Modern work is changing how sales teams operate and how customers expect to interact with them. To achieve operational excellence, sales teams need a complete, 360-degree view of all customer information to enhance customer relationship management. Top sales performers are those who get a competitive advantage and find new ways to boost sales by accessing all relevant customer data, both unstructured and structured, including transactions, outbound communications and purchase history. This means going beyond traditional customer relationship management (CRM) systems, which deliver only structured data, to integrated systems that can surface relevant content that is often difficult to find.
Looking for faster and smarter ways to sell?
Optimize your customer information management.
What is a customer information system?
A customer information system stores and provides access to all data related to the customer. It typically links content and documents to a structured database system, such as a CRM, that defines the individual customer. With relevant customer information easily accessible through an intuitive system, organizations can help sales teams sell faster, improving productivity.
Effective content management platforms integrate with the tools that sales teams use every day for instant access to relevant customer information. This type of connection helps to move customers through the lead-to-order process quickly and efficiently with reduced friction.
How do information systems facilitate customer relationship management?
Information systems should facilitate customer relationship management by providing a 360-degree customer record that includes not just real-time data from a CRM but also related content from other information systems such as a content management repository or file store.
Using a content management or customer information platform that brings all of this information together can reduce the time and effort sales teams often spend searching for the information they need to facilitate customer interactions. A consolidated and complete view of the customer across the enterprise builds better sales processes and drives deeper insights that help surface more opportunities, generate greater customer loyalty and build better relationships.
How do you improve customer tracking?
To provide full customer tracking and visibility, organizations should consider all inbound and outbound communications with the customer and apply systems to ensure relevant stakeholders can easily access this content.
Customer information platforms that provide sales teams with a complete, reliable view of the customer, including past interactions, purchase history and even past complaints, keep operations running smoothly and often lead to more positive customer interactions.
Organizations can also automate incoming communications via AI-augmented intelligent capture tools to deliver efficient customer tracking and ensure customer wishes get actioned quickly and consistently.
How do sales operations implement better content management?
Sales operations play a key role in delivering connected and effective systems to their users. Associated customer content is often, dispersed throughout systems and departments. Sales operations should lead the way in connecting this information to customer records inside CRM.
Organizations should provide an integrated infrastructure that drives productivity through better-connected people, content, and systems and delivers a complete 360-degree customer view to sales teams. By automating repetitive tasks, while increasing information governance to reduce risks, sales teams can add significant value to their CRM systems through enhanced content management to better fuel processes and improve customer interactions.
What are the benefits of having integrated customer information management?
Sales professionals capture, manage and track customer interactions in CRM systems, but other content, such as contracts, offer letters, quotes and invoices, offers valuable context for customer engagement. With data silos and disconnected systems preventing access, sales teams can miss out on account insights that ensure a superior customer experience and reveal new revenue opportunities.
With a content management platform that integrates with CRM tools and brings together critical customer information, where and when sales professionals need it, organizations can:
- Increase customer satisfaction by helping sales teams respond quickly to customer needs
- Shorten sales cycles and close deals faster with real-time access to account-related content across all touchpoints directly from CRM applications
- Help sales teams spend less time searching systems for account-relevant information and more time prospecting
- Uncover new sales opportunities through greater visibility and insights to identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities
