We love the promise of CRM systems!
As we learn at the Microsoft Dynamics Internet site, CRM can increase sales performance, boost customer satisfaction, improve marketing effectiveness. It can drive customer retention and increase sales by anticipating and meet customer needs. It can establish a 360-degree view of customer interaction and sales opportunities and deliver value with integrated interaction and knowledge management. It can help us plan, implement, and measure more effective marketing campaigns, slash customer response times, and gain new insights into service trends. Through increased user adoption, it can put business intelligence at each user’s fingertips, increasing productivity and reducing backlog on waiting for reports to be run. It is the road to operational efficiency. It works seamlessly with Outlook and automates workflows across sales, marketing, and operations.
Love it! But… Of course there is a “but….”
The “but…” is a human problem. If humans do not use the CRM system, if they do not enter complete, accurate, and timely information into the system, then what is there in the CRM system to process? User adoption is a serious constraint in the CRM environment and, historically, has been a major limiting factor on the success of these systems. Sales reps feel that reporting is paperwork, to be done whenever and wherever, at night, on weekends, all at one time in a huge sacrificial effort once a month. Many sales reps hate to keyboard in-depth information into the CRM system, so they leave out detail or fail to report . Many companies have given up and are now going to smart phones or tablets like the iPAD (“push 1 for inventory, push 2 for…) to try to reduce the reporting function to a few clicks in a template app.
Getting accurate, timely, and complete information into the CRM system remains the No. 1 constraint of these wonderful software systems. Without good information, decision making based on these systems is at high risk of being wrong! So, what is to be done to make the data entry so simple and fast that sales reps will, in fact, use the system to report their sales meeting information?
Voice and cell phone. Sales reps love to talk and they have cell phones embedded in their ears. Intuitive, natural, enjoyable, simple. The sales rep leaves a meeting, dials a secure number, enters a secure PIN or ID number, and then just speaks in his/her information. When finished, he/she hangs up and gets on to serving customers and making money. Speaking for 3-4 minutes is the equivalent of 40-60 minutes keyboarding. And speech-to-text is too inaccurate to be useful in an open sales environment on the road (wind blowing, rep with a head cold, gate and boarding announcements, other people talking in the car, a thousand random distractions).
A voice-based system, with features like US-based manual transcription by native English language citizens, 98% accuracy, quick turnaround, automatic syncing into the Microsoft Dynamics database, and automatically generated reports back to the speaker and to the leaders of the organization.
A voice-based system that would be natural and easy for the sales reps to use, that would clear the reporting hurdle in minutes rather than hours, with their reporting up to date with current, accurate, and complete information. With a CRM system such as Microsoft Dynamics kept up to date for organization leaders for correct understanding, competent decision making, and confident and forceful action (for more information, click here),