement the customer relationship solution in a haphazard manner. As it is very natural, like many other buyers of CRM you may always find yourself being carried away and find it absolutely exciting to implement the new system which is capable of streamlining all your business processes but don’t forget all complex projects needs to be broken down into manageable and measurable phases with achievable goals. Hence, for successful implementation of your CRM, go slow with the platform and implement the software without hurrying, one-step at a time.

Train your employees

As every employee in any organization has different capacity to understand and accept changes, it is always advisable that you must arrange training sessions for all your employees. Also, make sure during the course of the training you must train each department, like marketing, sales, accounts and customer support reps, on their specialized needs. Appropriate training on the CRM’s functionalities often brings forth positive momentum of enthusiasm among the employees, for implementation of the CRM.

Set guidelines for your employees

It is really important that you must lay down guidelines in consultation with your CRM project manager, on what kind of data (as per your company’s goals), your employees should input in the CRM. Since, for proper utilization of your customer relationship software, it is utterly necessary that you must manage all tasks and activities with proper reporting structure as a part of your guidelines.

Make the CRM available anywhere

Last but not the least, in case your sales team also includes sales reps working in the field, you must buy a CRM, which has a mobile application in addition to the web-based version of the platform.

User experience should also be taken into consideration while implementing mobile CRM app. As desktop and mobile environments of any app need to be different, the mobile version of your CRM platform should be intuitive and fast. It should also be data contextual, minimizing keystrokes and automating information as much as possible, to streamline workflow.

It is only when your sales team, see that the CRM helps them to sell, and there are little or no difficulties involved in using the platform, it will escalate the adoption rate of your customer relationship software.

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Takeaway

Remember, CRM adoption is a journey and not a destination. By following the tips and guidelines given above, it will be easy for you to overcome the early hurdles to CRM adoption and make certain that your business reaps the best benefits offered by CRM.

If you have found this article helpful, let us know about your CRM adoption success story in the comments below.

Small Business Marketing for Black Friday

Timing is everything. Understand the logic of where and when to find your customers heavily weighs on your skills as you develop your holiday marketing strategy, which is especially true if you are working with a limited budget. Here is an illustration how you can manage your holiday promotions and strategize your Black Friday plans in a few different ways.

Timing is everything.

Understand the logic of where and when to find your customers heavily weighs on your skills as you develop your holiday marketing strategy, which is especially true if you are working with a limited budget.

Hence for an example, the time to start building and executing your Holiday Season’s is now.

If you wait to launch a Black Friday or a Christmas page until the last week of the upcoming events, you will miss the bulk in your potential traffic. Why?

It is because of this simple reason that people will be looking for Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday or Christmas and New Year’s items well before these festive days. Moreover, the web page you have created or added to your web site with the purpose of promoting your business during these holidays needs sufficient time to begin ranking and getting indexed by Google and other search engines.

So plan ahead.

Be really goofy and creative with your holiday promotion strategies. One thing that you must remember about the holidays is that general people remains usually in a good mood during these celebrated days of the years. Therefore, people look forward to getting away from the hustle-and-bustle of their daily mundane lifestyle during these days and actually spend quality time with their families. This means if you are promoting your holiday promotions for a faster response in your social media channels, your publications need to be in a good mood as well, as personification is fun sometimes. Hence, even if your brand’s voice is not usually humorous, use the holidays during this time of the year as an excuse to get a little lighter.

Here is an illustration how you can manage your holiday promotions and strategize your Black Friday plans in a few different ways:

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The Past, Present, and Future of AI in Customer Experience

It can be debated, for all the good things that technology has provided to businesses over the last few decades, it has also compromised on customer experience, which is a key element, responsible for growth in any businesses. Nevertheless, at present we have just starting to realize the potential of AI and understand the potential implication for Artificial Intelligence applications, to make a more than welcome impact in the field of customer experience.

You can thank IBM’s Watson for creating an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that was integrated into a plethora of businesses and customer facing applications. You can credit Facebook and Skype for their recent buzz about chatbots and the gold rush of venture capitalists and developers creating an onslaught of bot developing companies. You can laud Amazon’s Echo and Apple’s Siri for applying intelligence into mundane everyday devices and bringing to life; voice, as the new user interface.
Nevertheless, the truth remains that we have also at present just starting to realize the potential of AI in customer experience.

The-Past-Present-and-Future-of-AI-in-Customer-Experience-CTA

It can be debated, for all the good things that technology has provided to businesses over the last few decades, it has also compromised on customer experience, which is a key element, responsible for growth in any businesses.

Websites, call-centers, apps, emails and other offspring of modern digital technology have offered companies scopes to scale and automate customer engagements, while also ushering in process efficiency and cost management systems. However, this also came at a price. As over the years, numerous customers have complained that these very processes and systems were the very elements that undermined and hindered satisfaction for the buyer’s community.

