Improve Sales and Delight Customers By Using Mobile CRM

Your sales personnel is always mobile and busy meeting your customers and prospective customers to either retain and account mining existing customers or generating new business from your prospective customer(s ).

Having anytime, anywhere access to critical information about customers, inventory and competition definitely gives your sales personnel an edge over your competition that always eyeing on your existing accounts and fighting hard to grab a pie of your funnel. With your customer information constantly changing and being updated, front line employees definitely would benefit from the updated information with them during their sales / relationship calls to your current and prospective customer. You can empower them by extending your CRM to mobile devices - to access and interact with customer information anytime, anywhere. Mobile CRM software can be used through the iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Android devices, and other smart phones and tablet computers. mobile Mobile CRM enables users to retrieve and update customer-related information from back-end systems, manage opportunities and jobs, process orders, check inventory levels, and much more just as easily as if they were in the office.

After surveying more than 1000 companies across Europe, respondents of Forrester survey agreed that by having access to a mobile CRM:

• Sales and employee productivity improve (87%).
• Productivity and efficiency of frontline employees boosted (77%)
• Customer satisfaction and experience increased by employees being able to respond faster to requests and inquiries (74%)
• Business process efficiency improved (73%)
• Usage and adoption of the CRM solution increased (62%)

Points to ponder when choosing a Mobile CRM Application

A good mobile CRM implementation should act as an enabler for your sales and field customer service staff even when they are on the go. So a mobile CRM soulution usually should:

• Multi-Device Support - Mobile CRM solutions let users access data virtually through any handheld device so that they can quickly and easily access customer data.
• Customer Intelligence - Mobile CRM solution should be able to aggregate customer information across the business functions with reasonable historical data, yet very brief to help field staff to assess and chalk approach strategy to a specific customer.
• Complete Contact Management - Mobile CRM solution provides user with end-to-end management of all clients, prospects, and other contacts. Additionally, users can efficiently organize related opportunities, meetings, calls, and other activities for comprehensive contact history tracking.
• Activity Logging - Mobile CRM solution makes it easier for employees to stay up-to-date on current company activities. The software can also be used to hold remote meetings and discussions that can be shared with all stakeholders. Mobile CRM solution makes it easier for businesses to log activities as they happen.
• Calendar and Schedule Management - Traveling staff members often have a hard time keeping up with their frequently-changing schedules. That's why mobile CRM solutions provide comprehensive features to effectively coordinate and manage their calendars.
• Automated Order Processing - When sales reps travel from one customer site to the next, they don't always have time to check in to the home base between visits. For these situations, mobile CRM solution can be used to automatically create, process, and route any sales orders to ensure rapid fulfillment.
• Job Ticket Tracking - Field service reps are always on the go, yet they still need to keep others informed on the status of their jobs and activities. By using mobile CRM solution, field reps can use their mobile devices to enter any updates or outcomes of their service calls into the central database.
• Data Synchronization - Mobile CRM solution allows users to work offline when there's no wireless connection available and automatically sync their data bi-directionally once a connection can be established.

About the Forrester Study

In January 2009, Forrester Consulting evaluated the uses, challenges, benefits, and implementation best practices for mobile CRM solutions. In conducting in-depth surveys with business/IT professionals at 1,005 companies in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain.

Forrester found that enterprises using mobile CRM solutions achieved: improved productivity of frontline personnel, improved customer experiences, increased customer satisfaction, and better business process efficiency compared with using solely desk-based CRM applications. Mobile capability also encourages higher usage of core CRM applications by frontline employees.