Definition of Customer Relationship Management Tools & Products
CRM
CRM is an acronym for Customer Relationship Management. Organizations hoping to improve their sales and customer relationships often use customer relationship management tools to better manage these interactions. There are two common classes of customer relationship management products: 1) Sales Force Automation 2) Customer Service & Support.
Sales Force Automation
Sales Force Automation (SFA) tools are designed to help sales organizations manage their sales processes. Most SFA products have very basic functionality and do little more than help a sales rep organize their sales contacts. However, there is an emerging class of SFA tools that have robust features that help facilitate the entire sales process. These products empower both the front line sales rep as well as sales management. A true SFA tool will help simplify a sales rep's day by taking on many tedious tasks, for example, gathering, categorizing and distributing sales leads. Also, sales management gains the ability to view, forecast and report on the customer relationship management sales pipeline as well as measure the performance of each sales rep.
Customer Service & Support (CSS)
Customer Service & Support (CSS) tools are designed to help facilitate customer interactions with the Help desk or service and support representatives. CSS helps by automating customer incidents originating as service requests, complaints and other types of information requests. A best-of-breed CSS product will allow a customer care representative access to all customer interactions—appointments, tasks, notes, email, inbound and outbound calls—in a single location, and are automatically linked to specific contacts and company details related to a customer service incident. Through quicker incident resolution, an organization is better able to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
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Educated Customer Relationship Management Buyers Choose Entellium
Entellium is one of the fastest growing customer relationship management companies today. We've beaten the competition time and again because our award-winning customer relationship management tools deliver practical innovation for our customers. Entellium delivers the best post-sales support in the customer relationship management industry with free Learning opportunities and world-wide support to ensure a quick deployment. After reading the following guide, you'll see why Entellium's customer relationship management products are considered best in class.
Companies that do their homework on customer relationship management tools choose Entellium over the competition for any number of reasons.
For Sales Organizations: Success with Customer Relationship Management Starts with Workflow
Entellium eSalesForce leads the customer relationship management software industry in two important areas:
- Unparalleled lead management automation. Analysts estimate that most companies lose track of
between 40 and 80 percent of all leads somewhere in the sales cycle, usually because of an unhealthy reliance on manual lead
distribution. The right lead management features in a customer relationship management system will free sales management from
micromanaging lead distribution, so they can spend more time analyzing lead conversion and improving performance.
Entellium eSalesForce customer relationship management software has best-in-class lead routing. You can distribute leads based on a variety of criteria—like geography, account size, vertical industry and products of interest. Entellium goes deeper than the competition, because you can apply multiple rules at once. In addition, Entellium eSalesForce is the only customer relationship management tool to implement thresholds that distribute leads based on the current workload of your sales staff—to make sure leads don't go cold. With flexible rules and thresholds that accommodate the way you do business, Entellium gives you unprecedented control over how leads are routed. - Sales process workflow. Workflow may be the most confusing topic you'll encounter in the buying
process. Every vendor will claim to create consistency in your sales process through workflow. So how do you know Entellium really
delivers? Consider the following example:
Entellium eSalesForce is the only customer relationship management product to support an unlimited number of sales processes. Other customer relationship management tools force your sales teams—major accounts, direct sales, channel management and so on—to use a "one-size-fits-all" sales process. Most other vendors simply assign different names and drop-down menus for each kind of opportunity—they don't really support multiple sales processes at all. Entellium's customer relationship management tools gives you the ability to follow unique sets of best practices for each account type, including the ability to define different sales stages, opportunity tasks, and forecasting rules. In addition, Entellium's customer relationship management product offers reporting on specific sales processes and across multiple sales processes simultaneously. This level of granularity improves real-time data quality and leads to better decisions.
For Your Service Team: A Multi-Channel Customer Relationship Management Tool that Delivers a Superior Customer Experience
The Entellium eCustomerCenter customer relationship management solution was designed with two guiding concepts in mind—empower your customers and resolve their issues quickly and completely.
- Multi-Channel means customer empowerment. Entellium
eCustomerCenter gives customers control over how they interact with your service team, and delivers a superior experience through
every part of the process. Nearly every hosted customer relationship management product vendor will offer a multi-channel solution,
where customers can use email, phone or an online form to raise an issue. But the experience online is very different from one vendor to
the next. Entellium takes personalization to the next level by offering each customer their own unique Web form and email address.
This personal touch has a practical benefit, since inquiries from these channels can be automatically routed to the appropriate service rep. In addition, Entellium pioneered the hosted customer relationship management innovation of integrated online chat, where customers can instant-message your Help desk. This invaluable tool gives customers the instant resolution they love at a bare minimum of cost. - Workflow-driven incident management. Just as Entellium's powerful customer relationship management lead distribution engine drives how new prospects are dispersed throughout your company, the same engine drives how incidents flow through your service department. We're the only hosted customer relationship management product that manages automatic routing of incidents between people and departments based on varying business rules—with no manual intervention. You can also track a series of events that must happen consistently each and every time, like a customer go-live process.
Must-Have Customer Relationship Management Usability—Get More Done in Less Time
Entellium customers typically spend less time with our customer relationship management tools, but accomplish more.