Think about it now. When was the last time that you enjoyed calling up and talking to customer service representatives? Or, for that matter, when was the last instance you were transferred between customer support executives, where the next support personal was already plugged-in into your customer account details and had the precise knowledge as to why you were calling?

It is really a matter of grave disappointment even today that many aspects of the customer journey are still disconnected. A symptom of outdated business models, where many important touch-points are independently run, in many businesses. Of which, many of these touch-points do not connect or even talk to each other, the way customers expect them. Pragmatically, in several cases, they even actually compete or conflict with one another, over the course of the customer journey.

The main reason behind this slow growth for improving customer experience is that businesses are most often viewed as cost centers rather than long-term investments.

However, in the recent times with stellar improvement in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology, AI opens up an unforeseen opportunity for introducing more personalized intelligent and scalable engagements with the customers, to help them solve problems and accomplish tasks, which contributes to improved overall satisfaction for the buyer’s community.

However, for AI to break new grounds and introduce new values, customer support and marketing strategists must step into an innovative approach regarding CX and so consider its impact beyond its novelty. Moreover, this growth of AI in CX cannot be hampered or throttled by existing CX perspectives and processes that abound today’s customer experience analogies.

AI applications in CX

Whether you are a CEO (Chief Experience Officer), CIO, CCO (Chief Customer Officers) or CMO in marketing, IT or service industry, Artificial Intelligence represents a blank slate for ushering improvement and innovations in CX. For, with a mix of right vision and intent, customer experience can thrust businesses into an accelerated path of maturity that can guide any organization with a new purpose, which is based on customer centricity.

Here are some of the ways by which you can apply AI to CX:

Chatbots

Chatbots are virtual agents that can perform intelligent conversation, which can be applied to various customer engagement scenarios. Under their hood, chat bots are just sophisticated computer programs that are  developed to simulate conversations with humans online- and they are a long time in the making.

Recently, Mark Zuckerberg the co-founder and Chairman of Facebook, in partnership with 1800FLOWERS, demonstrated a Chabot application at the F8 development conference. In this demonstration, Mark Zuckerberg used Facebook Messenger to show how a consumer can talk to a virtual agent and order flowers of his/her choice, without leaving the window.

What was unique with this demonstration is that the Chabot was capable of picking up conversational cues to suggest floral arrangements that meet the customer’s personal needs and goals.

Although, other Chabot applications that have hit the market have borne witness to some of the challenges, such as poor design and execution, and a universal emphasis on transactions over experience, but in reality, bots can be truly so much more if we allow our imagination to unlock new possibilities.

Virtual concierge

Whether they are docked in hardware devices or messaging platforms, virtual concierges are bots that are designed for providing personalized services. In certain instances, these bots are partnered with human counterparts to perform the task as a ‘digital-butler’ to aid us in booking travels, buy or find gifts and commodities, coordinate with a human on specific experiences and others.

A recent example of using on-demand virtual concierge in the retail business is Operator, which is developed by Garrett Camp, who is also the co-founder of Uber.

Operator aims to build a new front door to eCommerce by using messaging app.

Another example of using virtual concierge in the travel business is Lola, which is developed by Kayak’s founder Paul English. Lola is a new travel app that personalizes engagements with human thoughts along with AI.

Virtual assistants/attendants

While virtual concierges are designed to aid users in achieving simple-to-complicated tasks, virtual assistants and attendants make use of Artificial Intelligence to help users with commands and questions. Microsoft Cortana, Amazon Echo, Google Now, and Apple Siri are some of the examples of virtual assistants/attendants, among others.

Recently, each of these applications is vying each other to become a platform for its implementation in common devices and appliances, collaborating with the developer communities to help extend the functionalities of these applications in horizontal and vertical planes.

Cognitive computing

Cognitive computing is the simulation of human thought process to augment human engagements. One of the most well-known platforms in this space is IBM’s Watson, the AI platform that is famous for beating-down human contestants on the wildly popular American TV show “Jeopardy”.

Cognitive computing involves self-learning systems to recognize patterns, mine data, process natural language and interact with people in a way that is intelligent, value-added and complementary.

One such example is Softbank’s partnership with IBM, for adding emotional and cognitive intelligence to its line of robots, named “Pepper”. These robots are deployed in financial, retail and hospitality settings for proving an enhanced personal form of engagements to the visiting customers.

In the present times, self-service options are limited to ATMs and kiosks, where the abilities of these platforms are limited to nurturing customer relationship up to transactions. With ongoing researches on cognitive assistance, people will soon be able to have a natural conversation with machines, where their words, gestures, and expressions will be understood by these systems.

Initial applications where AI can improve CX

Although AI pilots can be used for, testing and learning everywhere, in a customer journey mapping exercise- here is a list of where AI applications are implemented today.

  • Personalization
  • Questions/answers
  • Customer self-service
  • Pre-emptive routing
  • Product/service innovation
  • Task performance/management
  • Predictive service/sales
  • Augmented engagement
  • Digital concierge/assistant collaboration

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Takeaway

Today’s customers live in an omnichannel world, where AI provides a means to facilitate up to date and precise responses across all platforms, at any and every point in the customer journey.

