Working with the CRM Management tab

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a business model that helps you increase profitability by keeping satisfied, high-yield customers. It emphasizes the value of your customers over the lifetime of your relationship together and gives you tools to maintain solid customer relationships over a long period of time.

Exceptional service and frequent contact are key aspects of CRM. The Vision CRM modules have been designed to help you provide great service, to make it easy to stay in frequent contact with your customers on a regular basis, and to help everyone in your organization stay abreast of customer opportunities and issues. Vision CRM tools specifically help you:

• Apply a more personalized approach to all interaction with customers. Share up-to-the-second information about your customers across all levels and departments of your company.

• Anticipate customers' needs and meet them quickly and efficiently.

• Increase customer retention and loyalty. After all, it costs far less to retain existing customers than it does to gain new ones.

• Build relationships with your best customers and keep them from turning to a lower-priced competitor. Lead them to the conclusion that since they have such a great, close business relationship with your company, it wouldn't make sense to go anywhere else.

• Provide closed-loop resolution to your customers' problems and concerns.

• Measure and increase the success of your marketing efforts and your best business practices. Analyze trends.

Vision CRM is based on the notion that events occurring in the normal course of your business create opportunities for you to strengthen your customer relationships. Vision CRM lets you take advantage of these "touch points" by triggering customer-focused activities based on routine events. An event might be as simple as the creation of a new customer record in Vision. Perhaps when a new customer is created, you want to alert sales support to send out a welcome package. Or perhaps when no orders have been received in the last two months from a customer, you want to alert an Account Executive to place a follow-up call.

CRM events can help you automate both best business practices and marketing/customer retention activities. The Vision CRM Management tab contains screens and fields that you can use to easily tap into routine operations through the definition and activation of CRM events. This tab also helps you check the status of CRM events and to manage ongoing customer-focused activities.

Following are descriptions of the screens available on the CRM Management tab.