Many businesses are turning to customer relationship management (CRM) to help them create closer, more profitable relationships with their customers. If you are a Sage accounting customer, you have the potential for integrated CRM in your business.

Last time, we suggested that CRM goes way beyond basic contact management, instead it provides a strategic platform for winning, keeping, and developing customers. In this blog, we want to build on that thought with the concept of ‘one view of your customers.’ We added CRM capability to our accounting products in response to the need to share information across the entire organisation. 

A central source of information 

As the number of ways your customers can interact with you increases, they expect to get excellent service at every point of interaction. This means that everyone in your business needs to know what’s going on. Integrating CRM with your operational systems creates a single view for everyone, from logistics to sales and service. This ensures consistency of service whoever initially deals with the customer. 

Seamless end-to-end processing 

As well as sharing information, you can create seamless, straight through processing. This means that, for example, quotations can be generated from within CRM by salespeople. Based on accurate and up to the minute pricing details pulled from accounting, salespeople can make promises to customers that they know they can keep. A tightly integrated solution also means that quotations can be turned directly into orders, without the need for rekeying. 

The SageCRM HQ team has also produced an interesting, 15-minute, video about "Taking the First Steps" towards a CRM mindset which we think could help you start formulating your own ideas about where & how to put SageCRM into your business.