Why one Unified and Converged CRM is way better than multiple siloed software systems?

You have asked for a monthly report. After waiting for several hours what you get is a spreadsheet haphazardly stuffed with figures. Worse, the report is incorrect and does not include the entire month’s data. But before you raise your finger at your employees, take a look at your work process. Is it entangled in a complex application landscape?

If yes, do not panic! You’re certainly not experiencing this alone.

All too often, business entrepreneurs complain of inefficiency. But surprisingly, this inefficiency is not always the result of employees’ half-hardheartedness into work. Rather it is due to the presence of standalone software systems that jumble up the entire work process and obstruct to streamline and automate important aspects of sales, marketing and service.

For any business to increase its productivity, a cohesive process is required that provides a holistic view of customers. However to achieve this, it is essential that data spanning sales, marketing and customer support processes are collected from all touchpoints and neatly streamlined into one repository. But does that happen??

The old school of thought

Many still perceive sales, marketing and support as separate entities and make them function in watertight compartments where information does not flow across or flows too late to take advantage. To make things worse, disparate software solutions are implemented to cater to the requirements of sales, marketing and service departments.

While these standalone systems provide immediate benefits, they restrict businesses from growing and expanding in the long term. Siloed business software systems together create a mess that results into inefficiency, non-productivity and sluggishness.

The new school of thought

As a business entrepreneur, it is imperative to get the fact that today’s digitally-savvy customers demand a seamless, consistent and personalized experience right from the first interaction. And to make this possible, it is crucial to intertwine Marketing, Sales and Service. Then only can:

– Marketing use sales and service data to run upsell campaigns for existing customers
– Sales use marketing data to attract and nurture their leads down the funnel
– Support use marketing and sales data to become familiar with customers’ history and cater to their requests/complaints speedily.

If these three departments are kept detached and fragmented with siloed systems, there is bound to be communication gap and information discrepancy. Several business challenges will arise that will cripple growth. Some severe ones include:

1. Slow process: Which business owner likes his team to spend hours on a task that can be completed in a few minutes? None

But this very thing happens when marketing, sales and support data is kept in different systems. Activities take a lot longer to get completed because the team sifts through piles of records saved across systems to compile the data. Such time-consuming tasks reduce the agility of the business as a whole.

2. Inaccurate information: Siloed software systems result into overlapping databases. But while it takes a lot of time to get a complete view of the statistics, the data produced in the report is not necessarily always accurate. That’s because compelled to spend hours on acquiring and analyzing information from disparate systems, often teams make minor and major glitches. As a result, businesses make decisions using incorrect information.

3. Increased cost: This is a no-brainer! Businesses have to spend a major share of their resource on acquiring and integrating disparate applications. This is a straight blow to the fast growing small and medium businesses that function with a limited budget and cannot afford to spend beyond a certain level in any department. Also IT time is wasted on software maintenance.

On the contrary, when sales, marketing and service is combined through a unified and converged platform, the following benefits are experienced:

1. Enhanced productivity: The entire data is in one platform, synced and accessible in real time. This ‘dramatically improved visibility’ plays a crucial part in making timely actions. Updated information can be accessed anywhere anytime to make accurate and faster decisions.

2. Lower software costs: Instead of investing in multiple software systems, single software fits the entire business needs. So IT does not have to install, integrate and maintain multiple software systems. That results in significant cost reduction and improved business operations as IT time is spent on other core areas.

3. Better customer experience: Unified software system provides a 360 degree view of leads and customers which results into better marketing, sales and customer service. Sales team can upsell and cross-sell more efficiently to their customers. Similarly, support can serve customers needs proactively and marketing can retarget old leads with personalized campaigns.

New-age Unified and Converged CRM software

To cater to the ‘One software’ need of businesses; many renowned CRM vendors have come up with Unified and Converged CRM solutions. As suggestive from the name, these software solutions do not function as plain-vanilla CRM but as comprehensive Management platforms through which businesses can manage customers, right from Marketing to Sales and Support.

So without further ado, free your business from a tangled software web and choose unified, full-featured, yet extremely easy-to-use converged CRM system for sales, marketing, support and billing needs. Using one platform to manage all functions enables businesses to save resources, control costs and behave and function like an integrated whole.