A new form of CRM, Social CRM often referred to as CRM 2.0, has grown from social networking and web 2.0.
Are you maximising the tools available to you to communicate with your customers?
S3 CRM is working with networking platforms such as twitter, linkedin and facebook to integrate its customer relationship management tools with social media offering a new branch of communications with your customers.
CRM (customer relationship management) tools are fast becoming one of the most well used and useful tools that a business can utilise. They can help to streamline tasks and processes and enable excellent customer service. With this in mind all the smart businesses are using CRM tools to enhance the service that they provide. When it comes to choosing the right type of CRM tool it can often be a tricky process. After all this tool will be instrumental in creating customer relationships that will be retained long term and which will help the business to increase its profits.
As there are so many CRM tools on the market right now it pays to think about the needs of the business before selecting one. So think about the following areas.
If your employees spend a lot of time on the telephone chasing leads and making sales you need a CRM tool that is easy to use and can be updated in real time. It also helps to have a quoting and invoicing feature as standard as this can make your employee’s jobs a little easier.
Can you afford for yourself and your employees to spend a long time getting to grips with the new CRM tool?
If the answer to this question is no (and it should be) you need a CRM tool that is easy to learn and easy to use. It is pointless opting for a tool that might be the latest ‘big thing’ but if it takes too long to learn how to access and use and it is overly complex to use on a day to day basis it will cost you too long in working hours. Go for a CRM tool that can be learnt in a couple of hours and which can be used whilst your employees are on the telephone and you will not regret it.
The cost of tools and applications should always be a factor for any business. Don’t be tempted to go for the most expensive package that you see thinking that it will be the best, as often this is not the case.
If you want to have access to your business from anywhere in the world (with internet access) you need to choose a web based tool. With this you will be able to keep in touch with the business and see what your employees are doing at a glance.
If you want to expand your business you need to be able to add new users as needed. Select a CRM tool that will enable you to do this easily if needed, otherwise you could find that you CRM tool is letting you down.
These are just a few of the things that you should consider when you are choosing your CRM tool. Make sure that you choose the right one first time and you will find that it works for you.
One of the main reasons that businesses fail today is that they do not stay in touch with what their customers want and begin to appear dated in the way that they advertise, conduct business and contact their customers. What might have worked well for a business 20 or so years ago will not cut it in the consumer world of today and businesses are realising they need to reinvent themselves to keep up to date. Initially it can seem like a costly venture for any business owner to reinvent their business, but thanks to S3 CRM it is much more cost effective than you might think.
S3 CRM can help businesses to reinvent themselves by streamlining their procedures and process through:
1. Providing the means to create easy to access and add to customer and employee contact databases.
Creating invoices and quotes quickly and easily and attaching them to customer contact details.
Plan projects and assign them to employees using S3 CRM, business owners are also able to see who has the most projects, which projects are open and which are approaching their deadlines.
Set alerts for when projects and tasks are nearing completion dates.
2. Create email marketing campaigns using an easy to follow structure which means that even a novice can successfully create email marketing campaigns in minutes. Email marketing is one area that many business owners are wary of as they believe that it takes certain expertise to do so and as a result shy away from attempting to produce them. With S3 CRM a business can move forward and reinvent themselves adding email marketing to their methods of contacting customers. Once an email marketing campaign has been sent users can check on its effectiveness using the reporting tools available through S3 CRM.
3. Send SMS messages using S3 CRM – this is another great way for businesses to stay in touch with customers.
4. S3 CRM also has additional reporting tools which can allow business owners to see the conversion rate for quotes, which customers have the most outstanding invoices, which customers have the placed the most orders and so on. In fact using S3 CRM can help a business to get the best from reporting so that it can increase profits and reduce outstanding invoices.
5. Each individual user is able to customise their own dashboard upon which they can place widgets of the features they use most often, this helps to cut down on the time spent opening different features and scrolling through screens.
6. As S3 CRM is web based users can access their account from anywhere in the world with internet access, this allows a business to provide the same service from anywhere – a total reinvention if users previously all had to be based in the same office.
These are just a few of the ways that S3 CRM can help businesses to reinvent themselves and there are many more to choose from.
When your business is doing well it is all too easy to rest on your laurels and believe that this will continue indefinitely, but this is not the case, particularly in light of the recent recession that has hit the UK. Business owners are now facing the fact that they need to compete or get beat and as a result they are looking for ways in which to do this. Here are a few suggestions on how you can compete and beat your competitors:
1. Do away with old and outdated ways of recording customer contacts, using complicated and ineffectual methods to record customer contacts creates confusion and vital information is sometimes missed. Without streamlined way to record contacts conversions can be missed and customers lost.
2. Cut down on the number of software applications your business uses – spending thousands each year on software licenses eats away at money that could be spent on other areas of your business, such as advertising.
3. Check out what your competitors are doing – if you have no idea what your main competitors are doing you need to find out, and fast! In order to compete you need to know and understand your competition or your business is out of the running and is already beaten.