This represents a new ground for what is referred to as ‘conversational commerce’. Where as an alternative for resolving disjointed touch points and instances, AI will aid the enterprises to stitch together a more natural and complete customer journey to integrate, improve, and re-imagine customer experience.

Customer engagement is not a cost center, but it is an investment in customer relationship. So whether it is integrating back-end CRM, introducing new touch points; predicting trends, behaviors and expectations successfully, AI implementation needs a new blueprint with imagination and ingenuity, which will not only enhance CX but can improve every aspect of any business in the long run.

Why Should You Consider Integrating CRM With ERP?

With a plethora of consumer data, being generated on a daily basis, business owners are presently experiencing more complex business environments than ever before. Since, if this customer centric data is not handled in a proper manner, it can become the biggest pain point for efficiency with decision-making, forecasting and ultimately- the purchase and sales processes. Happy customers are the most valuable and possessed assets to any business. But, how can you successfully deal with all these challenges, whilst building up profitable customer relationships? To combat this dilemmatic issue, businesses typically buy CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software solutions separately or mostly integrate a CRM with an ERP.

With a plethora of consumer data, being generated on a daily basis, business owners are presently experiencing more complex business environments than ever before. Since, if this customer centric data is not handled in a proper manner, it can become the biggest pain point for efficiency with decision-making, forecasting and ultimately- the purchase and sales processes.
Happy customers are the most valuable and possessed assets to any business. But, how can you successfully deal with all these challenges, whilst building up profitable customer relationships?
To combat this dilemmatic issue, businesses typically buy CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software solutions separately or mostly integrate a CRM with ERP.

The advantage of integrating these two enterprise business solutions help CRM to deal with front end information such as prospecting, recording customer interactions, sales tracking, pipeline management and creating/evaluating marketing campaigns.

So, while CRM helps businesses to manage relationships and sales pipelines, understand prospect and clients, and upsell and cross-sell products, ERP software is entrusted to handle critical backend processes. These ERP back end processes include supply chain management details, purchase history, accounting information, financial data, and billing and shipping details.

Although apparently having separate systems might appear more manageable, but integrating into one complete software solution certainly, boosts productivity and streamlines business processes to a greater extent.

Statics indicates that ERP provides an inventory accuracy level of 98% whilst it increases the order-to-shipment time by 24% and considering satisfied customers are the most precious assets to any business, it is not hard to understand the benefits of a unified system.

With these in mind, here are some of the other advantages of CRM and ERP integration for business owners, pertaining to all ranks.

Why is this integration so crucial?

Firstly, if you implement ERP and CRM systems as a unified business process you do not have to constantly worry about keeping these two databases synchronized. Any changes in one system will not have to be transferred to the other manually, which most often results in slower operations and an increased risk of database errors.

So implementing an integrated CRM process to your ERP solution will make certain that both these systems use one common shared database, whereby any update in any of the systems will be visible instantaneously.

This will not only help in faster billing but it will also provide a clearer look at all levels of your commercial enterprise’s sales process.

360-degree customer view

One of the major rewards of ERP and CRM integration is that it allows an overall view of your customers. Right from sales and support to accounting and finance departments, these systems provide an unparalleled visibility on your customer’s buying habits, order history, and general needs, which in turn helps in building long lasting relationships with the customers, and finding out if there is potential for any other future growths.

This data also provides you with enhanced analytics and reporting, so that you can track any changes that may happen in your customer’s preferences and loyalty towards your products or services.

Increased mobility

Imagine your sales team is in the middle of an important touch-point thought a customer’s journey having access to all the orders and customer inventory, alongside pricing and product information- will it not help in closing deals more efficiently? Having up-to-date data during customer interactions and not afterward, indeed make a lot of difference while closing sales.

Effective integration of ERP with CRM not only streamlines information but it also helps in keeping everyone in your business on the same page.

Managers can also keep track of all critical operational issues in real time, integrating these systems that help them to make more informed business decisions on the go.

Faster access to vital information

A fully integrated CRM with ERP provides employees with access to information with a push of a button in real time. Data like inventory levels, customer financials, shipments, order history, payments, pricing, returns and more are instantaneously synchronized across different platforms, which makes employees more efficient in serving the customers.

In other words, CRM and ERP help in cutting down of loss in business which mostly happened in the past due to negative experiences of the customers, when customer service representatives had to trawl through different systems or inquire with other employees for a customer’s requested order status update.

Eliminate mind-numbing data entry and duplication

Although both CRM and ERP hold the same data (account and contact information), it is used for different purposes.

While CRM focuses on sales, support, and prospecting, ERP, on the other hand, centers on keeping track of warehouse inventory, shipping, billing address and more. The ERP/CRM integration terminates the tedious necessity of duplicating data entry, whereby eliminating human errors during the duplication process.

