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Take IT on - Home real stories. Choosing the right CRM system

Software delivers closer customer relationship - and competitive edge

36% of customers in the East of England who have a negative customer experience due to poor IT say they will go to a competitor. By investing in customer relationship management software early in its life, one company in Essex has put great customer relationships at the heart of its business growth.

MiS Logistic Limited in Brentwood, Essex, provides management information systems to small and medium-sized logistics companies. It is a small start-up with five employees geographically dispersed across the UK.

From the beginning, the company wanted to stand out for its customer service and attention to detail. What it needed was an application that would automate the process of managing customers and help it deliver a superior level of customer service than its competitors.

MiS Logistic invested in a hosted customer relationship management (CRM) application from SugarCRM.

Customer Relationship Management

CRM software is designed to help an organisation manage its prospects and customers more effectively. MiS Logistic could have managed these relationships manually - by tracking interactions on multiple spreadsheets and other documents, for instance - but the advantage of CRM software is that it increases the company's competitiveness by automating the process and providing a central repository for all the information held on every customer.

"We simply knew that for the business to be successful, attention to detail would be important," says MiS Logistic's commercial director, John O'Brien. "That level of attention to detail would be difficult to achieve if we were dependent on multiple files and people remembering to share important information about customers."

The Sugar CRM application is equipped with plenty of functionality: MiS Logistic can create a list of leads for its telemarketing agency at the click of a button; sales quotations can be added to customer records when a prospect converts into a sale; and MiS Logistic can also sort customer data by different categories, for example, to find out which prospects have gone cold.

"It covers every aspect of CRM from working out which customers are valuable to you to understanding the structure of your customer base," explains O'Brien. "The advantage of the CRM application is that it brings everything together in one place, so it is easier to manage."

Hosted solution

MiS Logistic is too small to have its own IT team to manage the company's applications and hardware. The advantages of a hosted solution are that MiS Logistic doesn't have to manage or maintain the application in-house and, as it's hosted externally, the application can be accessed over the Internet from anywhere around the world.

For MiS Logistic' team of geographically dispersed employees, this means they all have access to the same application and database of contacts, wherever they are. "I'm based in Essex, but the company accountant is in Sussex and our sales guy is in Gloucester. With Sugar, it doesn't matter where any of us are, as we can always access the CRM system from anywhere that has a Web connection," says O'Brien.

SugarCRM offers a variety of payment options for its technology. MiS Logistic choose to pay 'on demand', which means that it only pays for what it uses. "Software is increasingly shifting from being sold as a capital asset to a service on demand," explains O'Brien. "It allows us, irrespective of our size, to have access to products in some software categories that would be unattainable usually for a start-up."

MiS Logistic could operate without a CRM system in place, but there's no doubt in the mind of its commercial director that having the Sugar application makes the company more competitive. "If we didn't have this application, the chances are that we wouldn't understand our customer base as well," says O'Brien. "What Sugar does is make sure that we look after our customer base in the best way possible."

Need to know: key lessons

  • Be clear about your needs: list the key areas where software could benefit your sales and marketing process to bring you closer to your customer
  • Invest early: the sooner you bring in business software, the earlier you can benefit
  • You're never too small: different software packages and payment options mean there is something for every business

The top line: CRM

  • Keeps all your data about customers and prospects in one place
  • Helps you understand who is buying from you-and who isn't
  • Lets you turn your sales pipeline into revenue forecasts
  • Allows you to fine tune your marketing and lower marketing costs

What can you do next?