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Mobile access CRM

Today’s workforce is truly mobile. Most of us now work at the office, from home and on the road. ‘On demand access’ to critical customer information from anywhere is becoming a ‘must have’ facility.

Now customers demand CRM access using a remote desktop or laptop accessing data through the Internet or on a handheld device. Suppliers are expected to have all the information at their fingertips at the moment of interaction. The same insight into their business and affairs are expected in a one-to-one meeting is expected when they phone into a call centre.

Remote access is a genuinely useful tool that can help your company to reduce duplicate entry, administration time, travelling time and costs for remote workers. It will also enable you to improve your customer service, and improve the quality and usefulness of data input.

Staff want the technology. Surveys have shown that sales management and field representatives both felt strongly that providing PDA access to CRM systems would drive increase productivity of the sales force. Eighty-three percent of sales representatives felt that a PDA sales solution would make them more productive in the field and 90% said they would use their CRM system more if they had handheld mobile access. Sales management agreed: 82% believe PDA access for sales representatives would drive field usage of CRM and 91% believe mobile CRM software on PDAs will become an important sales tool for their organization.

Two factors have stopped many companies from adopting mobile technology to improve their business functions. Firstly, companies are just inexperienced when it comes to applying mobile technologies. Secondly, even though it is not true, companies percieve the cost associated with mobile solutions to be greater than the benefits gained because they can't immediately identify how to apply mobile data to improve competitive capability. A mobile data delivery solution must be cost effective and allow organisations to experiment with mobile technologies and to gain insight on how to gain a competitive edge from the technology.

It should have the following:

• Access to information from any remote location covered by a mobile network.
• Low start-up costs allowing development of mobile strategies through experiments.
• Simplified user interface making it easy to administer data.
• Quick search and find

Success can be measured by:

• Improved cycle times in providing a customer with accurate information.
• Efficiency increases for buyers and sales people free them to focus on developing key account relationships
• Empowered sales people and buyers with information when they enter negotiations through remote access to data
• Allow management to be up to date with information where ever they are engaging with suppliers, customers, partners or shareholders.
• Experiments with mobile strategies to define ways of improving current business processes and prepare for new wireless technologies that will reshape the business environment.

Thanks to broadband and 3G technology this is no longer just the preserve of large companies. Now SMEs can also use the web and PDAs to access their CRM systems remotely giving benefits such as:

• Accessing important account contact and history information
• Updating account information
• Cultivating stronger sales relationships
• Improving customer service
• Scheduling activities and appointments

ECommerce pro and cons, dos and don’ts

ECommerce is one of the hottest topics in business today. It may be very beneficial for your company but it can be tough to separate fact from fiction. With so many retail businesses thinking about expanding to an online ECommerce web site there are some things to think about before you make the decision.

The shopping cart is what gets the most attention. Far too many people feel that a shopping cart is all that’s needed to have ECommerce. While it is a certainly an important part, there is much more to reaping the full benefits of ECommerce. A well designed ECommerce site is certainly central to attracting prospects and customers and should provide a pleasing shopping experience, assist your customer in finding their desired merchandise, allow them to bump into impulse buys and pay easily and quickly for their purchases but a lot more is required too.

This means an agreed requirement specification must be drawn up as the first stage before anything else is done – any other approach will only lead to confusion and worse.

• Does it have its own or does it easily integrate with your existing stock control forecasting and supply management systems?

• Back-end fulfilment – the logistics of ‘picking’ and fulfilling orders.

• Does it integrate easily with accounting systems (e.g. Sage, QuickBooks)?

• Does it have or integrate easily with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems that may be proposed in future?

• The chance to talk to a human being! Do you need a help desk for problems and other forms of customer service such as returns.

• Payments – merchant account and payment gateway: If you are going to invest in an ECommerce web site you have to have your own merchant account and a payment gateway or interface between your ECommerce site and your merchant account.

• Scalability – as your customer base grows, can your ECommerce solution still handle the volumes?

• Hosting – are your systems available when they are supposed to be?

Too many ECommerce sites neglect to consider some very important features, such as:

ECommerce marketing is all about enticing web surfers to your site and, once there, to becoming a customer. On the web, visiting your ‘store’ requires a great deal less effort. A single mouse click and there they are. Unfortunately it also means that the customer has nothing invested in the visit and they can just as easily move to another site with another click.

Just a few years ago it cost almost nothing to bring new visitors to your site. As the competition has increased, however, this has fast become the most costly aspect of having an ECommerce web site so effective search engine optimization is vital.

• Offline marketing – e.g. in-store. What works most cost effectively to drive traffic and orders via the web from non-web activities.

• Site optimisation – how to make sure technical structure, copy, content, back-links and a range of other factors are initially and remain optimised so that as many high search engine placements on relevant searches are obtained.

• Pay per click and other online marketing – how to get traffic from advertising against key words and phrases used in search engines and from adverts on other sites.

• Enticing appropriate visitor behaviour by establishing brand context, customer flow, building relationships, increasing per customer purchases and values.

• EMail – how to grow the EMail list and use it to grow profitable sales.

• Site management information and statistics – this is arguably more important than the shopping cart itself. If you do not know how visitors to your website and in the web shop are behaving, what turns them on and what turns them off then it is far, far harder to improve sales and site profitability. Applications such as WebTrends and ClickTracks need to be evaluated for best fit

EMails and auto-responders

EMails are essential to your business. The bad news is that people expect prompt replies to their EMail inquiries. And, if you spend all your working hours answering EMails, how are you supposed to run your business?

The answer is simple: use auto-responders. Auto-responders are programs that automatically respond to your EMails without you so much as having to click on your mouse.

There are a number of good reasons why you need an auto-responder besides just answering your EMail. For example, auto-responders can be used if you need a way to send information about your services or products, price lists, or if there are repeated questions asked across large numbers of EMails.

Maybe you want to offer your site visitors a special bonus of some kind, such as advice or relevant articles. All of this can be handled by an auto-responder. Auto-responder programs vary from software that runs with your EMail program to a specialized script that runs on your web hosting company's server. This kind of script may use a web page form or simply operate with your EMail account to send out a standardized message whenever an EMail is received.

Some auto-responders can do more than simply send out standardized messages. They can send out an unlimited number of follow-up messages sent at predetermined interval of time. For example, you can set your auto-responder to send out a new message every day for as long a period as you desire.

Don’t forget that same basic rules which apply to ordinary business letters also apply to EMails.

• You need a standard footer stating your company name and other details:
• You must include your registered office address, a contact EMail address, registered number and country of registration, particularly if the EMail forms part of a contract.
• The content of an EMail is covered by the same laws as the contents of a letter.
• Do not send or forward EMails that would be illegal, offensive or discriminatory if sent as ordinary documents.
• Check the contractual implications of an EMail before sending it.

Commercial EMails are covered by a range of regulations which include that:

• You must clearly show the purpose of the EMail and who it is coming from.
• You must provide a valid address which recipients can use to opt out of receiving further EMails from you.

You can create a standardized signature that every employee in your business uses, or you can go wild, and let every staff member create their own personal signature. Of course, like everything in life, there are some rules and guidelines to creating a signature.

• Keep the length of your signature between four to six lines of text, with no more than 70 characters in a single line.
• Make sure that your EMail program does not cut off your text!
• Include a short message about your company. It should be a subtle sell of your services or your products, and possibly your company's reliability and longevity.

EMail is an excellent marketing tool; it is inexpensive and it is fast. Use it to advertise your business by choosing your EMail system carefully.

 

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January: Mobile web & search strategy

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