A flexible CRM software solution will help you track valuable information about your customers. Having real time access to detailed reporting and dashboards will allow you to optimise many of your business processes. Whether you are a decision maker for marketing, sales or customer service, having the right information at the right time will help you make the right decisions for your business.

Real time customer information can be leveraged to construct powerful KPIs such as business process profitability and so account for the opportunity revenue as well as service costs of customers. Such KPIs can enable your management to implement strategies to attain more profitable customers while reducing unprofitable customers and increase customer satisfaction driving up the overall profitability of the business.

As a marketing decision maker you are always looking to drive the marketing return on investment. Having a real time dashboard for your customer relationship management system will help you to demonstrate the impact your marketing efforts are having by tracking the performance of the entire Target-to-Revenue process. As such you can closely monitor marketing investments in aggregate and individually to understand actual versus expected results.

Having customer data available to you at all times has a number of major benefits such as:

• Your marketing management will be faster and more effective

• You will measure your marketing spend, plan more efficiently and course-correct underperforming campaigns while still active

• You can adjust and align your strategy with resources to drive toward your marketing goals.

• You can reduce wasted expenditure by identifying underperforming investments.

• Gain and share insight about your marketing strategy’s impact on revenue and projected revenue.

• You can segment customer data to make better customer target decisions.

• Workflow-driven processes increase reach and relevancy.

• Seamless tracking of cross-channel communications saves time and money.

As a sales decision maker driving revenue is your primary goal. To do this effectively, accurate forecasts are essential. These will mitigate the risk of poor sales performance by gaining insight into projected sales performance. Moreover, a CRM software dashboard will help you monitor the ongoing health of sales performance with dynamic snapshots of metrics such as actual versus planned sales results, pipeline performance, and win/loss ratios. You will then be in a position to address sales and marketing issues sooner and more quickly. For example, if you can implement repeatable sales processes sooner and adjust sales strategies as obstacles are identified your closure rates are likely to increase. From a sales management perspective, access to real time CRM data will:

• Allow you to define KPIs that cascade and roll up across your sales organisation and provide views that support easy browsing such as by time or location.

• Give you scorecards to display KPIs showing status and trend on key sales metrics.

• Show you customer profitability and allow you to monitor and improve long term business profitability.

• Provide visual dashboard reports such as opportunities, top 5 sales people, estimated vs actual value of opportunities and revenue across product types.

As a customer service decision maker a primary objective is to ensure and increase customer satisfaction. Real time customer data will give you a simple scorecard view to monitor customer service and support processes against customer experience metrics. You can then mitigate potential threats to customer satisfaction and your brand image by addressing issues with products, agents or contact centres proactively.

Additionally, a detailed CRM software solution will help you:

• Reduce your customer service costs. You can identify, prioritise, and address the most costly aspects of your service process. For example if you have contact centres or agents, you can quickly identify better processes and so cutting training costs and develop a rewards program for efficient work practices.

• Improve your service metrics by reviewing a real time dashboard. Monitoring the performance of service processes, centres, and agents will allow you to adjust resources and processes to address the most important issues.

CRM software solutions such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM, whether you choose an in house solution that integrates to your other business systems or a web based CRM software solution will help you monitor, measure, manage and drive your business. CRM can give you access to real time customer information in a simple drill down dashboard view. As such it is an essential management tool that allows you to analyse customer information and make more effective business decisions at the right time.