It's easy to think of a business asset as something you slap a tag on, such as computers and machinery; certainly assets encompass buildings, land, and also intangible items such as intellectual property and business processes. And as management gurus write in their tell-all books, you should value your staff as one of your most important assets.
Let's not forget the one asset that should be at the forefront of all others: your customer.
As a business owner and manager, you are spending time and resources to acquire new customers. But have you thoroughly given thoughts to the process of keeping the relationship with your customers at the center of your business processes? A customer-centric view of your operations may look very different from your current set-up. Here are several areas of your business that may help you establish and sustain the relationships with your customers regardless of the point of contact:
- Empower your staff with enterprise-wide access to vital customer, partner and prospect information
- Integrate with your accounting software for efficient access to customer transactional data such as purchases, calls and interactions, emails and documents sent and received
- Analyze, forecast and report on key sales data
- Integrate with other applications through sophisticated but easy to use web services interface
- Customer information accessed by the sales and customer-facing departments delivers unique benefits for the entire organization, as well as to its customers.
Sales wins by:
- Having unprecedented levels of visibility into the order and invoice processes
- Knowing the account credit status, terms and account balance before creating an order
- Knowing the invoice, payment, outstanding balance, and aging information to provide more complete customer service
- Using past product purchasing information to plan future marketing campaigns
Accounting wins by:
- Maintaining control over the order entry process so that salespeople can generate accurate and complete orders
- Controlling product pricing and/or discounting
- Reducing the time spent answering questions from sales or generating reports because the teams have accounting information available at their fingertips
- Reducing customer maintenance activities
Overall, everyone wins with customer-centric integration because orders move to accounting more quickly, customers receive products sooner, the company gets paid faster, salespeople receive commission checks earlier, employees are more satisfied with their jobs, and clients receive higher levels of customer service.
Call on us to explore your options to implement customer-centric operations at your company - 866-400-0922 - or email inquiry@wacconsultinggroup.com and we will follow up with you within 1 business day.