4. Use email marketing to reach more customers – more and more businesses are seeing the value of email marketing as it is a fast and effective way of sending advertising directly to their customers. S3 CRM offers email marketing as one of its features and this can help any business to instantly compete with its rivals by enabling users to plan, create and send email campaigns in minutes.
5. Create a business website if you don’t already have one. The internet is an amazing way of generating business and the chances are that your competitors are already doing all they can to increase their internet presence.
6. Think about using other internet methods to further spread the word about your business brand. This can be done in many different ways including blogging – these are massively popular right now and a great way to engage with your customers and keep them interested in your business, social networking sites – create a profile for your business and spread the word, or you might want to take out advertisements on these sites as they get huge amounts of traffic. Not only are these types of methods effective, they are also cheap and they encourage customers to visit your business’s website more often.
As you can see there are a variety of ways in which you can start to actively change the way that your business competes with your competitors if you are not already doing so. Customers are becoming more and more fickle when it comes to choosing who and where the purchase good and services from so it is essential to engage with them and make them feel valued to retain their custom.
With the credit crunch on everyone’s minds it is no wonder that businesses are developing customer strategies to cope with the downturn. Any business that planned ahead and had a contingency plan for this will no doubt be feeling less of the strain, but for any business who did not have a plan or a strategy here are 10 customer strategies for the downturn:
1.Find out what kind of a return the business is getting from its marketing. Doing this will help to streamline business costs and will prevent customers from feeling the impact of over priced and ineffective marketing.
2.Target pricing – this means looking at your pricing and targeting it more effectively. If your customers can no longer afford your rates (and this will show in your sale figures) it is time to think about carefully targeting your prices
3.Listen to customer feedback – this is always essential for a business but never more so than in a credit crunch, listen to what your customers want and take notice! Do this and it will make all the difference.
4.Be relevant to the correct customers – being too general in your marketing and casting your net too wide can have disastrous effects during a downturn. Businesses who try to do this will find that they rapidly lose revenue and customers in the process by trying to be everything for everyone.
5.Enhance the customer experience – make sure that you are using CRM software that will make every customer contact count and enable a business to get the most out of these every time.
6.Perform a ‘healthcheck’ on your business – see which customers are loyal even during a downturn and give them a little something back. This could be in the way of loyalty discounts, something which customers are always keen to use when money is tight. Remember you want to keep hold of loyal customers and not just the ones that buy from you when you are giving discounts.
7.Increase customer engagement – engaging customers with your brand or business will create loyal customers which is exactly what you are looking for.
8.Take a close look at your loyalty schemes – are they targeting the right customers and are you, as a business getting the most out of them? If not it is time to change your loyalty schemes and raise revenue at the same time.
9.Think about affiliate programmes – these can stand to make customers who know, understand and willing to commit themselves to an affiliate programme a fair amount of money, whilst driving more customers your way. If you don’t already have an affiliate programme maybe it is time to think about one.
10.Keep costs to a minimum so that you are not having to penalise customers by increasing prices – do this by trying to use just one software application to run your business through, such as S3 CRM – the one stop shop for all your business and customer relationship management needs.
Hi,
Tonight we will be rolling out great new functionality.
Our new email dropbox functionality, which is available under “My Account” allows you to forward emails from customers, contacts, suppliers and new contacts to your S3 CRM account.
Basically the application generates a “fake” email address for your account, you then forward emails to this address. The emails get logged as comments against existing contact entry however if the email is from a new contact a new entry is automatically created.
The functionality will be rolled out tonight - please try it and let me know what you think.
Thanks
Sarah
Finding a software solution that you can virtually run your business from can seem like an uphill struggle and that is why a great deal of businesses wind up using several different software applications. This is not only hard to work with (no one likes to have to have four or more applications open at one time and have to flick between them constantly) it is also very expensive. Due to this many small to medium sized businesses find that they have to cut corners or decide which software solutions they can afford to run at the expense of others. If you are the owner of a small to medium sized business that wants an amazing all round CRM solution S3 CRM really is a one stop shop. Here is what you can expect from S3 CRM the most flexible, accessible, comprehensive, cost effective and user friendly CRM solution available:
- Customer contact and employee contact information storage – here users can store all customer and employee contact details in different categories for easy retrieval.
- Storage features – quickly and easily store all information relating to a customer with their contact details so no information will ever go missing again.
- Quoting and invoicing tools – create quotes in moments on multiple lines and with VAT added as standard. When a customer accepts a quote users can easily turn these into invoices to be sent at a later date.
- Employee calendars – this feature allows a business owner to see which employees are available, on holiday or away sick.
- Project tools – use this feature to plan and implement projects, assign projects to users and see which users are in charge of which projects. Using this means that no project deadline should ever be missed, even if the user in charge of a project is absent.
- Email marketing – create email marketing campaigns in minutes and send them to your email marketing list.
- Reporting tools – see which invoices are outstanding, who has replied to email marketing, which customer has the most repeat orders and much more.
- Easy to use dashboard – users can create their own dashboard with all their regularly used features and tools on it. Business owners can tailor theirs so that they can see their business at a glance.
