Every company, every product, every service and, above all, every customer is different. With all of this difference, your CRM strategy should also be different.
Yet, companies continue to rely on legacy, broad-based CRM solutions that have not been developed for their specific business needs.
And as consumers resist the mass-media messaging of traditional marketing, campaign effectiveness and productivity have decreased. Today's CRM solutions need to offer business-specific solutions for defined vertical markets.
“Our customers have to be able to communicate with their clients in ways that they understand and that are meaningful to them,” says Jane Thomson, MD of Softworx, an EOH company and Infor reseller.
Today's CRM solutions need to help customers get to their customers by offering them intelligent tools that help them anticipate their customers' needs to deliver the right products and services they want, when they want them.
“You need to be able to offer customers a CRM solution that fits and understands the basic issues that pertain to their industry. One size doesn't fit all: vertical CRM is the answer,” she maintains.
Business-specific CRM solutions enable companies to achieve competitive differentiation in several ways:
* Speeds time to market: Generate new opportunities efficiently without wasting resources through shorter sales cycles.
* Increased bundle penetration: Optimise the potential of existing customer relationships by selling bundled offerings that minimise churn and maximise revenue.
* Reduces churn and increases customer profitability: Utilise churn-detection models to identify at-risk customers and proactively build offers to retain them.
* Maximises your technology investment: Augment your existing front- and back-end systems and leverage your existing technology investment without additional IT outlay.
* Fosters flexibility: Increase your strength and resistance to market threats through the use of an open, adaptable technology for a flexible business infrastructure.
To achieve the above, companies need to implement a CRM solution with applications that enable them to communicate with customers more frequently and effectively, by providing greater insight into a customer's needs and buying patterns, offering an increased ability to act on that insight.
Generic solutions that try to capture the entire market's wants and needs into a single view lead only to more unread e-mails and unanswered calls.
An intelligent CRM solution will break down the traditional methods of sales, service and marketing and usher in a new era of highly targeted campaigns based on the specific needs of different verticals and customers.
“Customers want tailored services faster than ever before and they want to feel like they are your most valuable asset,” says Thomson.
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Softworx
Softworx is a successful South African business applications company that prides itself in being able to deliver world-class products to its extensive customer base, which includes a number of Fortune 500 companies. In addition, Softworx supports clients in industries ranging from manufacturing, retail, distribution and financial, to supporting various government entities. The company is dedicated to marketing, implementing and providing support for its range of complimentary software products to medium and large enterprises that require effective solutions to optimise their business processes.
Softworx has positioned itself as a leading provider of business applications in South Africa, specialising in end-to-end business solutions. The company prides itself on being able to deliver true value to its customers through the implementation of business solutions based on a powerful combination of leading edge products and consultancy. As a wholly owned subsidiary of EOH, Softworx has increased the number of services and products that can be offered to its customers from within the group.
EOH
EOH is a business and technology solutions provider creating lifelong partnerships by developing business and IT strategies, supplying and implementing solutions and managing enterprise-wide business systems and processes for medium to large clients.
EOH operates in the following three clusters of business units as a fully integrated business:
Technology - Through a number of subsidiary companies, EOH is able to sell, implement and support a range of world-class business applications, including ERP, CRM, business intelligence, advanced planning and scheduling, e-commerce and manufacturing execution systems (MES).
Consulting - Concentrated under the EOH Consulting brand are business units offering services ranging from strategic and business process consulting, project services, change management, supply chain optimisation and education.
Outsourcing - EOH offers comprehensive maintenance and support of client's IT infrastructure and applications through the rendering of full IT outsourcing, application hosting and managed services. In addition, EOH offers full business process outsourcing (BPO) services.
EOH has a presence in all major centres in South Africa and operates in the rest of Africa.
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