Sage CRM is known for helping you organize and streamline sales activities like managing contacts and appointments or creating quotes and orders.

But many don’t realize that it’s also highly adaptable – like a Swiss Army Knife – and can go beyond just sales functions to help you understand your customers better … across your entire business.

Tools for Targeting the Right Customers

Sage CRM Marketing functions can help you generate more targeted campaigns and a better return on your marketing investment through features like:

  • Integration with MailChimp to leverage the power of budget-friendly email marketing
  • Automating communications to build relationships with prospects and keep leads warm
  • Planning campaigns, tracking results, and collecting data so you can send your next campaign to the right people at the right time
  • Send special offers and discounts to the right audience based on their purchase history stored in Sage CRM
  • For some companies, email marketing is a one-way street … you send your message and cross your fingers, hoping someone will respond.
  • But what if they don’t? Do you know how many people opened the email or clicked on a link? Do you have the information you need to follow up with a more relevant message? If not, it’s time to think about integrating your email marketing effort with the data in Sage CRM.

Email Marketing is Better with CRM

With the release of Sage CRM 7.3, Sage announced a new integration with MailChimp – a web-based email marketing tool that helps you design emails, send  them out, and measure results.

When you combine MailChimp email software with the data in your Sage CRM system, you transform email marketing from a one-way “blast and pray” to a 2-way conversation with your customers and prospects. That’s because all of the information about opens and clicks (and other valuable metrics) are written back to your Sage CRM database.

Now when you pull up those hot prospects you’ve been pursuing for months, you’ll see which contacts are interacting with your email, what products they’re interested in, whether they’ve forwarded your message to a colleague, and even those that opted out (so you don’t spend time chasing your tail!). Best of all, the data is sitting right there in the CRM system you’re probably already using every day.

Outreach That’s More Personal & Timely

With email response data combined with notes from phone conversations and meetings in a single CRM database, you have the insight you’ll need to stay in touch with customers and prospects in a way that’s more tailored and relevant. You can even create a call list of “hot” prospects based on recent email activity to ensure that you follow up in a timely fashion … without ever leaving Sage CRM.

Similarly, you can develop more personalized and effective email communication by merging data from Sage CRM – like account history or previous purchases – into your email.

Working Better Together

Your email marketing and CRM systems are much like your sales and marketing teams. Each has a defined role in a shared objective for your company. They may touch the same group of people in different ways and at different times, but are most effective when they collaborate and work together.

Features to Improve Customer Service

Perhaps now more than ever, it’s important to build and retain a solid base of loyal customers because new business is just so difficult to come by in this economy.  Your sales and marketing teams have a fantastic set of tools in Sage CRM to help them accomplish their goals effectively. But have you considered extending Sage CRM to your Customer Service and Support teams?

If not, then read on and discover why Sage CRM is your “TICKET” to great customer service.

What’s in Your Toolbox?
Ask yourself this question … what tools do your service and support departments rely on to take care of your customers AFTER the initial sale? If your answer includes a loose collection of spreadsheets and stacks of hand-written follow up reminders, then the Sage CRM Customer Service component might be for you.

Whether you sell products that require technical support or provide services that continue well beyond the initial sale, Sage CRM Customer Service component provides you with tools to manage resources, resolve issues, track customer requests, provide high quality service, and build long-lasting relationships.

Now That’s the Ticket
Sage CRM Customer Service is built around the concept of service “tickets” that contain detailed information about a specific customer support request, contact information, resolution status, urgency of the issue, resources assigned, and service contract details.

It’s useful to think of a ticket as similar to a patient’s hospital chart. Both serve the purpose of defining a problem and coordinating the effort of several people and/or resources that will work to resolve an issue at various times and stages. It’s like a To-Do List on steroids that helps you manage longer-term   issues requiring more than a quick chat to resolve. From within a ticket, employees can schedule phone calls, meetings, to-dos, review support history, send and track email to customers, coordinate resources, and much more.

Better Information = Better Service

All service & support activities are captured in Sage CRM so you can accumulate a knowledgebase of common issues and resolutions. Your service reps can then use the powerful search engine to review prior tickets, procedures, FAQ’s, and reference material to quickly resolve customer issues. Plus, the reporting capabilities help Managers analyze customer service metrics, support trends, unresolved issues, and overall team effectiveness in delivering a fantastic customer experience.

A Few Nice Features

  • Web-based Customer Portal – empower your customers to find what they need online at their convenience with the ability to add or edit tickets, submit comments and attachments, and review the status of their request.
  • All In One – as a component of Sage CRM, your customer service and support data is combined with sales and marketing information to provide a complete 360-degree view of your entire customer lifecycle.
  • Configurable Workflow – Sage CRM Customer Service molds to your processes by allowing you to configure workflow, escalation conditions, and notification routing.

If you would like more information on Sage CRM, contact us today.

Bridging the Front and Back Office

Because Sage CRM is designed to work hand-in-hand with your Sage 100 system, you get the added benefit of bridging the typical communications gaps between sales activity in the front office and accounting and operations activity in the back office.

The result is greater reporting insight across your entire business, as well as improved communications and productivity, all of which create new opportunities for business growth.