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CRM meets machine learning - and flies


Johannesburg, 26 Sep 2016
The CRM of today allows for a complete digital transformation, says Daniel Turtledove, regional director, Dynamics CRM at EOH.
The CRM of today allows for a complete digital transformation, says Daniel Turtledove, regional director, Dynamics CRM at EOH.

When the first cave-dweller started selling hand-made clubs for the discerning hunter-gatherer there is a good chance he would follow up with the client to find out how the product performed in the field - hoping to create a lasting relationship and fine-tune his club production process to better service the market.

This process, historically, was a tedious, time-consuming endeavour but, over the last few years customer relationship management (CRM) has evolved, using cutting-edge technology to streamline the process and allow for unheard of insight into your existing and potential clientele.

To understand this evolution and the value-add cutting edge CRM can deliver, Daniel Turtledove, regional director, Dynamics CRM at EOH, and winner of the Dynamics CRM Partner of the Year award, gave us a tour of modern CRM.

"In simple terms, CRM is a tool that can be used to give you a full, 360 degree view of your customer," says Turtledove. "It should afford you the ability to understand what everyone in the organisation is doing with regards to your customer, thereby allowing you to understand, and know your customer and allow you to act ahead before matters become issues. You are able to see trends before they develop into problems. A simple example is 'don't send out a consultant to close a sale before you solve a known issue'. CRM gives you the insight to do this."

CRM gives you out-the-box ability to deliver to your customers on standard things that we take for granted, Turtledove says. "The traditional core that is CRM, is to offer customers a wide variety of services. We have access to opportunity, pipeline, marketing and case management to name but a few. That is the old, conventional CRM of yesteryear."

The CRM of today, however, allows for a complete digital transformation - the concept of digitising your whole business to optimise customer sales, service and efficiency and minimise - possibly even eliminate - paperwork, forms and standing in lines, he says.

"Today we need to cater to our digital clients. We need to be able to do all our transacting on the web, our phones or tablets using quick-to-build apps. This is only one aspect of digital transformation. Field Services from CRM has moved the full power of field service interaction into the hands of the field engineer, giving them the power to deliver field services on a rich, real time, digital platform, taking digital signatures, producing digital work orders and electronic invoices directly off the tablet."

"Voice of the Customer enables CRM to produce instant digital surveys that can be rendered on your client's PC, phone or tablet moments after the service or sales delivery has taken place. Fantasy Sales Team enables a fun, game-like way of engaging with CRM, promoting healthy internal competition for sales teams. And Microsoft Social Engagement puts social sentiment at your fingertips, allowing you to track trends and sentiment in real-time, giving you the ability to measure and act upon it instantly."

Machine learning is taking things to the next step, he says. "There is so much seemingly hidden data being produced in our everyday interaction with technology. Machine learning harnesses that information, gathers it and transforms it in to meaningful data, to make better and more informed decisions."

"For example, with machine learning (part of the Azure service Microsoft provides for online CRM tenants), the machine is polling and gathering data in the background and is learning from the statistics around what you are doing. There is so much information being unravelled during this process, and it allows the user to make incredibly grounded, informed decisions based on facts. This allows you to be pre-emptive, proactive and fix things before they become problems."

"You can monitor equipment and machinery using micro sensors on critical systems - pretty much anything. You will know in advance on a particular machine when a 12-month shelf-life component is more likely to fail. You can now order the part 30 days ahead, plan your production around the stoppage for the replacement, and be sure you won't disappoint the client. This is the digital transformation of machine learning."

Machine learning gives the ability to monitor thousands, or even millions of processes, sensors, and procedures. By extension, if you can measure something, you can report on it, and this creates knowledge.

"Machine learning, coupled with CRM, allows you to be proactive in what you are measuring. What you do with the results can pre-empt and address issues. It decentralises the decision making process. The technology now empowers operators and middle management to make decisions based on facts, projections, and real-life scenarios, with historic information to back them. This eliminates the unproductive admin process and empowers upper management to concentrate more on operational and strategic thinking."

Essentially, implementing a holistic CRM system is not only good for the customer, but makes operational sense too.

"Modern CRM is an empowerment tool. It promotes, enables and empowers employees. It supports better business, better thinking, and better methodologies. If management adopts it at the highest levels, and users across the board understand the benefits, you have a win-win situation. Managers are empowering their sales force and field service teams to do better business. The agent wins, the customer wins, and the company wins. No downside here."


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