How CRM can help grow your small business
If you’re running a small business you know it can be a great big pond out there,
with big fish in it. How do you get customers to notice you, believe in you, and
stay loyal to you once you sell to them?
Small businesses differentiate themselves from bigger competitors by virtue of their
care and feeding of the customer. Customer focus—outstanding customer service—sets
you apart.
This is where the customer-relationship management (CRM) offerings from Microsoft
Office Live Small Business come into play. With features designed specifically for
the small business you can be more responsive and attentive to your customers and
other business contacts, and thus efficiently manage your relationship with them.
Customer relationship management is not a new idea; there are many CRM products
and services out there. But Office Live Small Business specifically targets small
companies. With Office Live Small Business, you can shorten sales cycles and make
your customers more loyal to you by automating the daily work that goes into keeping
your customers happy. The Office Live Small Business CRM features help you lend
a strong personal touch to your dealings with customers—a key differentiating point
for small businesses.
3 tools to help manage customer relationships
Microsoft Office Live Small Business has three critical tools: Contact Manager,
a customer workspace, and a sales application.
With these CRM tools you can:
Gain access through a browser to your key customer information.
- Configure Contact Manager to send event-driven e-mail alerts.
- Use shared workspaces to collaborate with customers and colleagues on business development,
customer projects, partnerships, and more.
Through the Contact Manager "dashboard" interface, you can see—and update at a glance—everything
about your business and its customers (sales opportunities, contacts, accounts,
notes, contact history, etc.), and gain easy access to shared workspaces for customer
collaboration. The Dashboard gives your employees direct access to tools that help
them be more efficient and attentive to your customers. Details from contact information
to account-level information (who in your company is assigned the customer, revenue
information, payment status, etc.) is available at the click of a tab. This information
is arranged in key functional areas that keep you apprised of everything related
to a given customer, and related opportunities and obligations.
The tabs feature allows you to customize your view according to your business needs.
When you click to a different tab, you click to a different view. Through the "Create
View" option, you can customize your page to display your data in the ways most
useful to you.
Track all of your customer interactions
Contact Manager also allows you, via its "Opportunities" tab, to help ensure that
nothing falls through the cracks when it comes to cultivating a customer relationship.
In Opportunities, you can track all your customer interactions, from initial contact
through to a closed sale. You can track such things as revenue potential, probability
of closing, expected close date, and more, and can build in reminders (a customer’s
birthday, for example) that help you better care for your customer. Opportunities
allows you to track relationships more thoroughly which can help your sales forecasts
be much more reliable.
Workspaces can also be used to promote better customer relations. These password-protected
Web sites allow you and your employees to work together and share information about
projects, customers, sales, or other important company matters. Posting important
information in a shared workspace is infinitely more efficient and convenient than
attaching documents to e-mail and sending them around. Businesses can "meet" with
clients in workspaces as well: An architect, for example, can create a workspace
for sharing project documents (blueprints, schedules, estimates, etc.) with his
or her clients.
Office Live Small Business includes four workspaces: Customer, for sharing information
with people outside your company; Team, for workgroups within your company; Basic
Meeting; and Wiki, a brainstorming and collaborating space. And there is no end
to the additional Workspaces you can create for yourself.
Finally there's the Sales application, which is one element of a robust set of online
business applications available to Office Live Small Business subscribers. The Sales
application provides an online location for storing information about business competition,
customer support, and estimates. In terms of CRM, you can use the Sales application
to record customer support details, track inquiry resolution, and associate documentation
with support requests. Users can store frequently asked questions and answers for
quick reference when communicating with customers.
With three flavors of CRM to draw on, Office Live Small Business helps give small
businesses the competitive power of a company many times larger.
If you would like to know more, call Lou at 610-917-2471, or email him at
lcaccamo@aresolutions.com
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