Microsoft CRM USA Nationwide Remote Support

Remember old good days when your company probably had Great Plains Dynamics? If you are in San Francisco Bay Area you had local Great Plains Software partner consulting company, who served you basically coming onsite and charging you four hours minimum, even if the problem deserved 5-min fix? This was at the end of 20th century and remote support technologies were not very advanced Citrix was making good progress and taking market over from Symantec PCAnywhere. Today, when Microsoft Terminal Server and Citrix are remote support standards and IT department uses them to host application server for nation-wide and world-wide users, you should probably be thinking of getting remote support for your ERP and CRM systems. In this small article well take a look at Microsoft CRM remote support, customization, reporting, implementation and integration.

• Why Microsoft CRM Remote Support? Microsoft CRM market niche is still narrow and MS CRM consulting companies do not have enough clientele in their respected locals markets: Houston, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York even in these hypermarkets. In order to survive Microsoft CRM VAR went to nationwide and even international markets to get clients base.

• Technology-driven consulting companies. Microsoft CRM has web and MS Outlook clients and so by its nature it is web application. When you are considering hosting your web site you typically do not care where hosting company is located you consider price and quality. Microsoft CRM could be hosted with .Net hosting companies and implementation could be done remotely with web-session-based training.

• Customization. Today, even if Microsoft Business Solutions has open technology Microsoft CRM SDK the complexity of the specific tasks (messaging through Lotus Notes Domino, generic MAPI, advanced MS CRM Exchange connector) requires precision programming, which should be outsourced to nationwide development centers. As our experience indicates clients are demanding the expertise, not just cheap generic developers. Whoever comes for the cheap price they usually get poor results.

• Large Business ERP. Microsoft CRM proved its market strength and ability to automate large publicly traded corporation. It sits in Microsoft SQL Server and uses all the spectrum of Microsoft technologies: .Net, Active Directories, MS Exchange, Full-Text Search, Crystal Reports Enterprise. We are confident in Microsoft CRM ability to automate Aerospace & Defense, Pharmaceutical, Supply Chain Management, Medical & Hospitals, Distribution & Logistics, Oil & Gas, Wholesale & Retail, Education, Non-for-profit

• Integration. Microsoft CRM has standard integration tool with Microsoft Great Plains, Navision and Axapta integrations are on the way. However you can integrate Microsoft CRM with heterogeneous databases, such as Oracle, DB2, Lotus Notes Domino, Sybase, Pervasive SQL or Ctree/Faircomm.

• Web-Sessions and Skype training. Web Seminars are normal these days and you should be OK with the idea of remote web training. This will allow you to get the best expertise with moderate price.

You can always have us help you, give us a call: 1-630-961-5918 or 1-866-528-0577, help@albaspectrum.com

Andrew Karasev is consultant and CTO in Alba Spectrum Technologies ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ) Microsoft Business Solutions partner, serving clients in Illinois, New York, California, Florida, Georgia, Texas, Arizona, Virginia, Minnesota, Canada, UK, Europe, Australia, Asia, Russia. He is Microsoft Great Plains certified master, Great Plains Dexterity, Microsoft CRM SDK C#.Net, Crystal Repots developer.

help@albaspectrum.com

6 Steps to Effective Customer Relationship Management

Nurture Your Customer Relationships Simply put, customer relationship management is a way of tracking and nurturing your customer relationships throughout the customer's life-cycle, as they move from prospect to customer, to repeat-buyer. Once a customer buys from you, it is much more profitable to make efforts to keep that customer, than it is to acquire a new one, because there is now trust between you. If your customer is happy with your product, then that customer is much more likely to buy from you again in the future, much more likely than a new prospect would be. That's why customer relationship management is so crucial.

Don't badger your customers to death with every product and affiliate offer you come across, especially if the products are unrelated to the product the customer originally purchased. Email your customers ONLY when you have something good to give them, some really helpful information, or when you have a really good, high-quality offer that would interest that particular customer. For instance, don't email your Internet Marketing customer a "Free Gift Certificate" to your gift store.

Automate Your Customer Relationship Management Well, how do you automate customer relationship management in your e-business? You use email, and a dynamic database. You use auto-responders to stay in touch. I'm not talking about your regular auto-responders that deliver a vacation or "out of office" messages while you're away, either. I'm talking about sequential auto-responders.

