About Enterprise CRM

Enterprise CRM has emerged as way for larger businesses to streamline customer-related processes across divisions, increase the efficiency and effectiveness of customer transactions at all levels, and optimize service quality at each touch-point. Unlike smaller CRM solutions that focus on productivity enhancements at the departmental level, enterprise CRM helps companies plan and execute successful customer strategies across their entire business.

What is Enterprise CRM?

Enterprise customer relationship management is a family of tightly-integrated applications that span both front- and back-office operations throughout a company. Enterprise CRM includes sales force, marketing, contact center, and help desk automation systems to seamlessly coordinate and consolidate the disparate, repetitive processes and siloed data that often exist across multiple customer-facing business units. With enterprise CRM, all sales, marketing, service, and support staff can share information and work in synch to build stronger, more profitable customer relationships.

Key Benefits of Enterprise CRM for Your Company

Enterprise CRM can help your business enhance the way it interacts with and services customers through multiple channels and divisions. With an enterprise CRM suite, you can deploy company-wide best practices, implementing consistent, effective, and efficient processes across departments and business units. Improving the quality of your customer service, you will increase loyalty, minimize churn, and boost customer profitability.

An enterprise CRM solution can also deliver significant increases in staff productivity and reduce the costs associated with attracting, retaining, and supporting clients. By streamlining all customer-facing processes, coordinating cross-functional activities, and facilitating information flow across departments, an enterprise customer relationship management solution can eliminate the redundant and overlapping tasks that waste valuable employee time and money.

Does My Company Need Enterprise CRM?

The contact management and departmental CRM applications that work so well for smaller companies may not scale to meet the more complex needs of bigger businesses. If your company interacts with a large number of customers through multiple teams, then you need to consider an enterprise-wide CRM solution. Only enterprise customer relationship management can coordinate processes and activities across numerous channels and departments and help you improve service delivery at every single customer touch-point.

Common Enterprise CRM Features

Enterprise CRM provides a comprehensive suite of fully-integrated solutions, to automate and enhance customer-facing processes across your company. Components of an enterprise CRM suite include:

• Sales force automation: helps sales reps more effectively manage their contacts, opportunities and related activities. Sales force automation also provides mobile capabilities for on-the-go reps, forecasting, and order processing and tracking.
• Marketing automation: allows marketing teams to efficiently manage prospect databases, create and launch cross-channel marketing initiatives, and track campaign results and leads.
• Customer service or contact center automation: helps customer service teams deliver rapid, high-quality service while improving the success of up-sell and cross-sell programs.

What to Look for When Choosing an Enterprise CRM Solution

Larger companies have long-established business processes. Because these processes involve numerous staff members across multiple departments, any changes would be difficult to implement. Therefore, the enterprise CRM solution you choose must be flexible and customizable to work your existing workflows and procedures. It should also work seamlessly within your current infrastructure while continuing to leverage your previous technology investments. It must be able to integrate and share data with any existing system that stores customer information, including accounting and e-Commerce applications.

Ease of implementation is also critical, as some solutions require long, resource-intensive deployment cycles. In order to achieve rapid return on investment, your enterprise CRM project must be fast and well-organized across the various departments it will impact. Be sure to select a vendor that provides comprehensive consulting and training services to assist with installation and roll-out. Because the solution will be utilized by a large user base, it must be intuitive and user-friendly. Any solution that is cumbersome or difficult to use will require extensive staff training, and could negatively impact user adoption rates.