for the Small Business Market:
CRM applications have traditionally been reserved for larger organizations, where teams of individuals work together to serve and support a common customer base. In today’s competitive business landscape, innovative use of technology and information often means the difference between success and failure. More than ever, the small business owner needs the same tools and resources as their enterprise counterpart in order to help the business perform at levels required to maintain growth and profitability.
Always-On CRM™ and
e-Accounting™
(cpaasp.com)
are powered by InsynQ
Your Computing Utility Company™
CRM stands for
Customer Relationship Management.
CRM systems are designed to help you identify, acquire and retain customers. In the case of your business relationships, just about everybody you interact with is a customer of some type: a present client is a customer, a past client is a customer (just an inactive one), a prospect is a future customer; a vendor or alliance is in many ways a customer, and an employee or coworker may be an internal customer. Basically, any entity that you interact with can be considered to be a “customer relationship” of your business. Managing these relationships requires keeping data – useful, relative information – about how you interact with these customers, and recording the details that document the entire lifecycle of the relationship.
Traditionally, businesses have employed a variety of software and systems to handle the various interactions with these “customers”. Contact management systems are frequently employed to facilitate interacting with prospective customers and sales leads, as well as current and past business customers. Additionally, business customer information is generally stored in the accounting system, where customer billing and other activities is handled along with paying vendors and suppliers. There may yet be additional systems, such as time and billing systems or product or service management systems, where customer information and activity is stored and managed as well.
It is not unusual for a business to store the same data in a variety of places. This is typically done because different workers in the business have differing job functions, and need to interact with different bits of information in the course of their business day. This approach is prone to error or duplication of data, and frequently results in large quantities of unrelated and therefore unusable information. What is required is a single system where all of the data – all the bits of relative information – combine to create a total picture of the relationship on an ongoing basis. Only when this data is converged, combined and presented in a meaningful way does the data become truly useful information.
