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Overview
Customer Relationship Management is an integrated approach to identifying, acquiring and retaining customers. The key to successful CRM is:
1. The ability to maintain information about a customer, all its interactions with an organisation and then share that information throughout the organisation.
2. Managing the follow-up process to make sure that any additional communication or action with regard to a customer occurs in a timely fashion.
ICE:CRM addresses these key points as well as a number of additional issues. The main features of ICE:CRM are:
Companies / Personnel Details / Variable Information Store
Most systems seem designed around fitting variable shaped customers into square holes, ICE:CRM focuses on making the hole fit the customer. While the system has standard forms for recording Customer & Employee information, it is also easy to create new information fields that can be applied to all customers, a group of customers or to a single customer. In this way a variety of information can be collected and analysed about each customer.
The Company and Personnel table also acts as a central directory that is available across an organisation and can be searched, filtered and used for mail merges or other forms of direct correspondence.
Contact Management
A Customer can interact with an organisation in a number of different ways depending upon the nature of the relationship. Initially contact may just be an enquiry that requires follow-up and so would generate a lead or sales enquiry. If a support agreement is in place, a request for support may be made. All of these interactions need to be maintained as part of an organisations history with that customer. To facilitate the entry of this information, ICE:CRM comes with an in-built library of contact forms that cover the range of communication that occurs, including: Lead / Enquiry - used to generate a follow up process outlining the basic requirements that the customer is looking for; and Sales / Support Request - used to generate an action in the form of a sale or a service.
The aim of Contact Management is both to maintain a history of events as well as making sure you know what needs to be done for a customer. Often it is the minor items being forgotten that end up damaging a customer relationship. ICE:CRM aims to prevent this.
The in-built forms exist to get an organisation up to speed and using the system quickly, all these forms can however be extended and new forms can be added to meet specific requirements. As part of entering a contact with a customer, follow up actions can be created as detailed in the Event Management section below.
Task Management / Event Management
Events are tasks that need to happen. They can be given a target date, made recurring and assigned to a person or a group. A single contact can create multiple Events or initiate a task process which consists of a series of predefined actions occurring in sequence. Follow-up events can be considered part of general customer response or be place under specific customer projects. If follow-up actions do not take place within a certain period of time, they trigger a special type of event, called an alert, that apprises management that action needs to be taken.
Managing events is made easier through the use of projects which allow a variety of independent activities to be ongoing between a customer and the organisation or its various branches. Using Task Management ICE:CRM allows multiple projects to be managed separately so that while different people will be involved in the projects, each can see exactly what needs to be done. Each project may have its own Project Manager who will respond to alerts as well as approving tasks where required.
External Linking
The system supports linking to external systems so that other sources of information about the customer can all be accessed from a central system. This includes linking to:
User Profiles
Access to CRM is controlled through user names and passwords which can be changed through the use of User profiles. The organisation and its users are added to the system in the same way that Customers and their personnel. Using the system administration, a person can be given access as a system user which allows them to do more with the system. This includes:
- Ability to Access the System
- Generate Tasks
- Approve Tasks
- Set Alerts
- Manage and respond to tasks that have been assigned to them.
- Monitor tasks they have assigned to others.
- Access to different Projects.
While the employers of external companies are normally just included as a Company Contact, by changing their access type they can be brought on board as part of a project management team or for the purpose of reporting service, sales or support requests.
For more information about ICE:CRM, please crm@adtworld.com |