Moreover, any change, addition, removal of new entries, custom fields, or database is also instantly altered in an integrated CRM/ERP system, which lessens the time needed for editing of the data.

In addition, while quoting for a customer or a prospect in CRM, sales reps can quote the most accurate prices and discount pricings using the integrated ERP solution to retrieve real time inventory and updated pricing information.

Reduced IT and training overheads

In a report published by Association for Talent Development, it showed that businesses spend an annual average of around $1,208 and approximately 31.5 working hours on training their employees, which is a substantial amount and time lost on the part of the company.

So, when CRM is integrated into an ERP, the training session also goes down, as instead of individual systems the training can be implemented on a combined platform.

Moreover learning ERP and CRM as silo software at the same time can be a challenging task for any employee, which can result in poor adoption rates.

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Now that you have learned about the core advantages of integrating these two most important systems required for running your business, we would also like to hear your comments on this article below.

Why Startup Companies Need A CRM System?

Even before asking why businesses need CRM system, it is really important to understand exactly what a Customer Relationship Management system is. In short, CRM is the practice of managing and analyzing customer interactions and feedback, with the ultimate goal of executing better customer relationship leading to customer retention in the long run. Although CRM is a fairly new concept, this SaaS technology has so many inherent advantages, that most organizations of all sizes, from startups to big enterprises are quickly catching up with this platform. Now the question we need to ask is, does your start-up establishment needs a CRM? In this article, let us review a few points from this aspect.

Even before asking why businesses need CRM system, it is really important to understand exactly what a Customer Relationship Management system is.

In short, CRM is the practice of managing and analyzing customer interactions and feedback, with the ultimate goal of executing better customer relationship leading to customer retention in the long run.

Although CRM is a fairly new concept, this SaaS technology has so many inherent advantages, that most organizations of all sizes, from startups to big enterprises are quickly catching up with this platform.

Datachart from Salesforce Showing the Top 5 Marketing Metrics

Now the question we need to ask is, does your start-up establishment needs a CRM?

Why Startups Need a CRM System

Let us review a few points from this aspect:

  • Understanding a customer’s point of view often becomes difficult, due to several mismanagements of the communication chain. However, CRM ensures that literally nothing is lost in transition.
  • The latest research on customer experience shows that 88% of high performing marketing team acknowledges that in a customer journey strategy is essential for the success of overall marketing endeavors.
  • A workforce that comprises of all different aspects of any company is primarily important when you are dealing with any customer. CRM system helps this by unifying Marketing, Sales, Management, Finance, and Customer Service, which are of prime importance in this respect.
  • A dynamic converging CRM, like ConvergeHub, ensures that you can keep track of your progress with the customers no matter what devices you are using (PC, Tab, mobile etc.).
  • A CRM system can easily keep your organization up to date on sales and revenue aspects with the timely reports and since all these processes are completely automated, you can be very sure that you will never miss-out on an important benchmark once you use a CRM.
  • CRM is a scalable system, which ensures that you will never be at a disadvantage for want of more computation power.

Why your startup needs a CRM now?

The primary question lies not in whether you need a Customer Relationship Management system, but in why you do so. For example, ConvergeHub CRM, as opposed to pen and paper, is much easier to work.

To be honest, no company wants to remain as a startup forever and this is the main reason why CRM is important for all budding organizations.

As companies grow bigger, it slowly becomes inefficient in manually handling data and needs a platform that will help them to quickly organize and analyze data and identify their ideal customer base.

This is where CRM comes into play. CRM is also a platform for your sales team to meet and discuss central ideas, which are needed for identifying potential areas of growth that is most crucial for the development of any start-up organization.

Besides, CRM is also extremely useful as it brings everything from prospects, dashboards, sales orders, and invoices to automatic inventory under one roof.

CRM and Startups

As a startup, your main focus should be on finding the right prospect for your products and services and then maintain those valued customers for a long run.

According to Forrester, both large and small companies have shown more than 52% growth in lead volume after collaborating with a CRM service.

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Hence, it is now an established fact beyond any doubts that CRM services actually leads to lead value generation over time, which gradually lowers the cost of operation in start-ups compared to manual safe keeping and representation of customer and sales data.

Why mobile CRM is Crucial for Your SMB

We all are aware how indispensable CRM strategies are in today’s business world. From reduced marketing expenditures to superior customer retention rates- the benefits of CRM are never-ending. With the speedy rise in telecommunication and mobile technology, mobile CRM is a perfect tool for those who are on-the-go, since mobile CRM provides essential access to sophisticated data and customized information on the field. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 24% of employees did their work from home in 2015, which shows a formidable rise of more than 20% since 2003. According to the same source, BLS predicts that more than 106 million Americans will telecommute within 2020.

We all are aware how indispensable CRM strategies are in today’s business world. From reduced marketing expenditures to superior customer retention rates- the benefits of CRM are never-ending. With the speedy rise in telecommunication and mobile technology, mobile CRM is a perfect tool for those who are on-the-go, since mobile CRM provides essential access to sophisticated data and customized information on the field.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 24% of employees did their work from home in 2015, which shows a formidable rise of more than 20% since 2003. According to the same source, BLS predicts that more than 106 million Americans will telecommute within 2020.

