Customer Relationship Management

Qualitative and long-term relationships with customers have become a very important development trend for many companies. In this connection, strategies of customer relationship management are being developed. Their main objectives are effective attraction and holding of the most profit-making customers as well as data accumulation regarding loyal customers. "Customer Relationship Management" Module of DIRECTUM system has been designed to reach these goals.

This module ensures convenient and effective interaction with existing and potential customers and provides real-time access to data regarding customer and his relationships history in the course of sales and marketing actions. The module supports full lifecycle of sales (including customer data acquisition, appointment and holding of meetings, making of contracts) and allows to allocate work with existing and potential customers among responsible specialists of Sales and Marketing departments.

Customer relationship management efficiency is greatly increased due to use of capabilities provided by other DIRECTUM system modules:

• fast-access search and retrieval of necessary documents related to a certain company (contracts, business proposals, correspondence) and their reliable storing;
• instant transfer of information among employees with help of tasks mechanism improves quality and speed of customer servicing;
• various reports enable a head officer to efficiently control execution of assignments by employees, manage their work and evaluate their labor productivity.

Companies and Contacts Unified Database Maintenance

Creation of a single unified database of customers and contacts is one of the most important requirements of customer relationship management process. At the same time, a great number of employees working simultaneously in the system should have access to this database.

Aside from usual contact information (addresses, phone numbers, e-mails, categories, etc) DIRECTUM system allows to customize arbitrary additional requisites for a special-purpose companies classification (for example, company size, financial situation, information source regarding DIRECTUM system, loyalty reasons, etc). In future all these requisites could be used for analyzing information in different contexts and for selecting companies for marketing impact.

Each organization may have any number of contacts being communicated with. At the same time a contact person can work in different organizations and this fact will be included in the corresponding reports.

To determine target groups for marketing actions or sales planning it is possible to form any lists of companies. Company selection can be performed manually or through automatic selection according to specified criteria (requisites), including with help of Microsoft Excel.

For large-scale enterprises working in different lines of business and having a large number of customers, the system allows to allocate access rights to information regarding the line of business. Such kind of allocation prevents unauthorized access to the data stored in the system and provides each user with only that information, which is necessary for him.

Sales Management

A responsible employee registers every contact with a potential customer (a phone conversation, an e-mail message or a meeting) in the course of sales. Thus, a complete customer relationship history is accumulated.

All data on previous contacts with a customer is retained in the system, therefore in case of a responsible employee absence (because of a business trip, vacations, etc) necessary work could be easily handed over to another specialist.

The system allows to specify certain sales stages (initial calling, having a meeting, conclusion of a contract, etc.) that define the work-line with a customer. Depending on the achieved results the work can be processed to the next stage either manually or automatically. Such step-by-step customer relationship processing helps develop a sales technology which is specific for a company, as well as provides proper and quick training of new employees.

Once customer contact results have been entered, the system will offer to schedule the next contact step. If a contact has been scheduled, at a certain time a responsible sales manager will receive notification of the scheduled contact reminding him to contact the customer.

On making a phone call or preparing for a meeting a responsible employee can receive a report containing all the customer data and the customer relationship history. The report allows to quickly find all necessary information, to make the right decision, and to prepare for a meeting in a proper way.

E-mail service has become a very quick and convenient customer communication service lately.

In the course of such communication every responsible specialist creates his own address book and a customer correspondence history that are stored separately. This problem can be solved by integration of "Customer Relationship Management" Module and Microsoft Outlook that allows to quickly save a contact in the system and to use a common unified address book.

Marketing Actions Management

Companies with a dynamic marketing activity are interested in labor saving and increasing of marketing actions efficiency. "Customer Relationship Management" Module possesses functions that support holding of seminars and conferences, participation in exhibitions, mailshot of news, advertising materials, greetings, etc.

Responsible employee registers all planned marketing actions in the system; for each action he specifies planned and actual dates of its holding, resources, and stages of a marketing action. A list of companies-participants can be created for each stage of a marketing action. A target group can be selected either on the basis of the existing list or individually.

As soon as a marketing action is held, its results are registered in the system: for example, information on participants of the exhibition and other information on companies (source of information, degree of purchase interest, etc.). Effectiveness of a marketing action can be evaluated relying on analysis of the entered data.

One of the marketing functions is mailing various materials to target group companies. They could be professional days greeting, advertising materials, invitations to seminars or exhibitions as well as regular mailshots of updated lists, for example, news bulletins.

The system supports e-mailing, posting or fax mailing. It is possible to prepare documents with a personal addressing on basis of existing in the system templates.

Information Analysis

Contacts and marketing actions data accumulation and analysis are an integral part of customer relationship management. Various reports help analyze previous deals as well as predict future ones.

Integration with ERP-systems provides employees concerned with information on actual sales (issues of invoices, notices of customer payments, etc).

Customer relationship history retention and contacts report availability allow to prepare for meetings in a proper way, to predict and to conclude bargains.

Head officers can analyze their employees’ work (evaluate their workload, compare an amount of appointed and performed meetings, etc.), evaluate and schedule sales stages of a customer company, reveal ‘week points’ of a sales process, analyze customer needs, etc.

Thus, "Customer Relationship Management" Module of DIRECTUM system helps to build up effective relationships with a customer and brings a real effect to an organization:

• Retention of a customer relationship history in single unified information environment (information on negotiations, meetings, orders and documentation) ensures growth of employees’ work quality and efficiency.
• Routine operations - such as e-mailing, standard documents creation on basis of templates (contracts, business proposals, etc) and their approval - are simplified.
• Safety of stored information is provided due to allocation of access rights.
• It is possible to analyze advertising and marketing campaigns effectiveness due to retention of all needed information and availability of various reports.
• Manageability and predictability of a sales process increases due to separation of sales stages and rules of transition among them.
• Accumulation of corporate expertise and knowledge as well as information on all contacts with customers ensures fast training and interchangeability of a company staff.