Why Segregated Data Is Dangerous To Your Business: Benefits of CRM

Steve Diels, President of Aamcom, a provider of outsourced telephone customer service, had a major problem.

His sales data, client history and other essential information needed to run his business was scattered in various databases and systems - including Excel.

Most of Aamcom's clients are medical offices which rely on Aamcom to service their own clients over the phone.

With two locations, one in Sacramento and Redondo Beach and a variety of operators working from home, Steve knew that with data about his clients (medical offices) scattered in different databases, Aamcom was not working as efficiently as they could to serve their needs.

Aamcom explored a variety of solutions, including Microsoft CRM and Microsoft Business Contact Manager (a CRM-lite plugin for Outlook). He figured, that since these solutions were Microsoft based, they would work best. However, these solutions were either too expensive or too complicated for his needs.

At some point Steve came across Avidian's Prophet which provides CRM for Outlook Users. He liked the fact that Avidian was easy to roll out and perfect for his budget.

There are many good CRM packages on the market and no matter which one you choose for your business, you should have the same results as Aamcom.

Their biggest change was that instead of having several different databases for customer data, Aamcom now has one central place for client history and more.

Often times in having meetings about various customers, Steve's executive team found themselves digging for files or folders (physical, paper) or searching through one or more databases.

With data in ONE place access to the data is much faster and consolidated.

Sometimes we get distracted from what Customer Relationship Management is all about. Sure, it's about having a fancy, Amazon.com like web portal that has some artificial intelligence and enables customers to "see what other customers" have purchased. However, a BIG part of it, is also ensuring that your customer's data is not in an Excel file or stored in 3 or 4 different databases.

Having ONE central database for customer information makes it easier to serve your customers and see a complete profile of each customer.

tags: avidian , crm , prophet | 0 comments