Smart companies are beginning to realize that a CRM is a single-solution and the central point for all of the departments in your business. As a result, if your CRM has the most up to date data entered, it can deliver a greater return on investment. A CRM Knowledge-base software is one example of a single solution that can be organized and tailored for many user groups helping companies meet multiple business objectives. For example, a CRM knowledge base can assist sales staff with the sales journey of potential clients, support sales and marketing teams; assist help desk staff; directly address customers questions via customer self-service and provide up to date financial reporting for business management.
Using a CRM knowledge-base solution for your business is a great example of getting a many-for-one deal out of a single solution. However, this is only a good value if your users buy in to it. Your CRM should be kept up to date by every user to ensure that you are getting a return on your investment. A truly integrated system that leverages customer intelligence with organizational knowledge leads to a maintainable competitive advantage. Combining knowledge management with your CRM is always a smart choice for the following reasons:
Improved productivity
While responding to customer requests via your CRM, your employees can have access to commonly asked questions and company information directly from your knowledge management system. This eliminates research time, conferencing with other employees and switching between applications while customers wait. The staff will not need to copy and paste the outdated information from other sources which are no longer relevant.
Reduce monotonous tasks
In your CRM system, your cases can be updated with information learned during each resolution. Solutions to repetitive issues can be converted into articles in your company’s knowledge base.
Improve customer satisfaction
Customers visiting your company’s website can find self-service capabilities via a search function of your knowledge base. Alternatively, through interacting your websites FAQs which can pinpoint their problems to an appropriate response. Customers that can’t find resolutions or answers can be routed to a chat function with a live agent on your website. New cases can be automatically generated by the system to alert your agents.
Increased effectiveness
With reports that has clear amount of feedback, you can keep track of how many calls, emails and questions that have been resolved with solutions from the knowledge base and which issues are most active and repetitive. This form of real-time accountability gives you the control to respond to customer needs. It also builds knowledge where it is suitable and tracks the efficiency and productivity of customer service employees. Traditionally CRMs have been keeping management on top of things and less about empowering the companies sales team. In that way CRMs have been the very spirit of the top-down order. This may work fine for some companies where management can call IT experts for the purpose of acquiring a system. That will help management get an overview of sales results.
A CRM should allow every user, especially sales staff, to rely on the knowledge and data of the CRM to perform their jobs. The more data you put into CRM, the more beneficial CRM software is to your business. An up-to-date CRM can provide every team in your business the knowledge that that they can reach any set KPI’s. The more data that is available, the better the knowledge power your CRM has, the more it can make predictions for you and reporting on the past. This comes from updating data like setting your targets for sales, activities, revenue and financial targets. All that information that you input into CRM is analysed. Then presented to you in visually statistics to help you recognize the patterns that historically brought your business success. This will allow you to plan your marketing and sales campaigns in advance.
Providing real time updates
Your CRM system will also learn your way of working and pick up on details. Hence, making analyses to be able to guide you in moving forward. In return, you will receive important information that would probably take you about a week to calculate manually. Your CRM should have on-going, real time updates provided that the data in your CRM is up-to-date. The information from these reports can also display what is required from your sales team to reach your sales targets.
Knowledge that your CRM has on your previous sales, how you got the sales, the length of the sales journey and who your customers are is information that is more than valuable in making new sales and seeing where your customers are on their sales journey, how you got those customers and how close you are to your sales targets. Your CRM can also provide you with business financial knowledge. That means you no longer need to wait for your accountant to have any reports ready for you. Based on the previous entered information, it is able to provide your financial targets in the past and if they are on track and what your financial target should be.
What is the desire your business has and the needs for its CRM system?
A CRM is not a one size fits all solution. Not all businesses need the knowledge power that others may need. It is important to know what knowledge power you need for your CRM. Be ensured that you are getting the best ROI from your CRM. Knowledge is power it aims to provide you with real time accurate data. You are getting the facts regarding what efforts you need to implement to reach your sales and financial targets.
In short, your CRM should be able to provide you with knowledge that your business needs. This is to ensure the growth and success that both your sales and customer service team need; ensuring that your business is moving forward and not backwards.