How do your customers form an opinion of your business? It’s typically not any single part of their experience that initiates their perception of your organization. Instead, it comes from their extensive end-to-end involvement with you and your people. Purchasing behavior will be influenced by your products and services, customer interactions with your people, your website, and marketing materials.
If you hope to give your customers an engaging and brand-building experience that meets and exceeds their expectations and ever-changing needs, you’ll need to go beyond the traditional customer-facing apps. Modern ERP systems, those enterprise resource planning solutions that manage data and guide business insights, are a prerequisite for moving your organization forward.
How can ERP help with customer service improvements?
After you add a new ERP system or upgrade an older one, you can expect positive changes in your customer relationships as you surpass all their expectations. Here’s what you’ll gain:
- Faster deliveries of your products
- Improved communication with your customers
- Enhanced inventory control
- Higher productivity
- Better shipping operations
- Reliable tracking of leads, quotes, and new opportunities
- Improved supplier relationships
- Automation of formerly manual processes
Today’s excellent ERP solutions provide superior customer service because they collect customer histories, offer a complete view of each customer, prioritize, and give automatic discounts to your most valued customers. All of this data results in improved shipping operations, reliable tracking, and real-time shipping information—benefits that will make your customers satisfied and loyal.
ERP solutions will streamline your backend processes
Customer service improvements are made possible by a high-quality ERP system that makes your behind-the-scenes operations more efficient. ERP helps companies with order fulfillment by connecting the fulfillment manager to sales order management personnel. ERP users can:
- Assign priority scores to customers
- Set up service-level rules
- Assign supply locations
- Specify inventory for customer sales orders
The ERP system will then define settings according to either individuals or groups of customers. Depending on the preferences that were assigned, it can also automate fulfillment. Order fulfillment can be a complicated process since goods have to be delivered accurately, on time, without damages, and accompanied by complete documentation. ERP solutions and features include:
- Purchasing history with analytics
- Replenishment module
- Freight module
- Inventory forecasting capability
ERP is changing the way employees engage with customers
Cloud-based ERP solutions can accommodate complicated sets of operational, financial, and customer data, merging it, and making it accessible to decision-makers and sales reps in real-time. This results in customer experiences that are customized and engaging across various points of contact. Here’s a look at how an ERP solution can provide customer management and help you achieve your goals:
- Get maximum value from each customer: You’ll store all customer records and activities in one database. Your ERP will have all the information you’ll need to know your customers, track all success metrics, and discover new opportunities. The customer data can be accessed and used anytime by your team members in accounting, sales, customer service, and the customers themselves. This accessibility will help to ensure that you are responsive to your customers with real-time data.
- Optimize customer-facing processes: Since ERP systems integrate financials, marketing, sales, and service, you can assess your company’s performance and identify any processes or workflows that need improvement. For example, you might want to look at production workflows, billing or payment processes, or perhaps point-of-service interactions. You’ll see if any process steps create a bottleneck, delay service times, or prevent critical information from being available to customers when they need it. And because the cloud software enables mobility, workers in the field have access to the same up-to-date customer information.
- Integrate and automate: Today’s cloud-based ERP systems connect to other business systems, no matter where they are. Your goal should be to sync and centralize your data so you can use it across the organization. That way, you can take advantage of automating productivity tasks and accessing the information you need to make decisions.
ERP solutions can give you incredible insights into enriching your existing customer relationships and optimizing customer-facing operations. The ERP experts at Decision Resources, Inc. are on standby to provide the information you need to leverage ERP solutions to improve customer relationships and provide better customer experiences. If you’re ready to take a step toward transforming your business with an ERP, please get in touch through our online contact form, call 412-562-9660, or email us at info@decision.com.
