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24 Co m m E n tA r y In today’s highly competitive business environment, a good IT infrastructure will only benefit enterprises regardless of their nature – be it sales, engineering or marketing. One commonly used IT tool is the customer relationship management (CRM) system, software designed to keep track of customers and clients while allowing ready access to information pertaining to them. A good CRM system will benefit any and all businesses involved in selling products or services, allowing them to track targets, long-term trends as well as customer preferences. That said, CRM systems do not come cheap: systems incorporating exotic functions like the Sales Automation Force and contact management software can easily amount to upwards of millions of dollars. This effectively dissuades small and medium enterprises (SMEs) from adopting such a system, while potentially profitable can only be afforded by the largest of companies boasting the biggest IT support budgets. “CRM with operation tracking might not be sufficient to fulfil the needs of CRM for business. CRM without analytics is like keeping track of customers’ information without the ability to think,” said Ms Irene Boey, Consulting Ju l | Au g 2012 En t r E p r E n E u r s’ Di g E s t Director at Integral Solutions (Asia) Pte Ltd, on the importance of appropriate CRM elements. “Thus the right analytics (data mining) strategy will ensure that SMEs benefit tremendously from their CRM implementation. Data mining will be able to discover root causes to help SMEs generate more profit and improve productivity,” she advised. In addition, designing and then implementing a CRM system is not something that can be done in a workday. The setting up of a fully-fledged system could take days to even weeks, and even then employees must receive rigorous training in order to properly use and manage the new CRM system. Furthermore, many features in a CRM system are unneeded or underutilised by smaller businesses, turning into additional costs and deadweight. All these translate into escalated IT budgets for a system that can never be fully used to its fullest potential. Case in point: Australian Reef Pilots is a marine pilotage service provider that aids ships to safely traverse the pilotage areas of the Great Barrier Reef and Torres Strait. For their day to day business, the company receives requests from customers requiring pilots to guide some 160 ships a month while still ensuring the safety of said pilots. Australian Reef Pilots also collects and analyses data including pilot history, schedules, shipping information, environmental data and material from regulatory bodies – this necessitates a dependable and powerful CRM system to manage the inordinate amount of daily data. To further put into perspective the amount of data exchanged in the course of the company’s business, information crucial to the trade come from a plethora of Managing Customer Relationships – A Case Study A good customer relationship management system will do wonders for your business different sources: internal Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, Microsoft Outlook data, customer feedback as well as details from both the Federal and State government regulatory bodies. For bookings, Excel spreadsheets were used in conjunction with Outlook, but manual data entry had a high margin of error and produced unreliable data, affecting the everyday business of the company. Australian Reef Pilots required a more streamlined and efficient way to both manage the booking process as well as to unify the company’s distributed workforce (the pilots and the support staff). In the span of three months (October to December 2011), the pilotage company implemented a marine-
industry solution built on Microsoft Dynamics’ CRM Online, a powerful CRM software provided as a cloud service from Microsoft boasting remarkable features like instant access from virtually anywhere in the world. With this new system in place, Australia Reef Pilots dramatically transformed its booking process, reducing the margin of error by an impressive amount. This restructured booking system also improved vital business processes like customer management, safety performance audits, invoicing and financial reporting. The new CRM also allowed Australia Reef Pilots to streamline not just its booking system, but the entire IT infrastructure within the company. Needless to say, Mr Simon Meyjes, Chief Executive Officer of Australian Reef Pilots is pleased with the end results, “We’ve achieved nearly all our objectives for the new system in a very short timeframe and at a surprisingly low cost.” “For smaller businesses, nurturing and retaining your loyal customers becomes increasingly important as your business matures,” according to Mr Michael Park, Corporate Vice-president of MBS Sales, Marketing and Operations at Microsoft Corporation. The use of an advanced CRM system (if built and implemented properly) will do wonders for any business, but caution must be exercised when considering its use, for a myriad of different factors will affect the eventual look and feel of the final system. Businesses – SMEs in particular – must copiously assess the full spectrum of specifications and technicalities before settling on a system that will best suit their needs. “Giving your customers the best experience begins with a complete view of your sales pipeline, but it does not end there. A customer relationship management (CRM) system will integrate people and technology to maximise external relationships,” Mr Park finished. Co m m E n tA r y Ju l | Au g 2012 En t r E p r E n E u r s’ Di g E s t 25
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