The great news from these stats is that ConvergeHub CRM offers both Android and iOS app for SMBs. However, if you are still indecisive and sitting on the fence about downloading our CRM app from iTunes or Android stores, here are four solid reasons why you should not wait for anymore.

More Work Completed

Constant and seamless access to customer information means that time away from the office does not necessarily mean you have to be “away from the office.”

Being able to be connected to CRM software from remote locations allow your team to be far more productive than ever before.

In a recent study done by Nuclear Research (an information technology research firm specializing in investigative research) is of the opinion that mobile access to a CRM increases team productivity in SMBs by more than 14.6% with a further 4 in 10 mobile users of mobile CRM reporting improvement in productivity by more than 22%.

So how are teams using ConvergeHub on the go?

Using our app, users can update information and notes in between meetings or on the road, and assign tasks to their colleagues straight from their device. Moreover, if needed, users can also tag their bosses to make them remain in the loop on all events of the day.

Close More Deals

At the end of the day with all businesses, a more productive sales team signifies a healthier sales pipeline.

In a research conducted by Forrester, it has been found that more than 70% sales reps employed with companies those who have invested in CRM technology have successfully accomplished their sales targets, as opposed to just 21% of sales reps working in non-mobile Customer Relationship Management enabled companies.

With tools to respond fast along with customer data always at your fingertips, mobile CRM helps employees close more deals with fewer interactions and less time.

This allows sales reps to spend more time prospecting or find new avenues for exploring untouched sales opportunities.

Find Real-Time Information

In the present times, many companies allow their employees to work on the go or complete tasks while they are away from the office.

This could have meant in the past, that any information about a deal is not updated until the sales reps get back and log his or her activities on the CRM platform.

Mobile CRM prevents this from happening. With the help of cloud technology, any interaction an employee has with the prospect or customer can be now documented immediately in the mobile CRM. Hence, users of mobile CRM do not have to wait for information to be uploaded on site.

For an example, if a sales rep is out of the office, every other rep working in the organization will readily have access to the customer’s updated data as the rep who is out can log these changes while on the go.

Users can also refer to their contact activity feeds in the ConvergeHub app, before heading for a meeting, which helps in refreshing their memory on previous interactions with the customer making them fully prepared for strategizing a rewarding meeting plan.

Faster Data Collection

Before the age of mobile CRM technology, orders taken on the road had either to be called-in or put on hold until the orders could be entered at the office.

Now with the advent of mobile CRM, you can place orders remotely right into the system as soon as the customer agrees to the deal.

This, in turn, helps the production and shipping departments to get immediately started so that the customers can receive their products or services just in time.

Hence, we see as CRM has made its way to mobile, so businesses that hope to grow most must make a move with it.

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Therefore, not to ignore important business trends, download the ConvergeHub mobile CRM app before you scale up any more lost opportunities and get your team on the path to success now.

Customer Relationship and A Dozen Tried Tips to Better Know Your CRM

Perception Gap a word coined by Brian Solis and his team at Pivot is the breach between what the customers need and what the company executives think that their customer wants. A pretty fascinating topic for discussion. Just as making an assumption about your customers can prove to be costly, similarly, on the other hand, understanding what your customers need can enable any business to leapfrog their competitions. If you are of the opinion that you understand your customers, can you answer these few questions to find out if your assumptions are true?

Veteran marketers mostly pride themselves on their connections and of the capabilities in understanding their customers.

However, on the flip-side research on this subject shows that although 76% of smart marketers claim that they are aware of their customer’s requirements, only 34% have ever asked their customers as to what their customers want.

This Perception Gap a word coined by Brian Solis and his team at Pivot is the breach between what the customers need and what the company executives think that their customer wants.

A pretty fascinating topic for discussion.

Just as making an assumption about your customers can prove to be costly, similarly, on the other hand, understanding what your customers need can enable any business to leapfrog their competitions.

If you are of the opinion that you understand your customers, can you answer these few questions to find out if your assumptions are true?

Here we go:

  • What are the three most common problems that keep your customers up at night?
  • What are the three most sought after services or products that you provide, that can solve your customer’s greatest woes?
  • When was it last that any customer purchased these three products or services from you?
  • How long did it take to complete your sales cycle in selling these products and services to your customer?
  • How many touches did this sale require from your sales reps?
  • What are the opportunities that you have for shortening your sales cycle?
  • What are your up-sell opportunities?
  • How many up-sell opportunities did you lose?
  • How satisfied are your customers with your buying process?
  • Do you have any other contacts for building a new relationship in your customer’s organization?
  • Do all your team members have the access to the data to collaborate and nurture leads that will ensure the best possible experience for your customers?

