What criteria should be exercised by small and midsize businesses when selecting a business solution? When evaluating on-demand business solutions, we suggest no less than 10 criteria be examined:

1. How easy and intuitive is the user interface? Solutions based on portal technology are the best way to go. A portal offers users the ability to tailor the way they interact with the application and functionality, much like they would customize a Yahoo site to fit their specific interests.

2. How quickly and easily can the solution be implemented? Does the solution offer an accelerated implementation approach to minimize demands on your resources? Rapid implementation techniques can reduce costs by more than 50 percent.

3. How easily can the solution integrate with your supply chain, product development, and business processes? Remember, no system operates in a vacuum, and it delivers the most value when embedded in the business!

4. Can the solution easily scale as your business grows? Take into account not only number of users, but also specific roles and functions and the need to support end-to-end business processes, which are constantly changing.

5. Is the business solution available as a subscription? You can’t always anticipate the future. Keeping cash is important. On-demand business solutions must be available on a subscription basis, virtually eliminating the traditional upfront investments. The solution should offer you flexible 12, 24, or 36 month subscription options – allowing you to keep your cash working while you get the benefits of the newest business technology solutions.

6. Does the solution offer you company-wide visibility into your business processes? The right solution can help you gain a competitive advantage through increased visibility into critical business functions, superior reporting, integrated processes, and even increased customer loyalty/retention, more in-depth customer insights, and an accelerated product time to market.

7. Are there ample resources to assist you with your implementation and ongoing support? Look for business partners with both long-term business experience and support services, as well as expertise with cross functional, strategic technology and software solutions.

8. Is industry-specific expertise built into the product? The best business solutions are not plain vanilla. Each solution needs to address industry-specific needs, and support roles and functions unique to vertical markets.

9. Does it provide you with any analytics? That is, does it provide the means to analyze collected data and generate reports that help your analysts and management to better understand your customers and then turn that knowledge into action? You should be able to measure performance, predict trends, plan for business success, and make the most of customer relationships.

10. Can it operate on the Web? On-demand systems need to work across the company as well as with your business partners. Look for a business solution that has the flexibility and open access to accommodate future change in business and technology.

By NextCorp, Ltd., Microsoft Dynamics GP Partner for Texas

If your organization has to schedule resources of any kind—people, equipment, vehicles, buildings, and so forth—it’s a daily chore of your service manager to make sure these limited resources are used to best effect and that customer needs are met promptly. When this dispatching function is performed on paper by multiple people, mistakes that hurt customer service are virtually unavoidable.

Your service manager’s CRM priority: Centralized, intelligent scheduling
The service manager is focused on quickly and cost-effectively delivering services to customers and wants a system that can:

• Show at a glance the availability of every service resource companywide.
• Allow centralized service scheduling.
• Give multiple people access to the scheduling resource from any location.
• Intelligently apply your business rules to service scheduling (for example, “Bob and Sally are our only Xwidget experts”).
• Monitor the use of resources.
• Generate a history of which customers have received which services at which times.
• Automatically record service requests (both open and closed) associated with specific customer records.
   

Questions for your service manager

• Who schedules service appointments today?
• How is it done? How do you wish it could be done?
• How does your scheduler know which resources can deliver a service and when they are available?
• Are the dispatchers a bottleneck in scheduling service for customers?
• What are your most common customer complaints relating to service scheduling?
• What kind of reporting do you need on your service team and on the services you’re delivering?
   

Conclusion

Scheduling services promptly and following through with excellent service when promised can go a long way toward enhancing customer relationships. A CRM solution with built-in service scheduling capabilities that work the way your business works can improve customer service and lower your service costs.

By NextCorp, Ltd., Dallas Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partner

To effectively design compelling marketing campaigns that present new products and services to customers and new prospects, your marketing manager needs powerful, easy-to-use tools with which to analyze your customer and lead base. He or she then needs a way to quickly and easily pull together targeted lists, launch campaigns, track results, perform follow-up, and pass responses to the most suitable sales people.

Your marketing manager’s CRM priority: Increasing awareness

The marketing manager wants easier, less expensive ways to help your company sell the right products and services to the right people at the right time. To do this, he or she needs to:

• Know which products and services your customers are using and your leads are pursuing.
• Easily segment customers and leads.
• Quickly create new lead lists.
• Send personalized e-mail messages to groups of leads or customers.
• Track which customers have been targeted with past marketing campaigns.
• Quantify new sales associated with various lead sources and marketing activities.
• Monitor the progress, cost, and success of marketing campaigns.
   

Questions for your marketing manager

• How do you manage lead lists today? How would you like to manage them?
• How much work is involved in identifying target customers and prospects for marketing campaigns?
• How do you track marketing campaigns?
• How do you judge whether a marketing campaign has been successful?
• Do you know how much revenue a campaign generates?
• How do you compare the success of multiple campaigns?
• How are new leads distributed to sales?
   

Conclusion

Your marketing staff has probably been underserved by sales automation or CRM solutions you may be using now. A CRM solution with built-in marketing capabilities can dramatically enhance your marketing staff’s ability to reach leads promptly with compelling messages—and up-sell existing customers through new offers.

By NextCorp, Ltd., Dallas Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partner