Sure, every customer relationship management product claims to be the easiest to use. But Entellium goes further—using our customer relationship management software, reps accomplish daily tasks in much less time than the competition. Here's the proof:
- Activity management. Entellium leads the customer relationship management industry when it comes
to managing activities and tasks. Our Activity Center lets users track and create every kind of interaction with your contact database,
all in one central location. This makes customer relationship management much easier because interactions in the Activity Center are
automatically linked to that specific Contact, Company, Lead or Opportunity.
Another customer relationship management industry first is Activity Sets, where you can configure a series of tasks that must be completed in a certain order. Now you can set the entire series of calls, emails and other interactions up in advance—so it's easy to implement your customer relationship management best practices. - Working with leads. Other customer relationship management product packages require you to edit sections of the lead form one after another—so you have to navigate multiple screens and click all over the place. Even worse, you don't get to see all the information about the lead when you're making updates. Entellium's customer relationship management tools enable you to make changes to the lead form all at once—just like you're editing a document offline. This is a must-have usability feature reps come to depend on day in and day out.
- List management. Customer relationship management from Entellium makes it easy to work with lead
lists, thanks to our unique record paging feature. This is a very friendly user interface enhancement that enables you to select
multiple records (for example, all the Contacts you'd want to call today), and launch the chosen records so they're ready to page
through, one by one, just like you would click through a catalog.
This removes the pain associated with individually searching, opening, editing and closing each record one at a time that you have to do with other customer relationship management tools. - A full 360-degree view of the customer. Competing customer relationship management products talk about providing this view, only to omit all the leads associated with a given customer. Entellium enables better customer relationship management across the board, since you can see all leads, contacts, opportunities, past deals, incidents and contracts from a single screen. And Entellium doesn't force you to pay full price for this kind of visibility. For employees that only need a slice of the full customer relationship management functionality, Entellium offers MyCenter™, a module that provides read-only access to this 360-degree view of the customer.
- What's new dashboard. Just about every customer relationship management system will have a series of dashboards that display sales and service activity. But Entellium goes further than other customer relationship management solutions by providing a "What's New" dashboard that provides a single location for all new sales activity, with the ability to drill down directly into the new records. Consequently, management and reps alike can see what's been created, assigned or updated for key contacts, new leads or hot opportunities in the last 24 hours or last week.
The First Customer Relationship Management Product with Modular Pricing
For all the hype around how the customer relationship management model has changed, most vendors have a pricing model surprisingly similar to traditional software. For example, bundling unnecessary features is common. Many customer relationship management software providers force companies to purchase all the modules for every employee. This practice is wasteful, since companies end up paying for customer service functionality for sales reps (and vice versa)—even though they clearly don't need full access for sales, service and marketing. There isn't a strategic advantage to deploying a customer relationship management system solution this way—it's just wasteful.
Entellium offers each of our world-class customer relationship management product modules separately—so you only pay for the customer relationship management functionality each employee actually needs. At the same time, our modules are integrated, so each user gets a full 360-degree view of the customer. This helps make Entellium's customer relationship management tools the most usable, since each user sees only the tabs and screens relevant to their job.
Entellium has all of the benefits of a fully integrated multi-suite solution, but we price based on each employee's needs. Our modules are fully integrated so employees can see all of the information they need in the other modules—there aren't any compatibility issues.
No Hidden Customer Relationship Management Software Costs
The price quoted to you by other CRM vendos may look attractive, but many companies find out afterwards that the features they really need are included in a more expensive package. Further, list prices often don't stipulate how much additional features cost.
Features like High-touch Learning and support, data backup, offline clients, and access to full customization are lucrative extras for most of our CRM competitors. In fact, one leading customer relationship management vendor publicly discloses that its subscription price is only 68% of the total cost of ownership of their product.
Entellium is different—we're the only CRM software company with "What You See Is What You Get" pricing to provide the best value. Make sure to ask the tough questions of each vendor when it comes to what's included in the sticker price, and what you can expect to pay for essential items that aren't listed. With Entellium, you already know the answer—zero extra costs.
Guided Deployment & Free Support
When you choose Entellium for your CRM needs, you're getting a long-term partner. We provide high-touch Learning and support throughout your relationship with us—not just when it's time to renew the contract.
We offer invaluable resources to aid a successful CRM deployment with our JUMP-START Program—Entellium's free, customer go-live process. It's far and away the simplest, most high-touch and effective Learning in the customer relationship management industry.
JUMP-START has three separate "tracks" for each type of employee who will use our CRM tools—the Business Process Owner (sales and service executives), the System Manager (who will configure Entellium) and the Representatives (users who interact with customers routinely).
Each group gets live, Web-based training sessions relevant to their role in the company as well as supplemental how-to guides that explain key features in everyday language. Most reps are proficient in Entellium CRM software after one 90-minute session, and executives only needs 3 more sessions. And your whole organization gets access to the JUMP-START Program free, at no extra charge.
Whether you're evaluating CRM systems for sales force automation or customer service, Entellium has a CRM software solution for you.
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