It is unfortunate that although many small and medium businesses may have this information in their head, this data is not tracked anywhere. Hence, this information most often remains in the minds of the product-marketing managers, sales reps, CEOs, and customer support representatives.

If you want to dive deep, here is the infographic developed by Brian Solis and Pivot based on their Perception Gap research:Perception Gap
Image Source:
https://visual.ly/community/infographic/business/perception-gap

The power of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system can make or break your business. CRM offers most basic insights that can improve collaboration and revenue while decreasing the length of sales cycles in the fields of marketing and sales of a company.

It is a commonly known fact that it is always much easy to sell to a happy existing customer than to acquire a new one.

So, why so many marketers skip the most important thumb rule of sale-retaining ongoing customer relationship management?

Do you have any idea about what businesses you are leaving behind on the table for not being proactive in doing your homework about knowing the needs of your customers on a daily basis? How many relationships could you have not nurtured properly with your customers because of broken communications and unavailability of data to identify your customer’s needs that stopped you from embarking on the next step?

Knowing your customer do not just mean understanding their buying patterns and social behaviors or simply reading industry reports on what your customers may need now.

It has been often noticed that marketers get so busy doing upfront market research before a product launch, that they lose sight of the importance that nestles beneath continuous understanding of the customers, which keeps any business relationship thriving.

All businesses have a multitude of opportunities to gather customer data throughout the customer lifecycle.

However, the secret to success lies in interpreting those data to better serve the customers, retain them and ultimately sell the customers more products and services.

CMS platforms enable business leaders along with their sales and marketing teams to stay on top of the customer buying patterns, a trend that can directly affect their sales, delivery, and customer service successes.

Even an unimportant customer data can prove valuable over time, particularly when it is coupled with additional data sources.

There are many organizations those who invest in complicated or complex CRM systems, only to find they do not have sufficient in-house resources to manage these platforms.

Therefore, before buying your CRM for small and medium businesses, focus on right sizing your CRM system, and buy a CRM built exclusively for SMB processes.

Here are 12 killer tips for buying a CRM that will help you to take your customer relationship to the next level this year:

  1. Before purchasing a CRM system, identify your tactical and strategic needs. Research and find the best platform that will suit the requirements of your business. Not all CRMs are meant for everyone- as one size does not fit all.
  2. Know what you expect out of your CRM. Identify your goals and metrics that will help to guide your transformation to the new customer relationships that your desire.
  3. Get a real feel about your available resources to acquire, prepare, implement, and maintain your new CRM.
  4. Ask hard questions to your CRM vendors so that you can be certain about knowing what you are getting regarding all cost and time considerations.
  5. Find out if you need to outsource additional help for implementation, maintenance of the CRM or for any other kind of CRM related strategic guidance.
  6. Ask for additional customer testimonials from your CRM vendors even if they have readily available testimonials of their customers from your industry niche on their website. Once you are in possession of these extra testimonials, call those references and ask them what challenges did they experience while implementation of their CRM.
  7. Never underestimate the power of your peers. Ask them what CRM platforms they use and why they admire their CRM. In addition, read online reviews of different CRM, search for forums, and groups those who are devoted discussing CRM related issues.
  8. If you are migrating from an existing CRM system to another, find out what are the necessary steps, cost and time that is associated with the transfer process.
  9. Even before buying a CRM, prepare a detailed plan for execution of the system. Set solid goals, timelines, milestones, SLA responsibilities and encourage absolute collaboration across your organization for implementing the system.
  10. After implementation of the CRM platform, continuously manage your progress. Find out if you are utilizing your CRM to its fullest potentials.
  11. Find out if your agents and other employees are filling the CRM with every single valuable customer data, as you instructed them during installation of the system.
  12. Most of all, after installation of CRM, evaluate how or what you are continuously learning about your existing and new customers so that you can enhance your customer relationships using the system.

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The more you do this upfront pre-sales research, the greater will be your satisfaction and happiness with whichever CRM you choose as an ideal customer relationship management platform for your business.

Nurturing customer relationship is not just a one-time event. In other words, excelling in customer relationship is not a destination but rather a journey.

Remember, the more you can learn about your customers, the better you can serve them, which is directly proportional to your company’s growth and ROI.

How Small Business Can Manage Their CRM Database

Customer related CRM database provides an insight on the customer behaviors not only to enterprise users of the system but also is a vital piece of information for users of CRM for small business. Rather to say, the database is the foundation on which the CRM software strategies work. As for all businesses, the customer-related information base is one of the most important characteristics that impart the customer-based tactics and strategies needed for optimal use of this system.

Customer related CRM database provides an insight on the customer behaviors not only to enterprise users of the system but also is a vital piece of information for users of CRM for small business. Rather to say, the database is the foundation on which the CRM software strategies work. As for all businesses, the customer-related information base is one of the most important characteristics that impart the customer-based tactics and strategies needed for optimal use of this system.

Hence, the database is one central prerequisite that supports all types of best CRM solution that are available, such as CRMs used for Strategic, Analytical, Operational or Collaborative purposes.