- Accessibility – as S3 CRM is web based users can log into their account from anywhere in the world that has an internet connection which means that business owners can stay in touch with the office even when they are not in the country.
- Easy to use – S3 CRM is so easy to use that anyone can learn how to access and it’s features in just a few hours – so say goodbye to long and expensive training days for employees. Just sign up a new user and they can be using S3 CRM in well under one day – without any intensive training.Cost effective – S3 CRM costs £4.99 / $9.99 per month which makes it one of the most reasonably priced CRM solutions on the market.
In addition to these features S3 CRM also offers – document storage, meeting planning tools, route optimisation tools, recycle bin – the list is endless, proving that S3 CRM really is a one stop shop.
Hi all,
Hope you are all looking forward to Christmas 
With Christmas less than 2 weeks away we have been busy at S3 CRM launching new functionality and improving the existing application.
This week sees the launch of the ability to import your contact information via CSV file into your S3 CRM address book. This has been requested by a number of you so we put it to the top of our development stack to ensure we brought the functionality to you as soon as possible.
Have a look and let us know your thoughts. You can either post on the blog, on our forums or email me at;
info@s3crm.com
Hope to hear from you soon.
Sarah
With the advent of the Internet and the continual advancements in communications it is no wonder that remote working is becoming more and more popular for many reasons. Remote working means that a business or organisation have workers who are not actually based on site, instead they work from a non central location (often their own homes) and log into the website or web based application that their business operates and runs. From there they will carry out their duties in their role as they would if they were on site but without having to travel to another place of work.
Obviously remote working carries benefits and drawbacks however for the majority of businesses who choose to let their employees work remotely the benefits vastly outweigh the drawbacks. If you have a business that uses remote workers or you are looking to allow your employees to work remotely you need a software application that can assist and able this to be done. S3 CRM is ideal if you are in this position for many reasons such as:-
1. S3 CRM is web based – this first and foremost is the most crucial aspect of remote working – you and your employees need to be able to access the same software application as each other and this needs to be web based. Web based applications have the benefit of not being installed onto one (or more) particular computer as with many other software applications. This means that as long as you or one of your employees has a username and password they can access the application from wherever they are in the world and work as though they were in the same building as the business.
2. S3 CRM updates are carried out in real time – this is another benefit if you are remotely working as you need to know that the information that you have in front of you is correct and up to date. Information that is old and incorrect is an absolute no-no in business as to be misinformed is to be left behind. S3 CRM puts an end to incorrect and old information and lets you and your workforce use information that is accurate and up to date.
3. S3 CRM has amazing document storage features – one aspect of many businesses that can cause problems, especially when working remotely is where to store important documents relating to customers and projects. S3 CRM allows you and your employees to attach and store documents, files, meeting notes and more so that nothing goes missing ever again. If you or an employee needs information on a certain order or customer simply log into S3 CRM and retrieve it – what could be easier?
S3 CRM also incorporates a business wide employee calendar so you can see at a glance who is doing what and which projects are approaching their deadlines. This gives you, as the business owner, a greater control over what is going on in the business even if all of your employees work remotely.
Today more and more people are adopting a Green lifestyle, they will recycle items, use energy efficient appliances, think about the type of car they have based on their carbon emissions and much more. Businesses too are beginning to realise that they must adopt Green behaviours in order to contribute to the wellbeing of the environment. This can be anything from ensuring that all waste paper from the business is recycled to signing up to other Green initiatives such as only using certain products from certain sources within the business.
It is not only the products and services that a business uses that can be seen as Green – technology can also play a large and vital role in helping a business to be Green and here’s how they can do it:-
1. Turn your office into a paperless office – this can easily be done now due to the storage capabilities offered by new computers and storage devices. By storing all information, documentation, files and so on electronically paper is saved in great quantities, which helps your business be Green by saving paper which saves trees.
2. Use video interviews whenever possible for first round interviews – this is one of the newest advances in technology as more businesses now are using video interviews rather than having face to face interviews with candidates in the first round. This not only saves time for the candidates and businesses but it is a very Green way of conducting interviews as there is no travel involved to the interviews which cuts down on carbon emissions.
3. Use webcams as a form of communication between businesses – this is a very useful way of having meetings as each person can stay in their own office and by using a webcam they can have meetings or conferences with others without having to travel, once again saving carbon emissions.
4. Choose new energy efficient computer hardware and peripherals – doing this will help your business to save energy which can also lead to money being saved also which is an added bonus.
5. Have ink cartridges refilled – doing so will not only be another money saving option for a business as refilling cartridges is much cheaper than buying brand new ones but it also reduces the amount of old empty cartridges that are being thrown away each week.
6. VoiP calls (Voice over Internet Protocol) do not use regular telephony technology as calls are made over the Internet, in this way technology helps businesses to be Green as VoiP shares Ethernet copper which is actually toxic and is already in place to complete an Internet connection.
As shown using such new technologies can seriously help businesses to be more Green and as more businesses are making positive changes towards being Green it is a very good sign for the environment. Being Green was once quite difficult for businesses but today it is commonplace and technology supports this, so if you want your business to help improve the environment try a few of the methods mentioned.