Use Sequential Auto-Responders In Your e-Business Sequential auto-responders allow you to pre-format and load a series of pre-typed messages to your prospects and customers. You benefit by not having to follow-up with these customers manually each time. Instead, your auto-responder delivers your messages on a timed interval set by you. To your customer, it looks as if you sent out each message yourself. This way, you stay in touch with your customer and not let them forget about you. When they have a need for one your products or services, your business will hopefully come to mind first and they will re-visit your site directly or by clicking a link in one of your emails, as a loyal repeat customer.

Personalize Your Messages for a Warm Feel! (Mail Merge) Most decent auto-responders have mail-merge capabilities. This is the ability to merge personal information into your emails, like your customer's first and/or last name or their email address, etc. This personalizes your email messages even further and gives your customer some "warm and fuzzies". What's more you set all this up just one time, and any new prospects or customers will get the same message series without you having to lift a finger.

If the sequential auto-responder you're using has mail-merge capabilities, then it will automatically take that customers name and incorporate it into the email series you have set up. Usually the auto-responder service you're using will have some sort of tokens set up for this purpose. Look at the example below. Let's say your customer or prospect's name is Bob.

Hello, $firstname, - That translates into: Hello, Bob.

You could also do this with a customers email address too, like "$email". The token would be replaced with the customer's email: bob@bob.tld Do you see the power of mail-merge?

Use Lead Capture and Subscription Boxes For instance, you could set up a simple box on your sales or download page that asks the customer for his/her name and email address in return for some free product, or simply just to subscribe to your newsletter. If you set up a page specifically for this purpose this is called a "lead capture page". The information entered by the customer into your subscription box can be mail merged into the follow-up messages sent by your auto-responder.

Stay In Touch Keep in contact with your prospects and customers. Set your auto-responder series to deliver your messages over an extended interval. There are several e-books and articles dedicated to this topic; however, if you want the first, most informative and still the king of auto-responder help, get "AutoResponder Magic". This e-book once sold for about $17, but you should be able to find it free many places on the 'Net. It has a plethora of information regarding auto-responders, as well as many examples you can build from.

Ettione Stuckey has a passion for ecommerce and Internet Marketing. He is an accomplished webmaster, who runs several ecommerce websites. He understands the science and application of ecommerce technology and concepts. Benefit from his efforts at www.ProWebWare.com

Sales Force Automation Using Lotus Notes

Sales force automation is the process by which all day to day activities and events in the sales department are automated using the help of Information Technology. It includes the automation of all the activities like daily reports of individual sales executives, order tracking, sharing information among all sales executives, inventory control and monitoring, sales forecast, etc. This will be very helpful for organisations that are geographically spread across the length and breadth of a country or even across different countries. With the right choice of software and network support, centralized control is easily possible. Access to data becomes easier and quicker without having to wait for days to get updates from sales executives.

If you have a well defined sales process, automating it becomes very productive as it can help avoiding unnecessary delay in getting each process done manually. For instance, if a sales executive located in a remote place sends a proposal to be approved by his sales manager by post or courier it will take at least 3 to 4 days to get it done. This can be avoided if the salesman uses a system and an appropriate software which could alert the manager immediately when a request has been sent to him. The manager can reply to it immediately and the whole activity can be completed in minutes. There are a numerous instances like this where unnecessary delays could be avoided and help the sales people close the orders immediately.It can also help you track the employees performance in a more organised way. Lotus Notes can be a very useful platform on which this application can be built. It can help you develop an application exactly in the way you want instead of purchasing conventional Sales Fore Automation software which may not suit your requirement.

Why is Lotus Notes appropriate for building SFA tool?
Lotus Notes is an Ideal choice for the SFA because of its unique feature called Replication. The information can be accessed from a laptop computer of a sales executive even if he is not connected to your central network. This is possible because Lotus Notes can be configured in such a way that information can be saved in a local machine and accessed even if it is not connected to the server. The modifications made in the database can be updated into the central network by a process called as "Replication".

How Does this help?
Assume that a salesman is in a remote location and not connected to any network. He can access critical information about the prospects available in the database on his local system and use it to close the deal. He can make changes in them and edit information as appropriate and save them. Once he is back where he gets access to internet he can update it to your central database and the subsequent processes can start immediately without having to wait for the salesman to return back to office. Another advantage is that you can easily assign access privileges to various users based on their hierarchy and necessity to use the application. The overall administration of the application can also be very easy with Lotus Notes.

Lotus Notes applications can be web enabled and can be accessed through ordinary web browsers to either control or access information. Notes' security is impeccable and the safety of the information is assured.