What do you do if your business needs to improve customer relationship management using ERP?

Businesses usually need a CRM to improve customer loyalty and lead conversion. The goals can be to increase customer lifetime value and to become the market leader. The CRM processes need to be streamlined and automated as much as possible for better tracking of leads and sales opportunities and for eliminating or reducing customer churn. A thorough knowledge of customers' preferences and sentiments is essential for proactive marketing, sales and after-sale services which must be targeted, effective and efficient to improve the return on investment.

There can be different methods to review the needs for Customer relationships. These needs will be dependent on the nature of the business model such as B2B or B2C etc. It is important to assess the business need to check for requirements of customer relationship management while evaluating the ERP upgrade. Defining the CRM KPIs helps in determining the need for the information capture required and hence can help in defining the scope. The CRM functionality implementation can be phased out after stabilizing ERP implementation while considering only the required data points that will be considered in the future for CRM.

The right ERP solution needs to have integrated CRM capabilities as CRM, supply chain management and finance are highly interdependent. A CRM must be scalable as business growth is expected. The CRM must collect, store and analyze the interactions of every customer performed via any communication channel like phone, email, chat, social media, Webstore and in-store visit. This provides a 360° profile view of every customer to enable personalized and proactive marketing, sales and after-sale services. As sensitive information about individual customers is involved, the CRM must comply with data privacy laws and regulations. It must be usable and accessible anywhere and on any device with high availability and reliable security administration.

The ERP generally focuses on the operations within the organizations while the CRM focus on outside the organizations. ERP revolves around integrating with standard financial reporting while CRM revolves around tracking the communications with customers and building analytics around it. Based on the nature of the business if it's determined that CRM can not be achieved with functionalities available in ERP it can be fulfilled by considering integration capability with standard CRM solutions available that should be considered important evaluating parameter. It is then possible to have a heterogeneous architecture for ERP and CRM solutions, both can reside on the same or different infrastructure platforms like on-prem or cloud.

When selecting the appropriate ERP, prioritize your organization's needs. Begin by comparing available CRM platforms and analyzing which one best meets your requirements. If scalability is a priority, engage in thorough discussions with vendors to ensure the solution can grow with your organization and be customized to your specifications. Alternatively, maximize the utility of existing workflows by aligning them with your business processes if scalability isn't a primary concern.

Various customer-centric KPIs can be developed through the ERP system. As standard ERP functionality, they will be based on current or past business with the existing customers. General performance monitoring can be done in terms of OTIF(On Time In Full), open order reports, aged inventory, customer balance aging reports, etc. While, CRM itself can help in monitoring performance related to customer satisfaction, customer retention rate, customer complaint tracking, new customer inquiries, etc. By integrating CRM with ERP it can help to generate various combined reports like sales pipeline value, conversion rate, etc. The inputs about past sales can be fed into CRM for providing onhand information to the sales team while customer-facing.