What is the meaning of Customer-Related Database?

Be it a Server based or Web CRM, for all kinds of infrastructures, the customer-related database is the collection of customer-related information, which focuses on current and future opportunities along with historic sales data of an organization.

The maintenance and updating of this database are done by a number of functional departments in an organization, such as sales, channel management, product management, customer support, accounts, and others.

Information those that are stored within the CRM database are customer information containing fields like:

  • Name
  • Address
  • Contact details
  • Contact preferences
  • Age
  • Marital status
  • Birthday
  • Anniversary
  • Professional and social status
  • Purchase history
  • Customer support information and others

For example, a sales manager who is using sales CRM can ideally record past transactions, opportunities, product preferences, customer support issues, accounts data and others vital information using a Customer Management System platform. Similarly, channel managers can record online retail information, details of business-owned retail outlets and product managers may document product preference, and product category explored, products within a specific price band sold and others.

Types of CRM Database

Irrespective of whether you are using a Server based or a Cloud CRM, based on respective purposes CRM database is classified into two types:

  • Operational Database
  • Analytical Database

This means operational data of a CRM resides in OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) database, while analytical data of the system resides in OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) database.

How Can You Develop and Maintain Customer-Related Database?

The database in a CRM is a storehouse of a collection of files (or tables), which contains a series of records (which are rows of the table) that in turn incorporates a number of fields (which are columns of the table). In each of these files information such as of customer, products, sales, and others are stored within the CRM system.

Here is a visual illustration of the steps that are followed for creating and maintaining a customer-related database:

All best CRM vendors suggest that this database always needs to remain up-to-date for maintaining the accuracy of the data.

Types of Customer Data

Be it a Sales CRM or a Customer Support CRM meant for an enterprise solution or a CRM for small business, there are principally 2 types of CRM data:

  • Primary
  • Secondary

This ‘primary’ data in a CRM is the data, which is collected initially for the first time, while the ‘secondary’ data is the information that has been collected previously.

The users of the CRM generally collect the primary data by conducting surveys, inviting customers to subscribe to newsletters, holding a skill competition or while registering their customer’s purchases and others.

All modern CRM software works on Relational Database architecture that is composed of tables that incorporate rows and columns. In this, the tables are connected to other tables with the help of a unique identification number, which is named as the ‘primary key’ and is stored in the ID field.

Database Management for CRM

Several database management systems are available in the market today. Some of the most popular DBMS are:

– Oracle

– Microsoft’s SQL Server

– DB2 from IBM and others.

These systems help to administer and update the CRM’s database.

Hardware Needed For CRM Database

The parameters of the hardware platform on which the CRM database will reside is chosen based on the following criteria:

  • The existing technology used in the business
  • The size of the database
  • The location of the users of the CRM

Data Attributes

The CRM data stored in the CRM’s database must comply with the following attributes:

  • It must be shareable (as several people may need to access it from different geographical locations)
  • It must pertain to a given purpose and so must be relevant
  • It should be accurate (For this data should be reviewed in a timely manner while acquiring and entering data into the system)

Data-Warehousing (DW)

All CRM database consists of Data-Warehouses, which are a huge collection of customer-related data, which are received from several sources. The Data-Warehouse repository can be as big as a few Terabytes.

There are a plethora of global businesses operating from several continents and countries that generate a gigantic volume of data. However, this data needs to be converted into useful information for subsequent operations and analysis.

A Data-Warehouse does this work by:

  • Transforming the data into a required format before loading it into the database
  • Organize the data chronologically and according to the subjects of the business
  • Standardizing the data into a single format which are coming from various sources
  • Conduct periodic updates of the data (This is not performed in real time)
  • Provide updated data for the purpose of data mining, analytics, and reporting

Data Access and Interrogation

CRM is a system that allows users to interact with the database.

This data access and interrogation are performed in the following 3 ways:

Data mining

In the context related to CRM database, data mining is the application of predictive analytics that supports sales, marketing, and services. It finds an association among different datasets and classifies the customers according to their business value to answer the following questions:

  • Which customer your business should target?
  • What is the cost of your customer acquisition?
  • Which customers are buying and not buying your products?
  • Why some of your customers are becoming defaulters regularly?
  • Who are your low, medium, and high margin customers?
  • How can you segment your business market?

For organizations that use CRM for small business and even for large enterprises data mining is an excellent tool that can provide relevant data to the marketing and sales team of a company for marketers’ analysis, which is required for generating sales volume, and subsequently increase ROI.

Database Queries

The queries are tools that help you to access and modify your CRM’s database. SQL (Structural Query Language) is used as a standard language for relational database management system. These SQL queries come in the form of statements such as:

  • SELECT
  • ADD
  • DELETE
  • UPDATE
  • DROP, etc.

Reports

All Customer Relationship Management applications generate reports on a regular periodic manner for analyzing the quality and traits of performance, sales, and many other related activities. The management of an organization, for performance assessment, mostly accesses these CRM generated reports.

