Guest post by the Workbooks team

Having accurate records of communications with your clients is vital for any business. Networking, marketing, sales and retention of clients all rely heavily on the ability to easily recall and check on previous interactions. Some of the best tools on the market today that can be used to track and analyse communications and interactions with clients are web-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software packages.

What is Customer Relationship Management?

Customer Relationship Management is a strategy for managing your company or business’s communications and interactions with customers and potential customers. Various Customer Relationship Management software packages are available that provide tracking, organization and analysis of various business processes, including marketing, sales, customer service and technical support. Web-based CRM software is especially popular as it provides unparalleled flexibility and accessibility to the software for employees and business owners alike.

What Can Customer Relationship Management Do?

CRM software allows for every communication and interaction of your company with a client to be easily recorded and integrated into an easy to use database. Emails, mailings, telephone calls and the customer’s replies (or the lack thereof) can all be documented. Web metrics, including such interactions as clicks and page views can also be tracked. By using Customer Relationship Management software a business owner or member of staff can have all this information at their fingertips, aiding decision making and allowing customers to experience more professional and more helpful customer service and technical support. Technical support and customer service staff need not ask repeat questions every time a customer has a problem, therefore improving the quality of the customer’s experience.

Marketing and sales staff can assess the impact of previous interactions on the client, and make better decisions going forward, thereby increasing the generation of leads and conversion of leads into sales. Customer Relationship Management software can also flag up bottlenecks in your communications, such as a particular member of staff who has been dropping the ball or a method of communication that has slower response times. This allows business owners to streamline and improve their client communications.

Advantages of Web Based Customer Relationship Management Software

Many companies now offer – and many employees now wish to take advantage of – flexible working hours and opportunities to work at home. Web-based Customer Relationship Management software allows these working conditions and the benefits that go with them to accrue to a company without sacrificing the advantages that an integrated Customer Relationship Management software solution provides. When employees are on business trips, at home, or away from the office when an opportunity or concern arises from a client, they do not need to be equipped with a company laptop on which the software is installed. Instead, the employee can use any computer with internet access to log on to the secure site and log the communications. This avoids lag times where important communications are not available to other employees, avoiding crossed wires, unnecessary communications and annoyance to the client.

This article was written by Workbooks, leading supplier of web CRM software.

If there is something everyone loves about Open Source software (FLOSS) is that every issue ever discovered with it is known, there are no surprises. All incompatibilities, if discovered, are out there and anyone trying out the software knows what to expect before they begin. The main benefit of such transparency is that customers are never outraged by bugs. And let’s face it, there is no bug-free software, especially if you try to make it work on Windows

When it comes to closed source software, I’ve been in the industry enough to know the rule of “hush-hush” is the preferred business model. Known issues, bugs, incompatibilities? Keep them buried and hope no one finds out. The perfect plan to have everything blow in your face.

I thought a series debating all the aspects of this “hide it all under the carpet” strategy would help software vendors understand that transparency can actually be a great selling point. No customer likes to be bullshitted and asked to remove programs without any real explanation. That is why I’ve come up with a series focusing on how important respect and telling the truth are in this competitive industry and what the lack of these values can lead to. Up to now, I’ve thought of 4 parts, but things might get more complex around the way:

1. How Much Do Sales People Know and How Much of that Do They Hide?
2. Should the Marketers and Communicators Care about What’s Wrong With the Product?
3. When Everything Goes Wrong, Do Support Engineers Eventually Come Clean?
4. Software Utopia: Transparency All the Way! Any Benefits?

This is indeed a large and complicated topic, so while posting each entry of debating the subject of transparency in the software industry, I’d love to hear your thoughts, your pleasant encounters and horror stories involving tech support, sales people and marketer in the software industry.

So stay tuned, and let’s start debating!

All companies developing commercial software products offer support services. Even open source solutions benefit from this advantage. Be it promoted as free (included in the license price) or as subscription-based service, the technical assistance seems more of a must than an additional benefit.

However, the types of support services and their quality play an important role in buying decisions, both for end-users and savvy IT personnel. For end users, it’s a question of abilities and knowledge they lack. They buy software products to make their lives easier, not to spend hours and hours trying to debug them (unless that’s their hobby). For IT professionals, it’s a question of time and resource management. If you need to invest in a certain solution, why not save crucial time and resources by acquiring one with technical assistance included. If you’d like to know more on why it’s recommended to call support instead of toying with a product yourself, I recommend this article I wrote a while ago.

Given the high importance potential customers place on tech assistance, support services need to be designed so as to represent a strong competitive advantage. And there are a few aspects you can think of to sketch a strategy to tune what you offer your customers.

• Availability – the longer support services are available the better. Non-stop is what you aim for, given that more companies provide such services, part of them free of charge. Nine to five is not that hot, given that software issues have this bad habit of not waiting for it to be a business day to happen. They also show no preference to business hours.
• Diversity – Email, chat, phone, forum, blog, the more channels you open, the better your reputation will be. Besides, email and live chat are not always available. Especially if the problem affects your customer’s internet connection
• Language barriers – do you sell your soft worldwide? Sometimes through local partners to people who are not that good with your mother tongue? Then you should work hard on assisting them in their own language. You can either hire techies that are also fluent in a second language. Or establish a basic level support center through your local partner. Besides helping you build a great relationship with customers and to keep them coming back, it might also be compulsory (at least partially) in certain countries. For example, in Romania you must provide user manuals and quick guides in Romanian for all software products you sell.
• Outstanding quality – the professionalism, expertise and ability to reach their customers is essential for your support staff. Also, the time it takes them to respond is crucial, as customers get impatient extremely fast and never have days to waste on waiting for a reply or a solution. Therefore you should first make sure you have enough employees to guarantee a response time of maximum 24 hours and then make sure you develop more then their technical skills. You might look into providing some “soft skills” training sessions for them. This will teach them empathy, efficiency in conversations and not to take any incident personally.
• Adaptability – Some customers are really open to providing feedback after interacting with a support representative. They provide extremely useful input on both the product and the service. Such feedback needs to then be the base of all service enhancements you might plan for the future. Otherwise it is just a waste.

Software development, just as any other IT-related field, is a highly competitive market. Turning every little aspect of your portfolio into a competitive advantage is a smart move. Features, prices, support services, everything you do can be turned in your favor.