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Both an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and a customer relationship management (CRM) system can individually provide value to any company. Together, they offer the potential to provide tremendous positive impact to your company’s business planning.
An ERP system gives you the ability to oversee and manage numerous functions inside your organization. These include IT, human resources, finance, and more. A CRM system streamlines your customer communications through automation. This can make sales and marketing far more efficient. When you integrate these two systems, it provides you with an overarching view of your business from end-to-end.
Integrated Business Applications Offer Better Overview
Using individual software solutions for CRM and ERP only offers you a partial view of limited areas of your business. CRM software is usually very effective at reducing your resource demand through automation, but it only gives you insights to customer-related data like sales and communications. There is no easy way to see how that customer data correlates with other areas of your business.
Likewise, ERP software is very effective at letting you analyze various areas of your business. It lets you monitor your production and inventory levels, for example, but inside the software you’re blind to customer-driven data.
Integrated business applications that combine CRM and ERP functions provide you with a 360-degree view of your business. It lets you view and correlate data from areas of your company like accounting and sales to HR and warehouse. You can track, manage, and maximize the effectiveness of all areas of your business.
Boosted Business Productivity
An integrated business solution with CRM and ERP functions allows you to boost productivity within your organization. This is especially true if the solution includes ERP mobile systems.
These systems allow your employees and management to access systems and data not only when they’re in the office, but from anywhere in the world. This is especially true for industries like sales, customer service, or transport, which rely on remote or mobile workers who may be located anywhere.
Integrated business software with both CRM and ERP functions, accessed via mobile systems, provide tremendous flexibility to your workforce. This ultimately will lead to a significant boost in productivity for your overall organization.
Improved Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is one core area many businesses seek to improve. Customer feedback and surveys often drive corporate initiatives to improve the customer experience.
With integrated business solutions, customer data and ERP data is accessible from a single dashboard. This lets you see the relationships between your internal business processes and performance and customer-driven data.
These dashboards will show you things like the status of customer orders, so customer service can relay that information to customers more quickly during a phone call. It allows efficient, informative answers to customer inquiries, which almost always results in a better customer experience and satisfaction.
A direct result of this is more orders from satisfied customers and more revenue for your business.
Better Customer Retention
An individual CRM software solution can allow your sales and marketing staff to provide special offers to customers, sometimes in an automated manner. However, if you use an integrated business solution, marketing and sales can use the past purchasing history of individual customers to offer personalized offers.
Recent surveys show that personalizing offers leads to increased sales. Your marketing staff can even use recent orders to generate upsells and further maximize overall revenue for the company.
Customer service can use data from the ERP inventory management module to identify any issues with shipment dates. This allows customer service and sales to provide customers with realistic order fulfillment and delivery dates.
All these activities that are made possible through a combined ERP and CRM solution serve to improve the customer experience, boost retention, and maximize your company’s profitability.
Contact Management
Another area that an integrated business solution can benefit a business is in contact management. Whenever any system is separate, individual databases need to be maintained to track the identities of individuals, whether those are customers or employees.
Correlating data about those contacts between the two systems can become extremely unwieldy and difficult to maintain, with mismatching information often forming between the two databases.
With an integrated business solution where CRM and ERP systems share a single contact database, everyone in the company can access the same contact information. This reduces the chance of errors, and allows for a more efficient management of contact information.
Integrated Business Applications from Mindover Software
Mindover Software has offered integrated business applications for nearly twenty years. Our team of professionals are CPA’s and MBA’s who understand all aspects of your business, including financials, sales, and marketing. As an Acumatica and Sage Software Select business partner, we have many of the world’s best software available to meet your needs.
Our integrated ERP and CRM solutions include Sage 300 with the integrated Sage CRM solution. These Sage products work together to help small and mid-sized businesses to improve sales, marketing, and customer service processes.
If you are looking for a cloud-based solution, we recommend Acumatica. This cloud ERP offers an integrated CRM as an add-on suite that uses one central database with other suites, such as Financial Management, Distribution, and Project Accounting.
Contact Mindover Software to get started finding the right integrated solution for your business.