OLAP (Online Transaction Processing) technology used by CRM is capable of depicting data at the lowest levels that of a sales rep or of a complete region, which aids in assessing the performance of the champions and question the underperformers in a company.

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What is the position of the CRM system in respect to its Database?

While analytical CRM does work most strongly with the customer’s database, the strategic CRM do work furthermost from the system’s database.

Here is a visual illustration to elaborate the statement:

If you have found this article useful in understanding the CRM database structure, which works for your CRM for small business as well as for large enterprises, we would be happy to know of your comments below.

Know What Does CRM Stand For with Reasons of Growth in Cloud CRM

CRM as a technology has already established its position as an essential element, which is capable of helping organizations of all size and bridge the gap between sales, marketing, and customer support teams. Through the end of the first decade, and up to the present day, the availability and rise of Cloud and SaaS CRM continued to gain popularity, due to lower initial cost and easy integration with mobile devices. Cloud-based CRM allowed all the business data of a company to be stored, accessed, modified, and saved via the Internet.

Do you know what does CRM Stand for and Cloud CRM stand for?

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, which is both a procedure and software that uses customer data to create the right strategies to optimize results, especially those regarding sales, revenue, and customer support.

Using CRM organizations can understand who their customers are, where to find them, how to contact the customers and identify their purchase power.

It is not only the software but also the correct analysis of the data and the execution of effective strategies what makes CRM valuable for businesses.

There has been much debate this year about more organizations, both SMB, and large enterprises, porting their CRM platforms into the ‘Cloud”.

The global market of CRM has been affected so strongly in the recent years that the world’s leading technology advisory firm Gartner, recently said that the Customer Relationship Management market will be worth $36 billion by 2018.

This prediction is built around Gartner’s analysis of new business scenarios what Gartner terms as the “Nexus-of-Forces”- social, mobile, and cloud.

Know-What-Does-CRM-Stand-For-And-The-Reasons-For-The-Growth-Of-Cloud-CRM-CTA

The Power of Cloud CRM

CRM as a technology has already established its position as an essential element, which is capable of helping organizations of all size and bridge the gap between sales, marketing, and customer support teams.

However, through the end of the first decade, and up to the present day, the availability and rise of Cloud and SaaS CRM continued to gain popularity, due to lower initial cost and easy integration with mobile devices.

This availability and rise of Web CRM allowed companies to think about alternatives options to traditional on-site CRM software, as this modern technology helped firms to adopt CRM technology without creating any ‘physical’ infrastructure and network.

In other words, cloud-based CRM allowed all the business data of a company to be stored, accessed, modified, and saved via the Internet.

According to a study done by Poneman Institute for Thales e-Security, a leader in advanced data security solutions, it has been found that:

“More than 54 percent of the 4,025 business and IT managers polled were already sending sensitive data to the cloud, and 31% of those from within seven global countries expect to do so in the next two years.”

Although the cloud technology solution has been around for approximately nearly 6 years, in the modern times, it is going through a second looping, as by CompTIA’s Fourth Annual Trends In Cloud Computing, said:

“90 per cent of firms polled have some presence in the Cloud.”

Here are the two primary benefits of adopting a cloud-based CRM service for your company:

  1. Cloud CRM is often the most preferred choice for all SMB (Small and Medium Businesses), companies, which lack in-house IT expertise that is needed for managing and upgrading an on-site CRM. When companies adopt Web CRM the vendor takes up the onus for managing the software and its technical glitches, provide updates across the system, and take care of bugs and other critical issues as an when they arise.
  2. Cloud CRM integrates with most commonly used cloud-based office applications, email systems, and provides seamless amalgamation with social data. It also helps in taking continuous data backups, which are kept, secured in the cloud.

Some of the other advantages of using a cloud-based CRM service are:

Cost savings: Adopting SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) model can save your organization a lot of money on IT budgets.

Agility: Companies using Web CRM always gain a competitive edge by giving employees access to information, which in turn speeds up projects.

Resourcing: Cloud CRM provides increased business value, as it allows your staffs to complete their projects faster allowing your employees to skill themselves up in other areas of business within the organization.

Elasticity: Using SaaS, resources can be re-provisioned and deployed in real-time, according to appropriate workloads within the organization.

Access to new markets: The savings in IT infrastructure costs that companies make by using cloud CRM can be spent for strategically tapping and exploring new markets.

Other than this, using a single cloud-based CRM system, you can make your employees work without being tied to their office desks or your office server. Hence, your employees can contact their customers on-the-go and also mine real time data for providing fast customer support solutions or close more deals.

Cloud CRM also provides more frequent customer insights so that your employees can enhance productivity across all departments in your organization.

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Conclusion

Hence, to conclude, the role of cloud CRM should be taken as a strategic business enabler and so businesses with an eye on the future must use Web CRM solutions or migrate to a cloud CRM if they are using an in-house CRM solution, and in doing so stimulate their competitive edge.