What's a Good System for a Small Company?

Gwynne Young
Managing Editor, CustomerThink
Member

Posted 03-Dec-2004 11:30 AM

[Posted for Eli Irvin]

I work for a company who is in the primary business of valued inventory management and sales of supplies for small and large companies and financial institutions. In the last 2 years, we have gone from around 100 customers to around 1500 customers, all of whom vary in size and supply requirements. Each customer, however, requires the same amount of communication which is being done primarily through email.

Jobs are getting lost in the message trails and customer satisfaction, among the smaller customers, is low. I would like to have something in place that helps my company better serve the customers and reduces the amount of e-message and paper shuffling the sales staff and customer service reps face each day.

I was thinking the a CRM system might be right for my company, but I don't know what I should be looking at. A friend of mine works for a company that uses Vantive (PeopleSoft) CRM. They are a much larger company though, and have staff enough to handle Vantive's demand for customization. My company has roughly 40 employees. Does anyone have any recomendations?

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Jim Sterne
Guru
Member

Posted 12-Dec-2004 09:37 AM

Without getting specific about which technologies or tool vendors can do the job, I have a suggestion about a different approach.

Consider creating an individual extranet (private home page) for each of your clients. Yes, 1,500 sounds like a lot but what you'll end up with is a page that each client can visit to see the latest details on jobs.

Just send a once-in-a-while reminder that page is available. No more spam filters. No more concern about who the right people at the client firm should be on the notification list. They just log into own private page and get the update.

Individual accounts can be managed by individual account reps and you can take this to whatever extreme you like. These pages can be as simple as "Download your invoice" and as complex as incorporating business processes—that's up to you.

Jim Sterne
Target Marketing www.targeting.com

Emetrics Summit
Web Analytics Conference
www.emetrics.org

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Graham Hill
Guru
Member

Posted 12-Dec-2004 11:50 PM

Eli

I support Jim's suggestion about an individual Extranet or Intranet. That may be a customised Extranet page per client or a standard Intranet interface that allows you to do what you need to do easily and effectively.

Having said that, I detect a bigger underlying problem in your original posting and that is that your business processes seem not to be working properly. If you are losing messages and CSAT is low, then something fundamental is wrong that a software 'band-aid' won't fix. I suggest that you need to look at how you actually operate your business and how you want to assist your growing number of clients to do business, BEFORE, you start to think about installing an Extranet, Intranet or other software solution.

As we used to say at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
OO + NT = EOO
(Old Organisation + New Technology = Expensive Old Organisation.)

Graham Hill
Independent Management Consultant

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akashmavle
Member

Posted 21-Dec-2004 05:12 AM

Eli,

I feel that both Graham and Jim have a point. Keep is simple, vantive will be a overkill.
Also, as Graham has said that Expensive old organisation will be bad thing to happen.
This is what I would advice( if I am allowed to... Smile )
Step1: define customer centric processes
Step2: idenify a phased approach for refining them, work on them
Step3: See what is available in the market for managing refined processes, in doing this, apart from looking at small/midmarket CRMs, look at what open source has to offer...

Akash Mavle
Www.solversa.com

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Justin
Member

Posted 11-Jan-2005 10:42 AM

As has been said, there are many approaches to take that can help keep all the data in a single repository, accessible both to your employees and to your clients if needed, however making sure that the way you operate your business daily incorporates all these is what needs to be done first.

At 40 users, undertaking a PeopleSoft implementation would be overkill. I'd suggest looking towards on-demand CRM—http://www.salesboom.com is my recommendation, as well as the usual suspects—SFDC, Salesnet, Siebel OnDemand.

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Michael Silverstein
Member

Posted 23-Jan-2005 08:23 AM

I would strongly suggest you look at C-suite Office for your size business. This software and company are very focused on the small business and mid-market level. You can download a free trial at www.sbnsolutions.com They are a new player in the market, but they seem very capable of assisting with configuration needs at a very affordable price.