Why is CRM so important?

CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is a company-wide business strategy designed to reduce costs and increase profitability by solidifying customer loyalty. True CRM brings together information from all data sources within an organization (and where appropriate, from outside the organization) to give one, holistic view of each customer in real time. This allows customer facing employees in such areas as sales, customer support, and marketing to make quick yet informed decisions on everything from cross-selling and upselling opportunities to target marketing strategies to competitive positioning tactics.

Customer Information held in eLink

The information, which eLink CRM solution holds includes the history of contacts, actions and documents exchanged and in particular the current outstanding items to be dealt with and the planned actions for the future. You or your member of staff will be talking to a person at that organisation so you’ll need to know business related information about that person; for example meetings booked with someone else from your company, the products that person has bought from you, any credit control problems, any quality or delivery issues currently being discussed, any recent mailshots or emailshots sent to them, any on-going sales opportunity, any joint project work being undertaken, maybe even about friends you both know.

Ongoing records of all communications & actions

Every contact and each company carries a record for every communication, email, letter, and contract, together with details of all actions, meetings and diary entries. Each person and company can be linked to one or more projects, sales opportunities, marketing campaign, companies / organisations (with the job function / job title / role and also with a start date), and the products he / she is interested in or has bought from you.

Each person can also be linked to other contacts eg personal assistants and secretaries, or significant business friends and each company can be linked to other companies and relationship specified (and using a organisation chart can be seen graphically.). With regard to their company, you may want to know who else your company deals with there, what other products and services you provide them, what projects and sales opportunities are live at the moment.

Maybe you want a quick hyperlink to their website to understand more clearly what their business is, or what subsidiaries or other associated companies, divisions and offices they have. eLink CRM system gives you the opportunity to have all this information at your finger-tips.

The more people the better

CRM and the related communications and actions are core to the operation of any organisation so the more people who use it the better it is. So it’s vital to have one integrated system for all your staff and executives to use. eLink CRM solution provides this, ‘on-demand,’ whenever and wherever and protected in a secure environment on resilient systems.

Future-proofed solutions

The system stands on its own as your CRM solution or because of the interconnection with other modules available within the eLink business management system, it can be used as a starting point for a more comprehensive business management solution. Your initial solution can be amended and extended by you on-demand, live on your system at any time, it will grow and adapt to match how your organisation grows and adapts to your market needs.

The benefits of the eLink solution

The benefits of the eLink CRM solution are:

• Better customer relationship management because staff can get the details fast and accurately

• Better staff productivity because all the information is held electronically

• Improved security and risk protection because the information is built into your Corporate Knowledge Base, held on a resilient system under high standard data protection rules

• Better management and control because all the actions and follow-ups are extremely visible and because there is a wealth of management information available

• Better morale because everyone can be seen to be more ‘person-centric’

• Improved profitability because of retaining existing customers and because of freeing up sales staff to develop more new customers

• Increased sales turnover