Category: Blog

CRM for Membership Organisations

Membership organisations have a lot of data to keep track of. Whether they are academic institutions, geared towards professional certification, or more commercial enterprises catering for specialist interests, the more these membership organisations know about their members, the better they can serve them. But managing that data grows more complex as the organisation evolves, and the old ways of doing things don’t always support current needs.

Let’s look at the specific needs of membership organisations and see how an advanced CRM system can help.

Tracking accreditation

Some membership organisations bestow upon their members a certification or accreditation that is necessary for their professional practice. To keep this accreditation, members must renew their membership periodically and perhaps provide evidence of their continued expertise or employment in this field. Reminding members that renewal is due, giving them the information they need to fulfil requirements, and removing those who don’t renew from the ‘active members’ list are all tasks that can be automated using an advanced CRM.

Selling events

Many membership organisations will offer professional development courses, in-person events, exhibitions, etc. either as part of or in addition to the membership package. Making sure the right people are targeted with the right communications is another job for the CRM and can also be automated if you’ve captured the detail for every member. For example, if your organisation is open to all boat owners, you would want to distinguish between people who sail dinghies and people with super yachts, knowing they have different interests and different budgets. Likewise, if your events are location-specific, it makes sense to target members geographically. All this information can be held by your CRM and utilised to produce a targeted marketing campaign.

Long membership durations

There are membership organisations that are most relevant for specific periods of your life. For example, most people will only be part of the National Union of Students for a few years. Whereas there are other organisations, like the Royal College of Physicians, whose members remain for the duration of their career. Long-term membership organisations have to deal with the challenges of keeping up with members throughout the many moves and changes that take place through their lives. Managing this data, or allowing members to manage their own data, can also be conducted through an advanced CRM and usually with very little manual intervention.

Managing lots of data

Membership data will vary from one organisation to another, but can end up being very complex. Some older organisations, due to the nature of the technology available at the time, have separated data across different systems, making it hard to access all the data, let alone keep track of a member’s history within the organisation. This can lead to confusion and missed opportunities, as it’s hard to approach members in a targeted way if you don’t have all the information readily to hand. An advanced CRM has greater capacity to hold, sort and glean insights from your data, enabling you to really make the most of what your members are ‘telling’ you with every interaction you have with them.

The challenge of managing member data

Managing all this data in a way that is efficient and accurate can make all the difference both to organisation employees and to the membership experience. On the organisation side, no one wants to waste time inputting data if it can be reliably automated. On the member side, no one wants to be on the receiving end of poor customer service as a result of slow, faltering, or inaccurate comms, which is what can happen when the CRM is not up to task. Of course, members won’t know it’s the CRM at fault. They will blame the organisation.

So why do membership organisations often struggle with their CRM? What’s going wrong?

The problem with bespoke CRMs

Many membership organisations – but particularly the long-established ones – operate bespoke CRM systems that were designed especially for their purpose. This can prove to be a challenge in the long-term as the organisation evolves and the CRM ages. How do you get a bespoke CRM to grow with you?

Often, the CRM is designed to meet a specific brief, but over time a number of variables come into play. Hardware evolves. Other, interlinked software is upgraded. The old programme doesn’t remain compatible with new ways of working. The organisation that developed the software for you disappears or changes hands and can no longer provide tech support. The membership organisation itself changes so drastically that a new CRM is required.

These changes are like cracks spreading through the CRM, rendering it unstable. Glitchy software puts your data at risk of security breaches and technical issues. And if your CRM lacks the capabilities to support your needs, you can find your organisation’s growth and development is limited to ‘the way things have always been done’.

The potential of advanced CRM systems

This is why we would advise working with an advanced CRM provider that has the flexibility to tailor to your needs with the backup of global, high-quality support and an established backbone of tech to underpin your operations. This type of CRM can be designed to your specifications, with the fields, processes and workflows required to support your requirements, within the scope of a system that is regularly and automatically updated to the latest spec, and which is designed to integrate with your other core tools.

The additional benefit of advanced CRM systems is the potential offered by Business Process Automation and Robotic Process Automation to reduce the workload and keep on top of day-to-day data management. Things like responding to member enquiries, updating contact details, chasing renewals, etc can all be managed automatically, ensuring your system runs more efficiently, and optimising your operations.

If you’d like more information about how we can help your membership organisation improve customer service and optimise member insights, get in touch.

December 14, 2023
CRM and ERP Integration: Why Is It Important?

What happens when crucial departments don’t talk to each other? On a small scale, there’s the possibility of miscommunications and misunderstandings. But when those escalate, it can lead to further division, poor morale, and ineffective business practices.

In short: silos don’t work, and customers pay the price. Integrating related digital tools, like ERP and CRM systems, is one way to break down those walls and improve process transparency.

What is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system?

Whether your turnover is measured in millions or billions, ERP helps ensure that you’re properly managing the supply chain to meet the needs of your organisation, focusing on inventory, warehouse, shipping, logistics, and billing. For example, if you are a mover, you ensure you have sufficient boxes, tape, bubble wrap, vehicles, and people to complete the jobs you’ve been hired to do. If you sell paper, you need to know you have the supplies to keep up with demand, as well as the means of getting it from A to B.

Running your resource planning through a purpose-built platform ensures everyone within the organisation has access to the same information (process transparency), allowing them to contribute and learn from the planning process.

What is a CRM?

A customer relationship management system, or CRM is more than just a digital Filofax of names and contact details; it’s a history of a customer relationship, which provides you with insights into the future of that relationship, enabling you to track all customer interactions.

An advanced CRM includes a record of all correspondence, a summary of in-person meetings, details of what the customer is interested in, your proposals, and your sales. Again, this is accessible to all relevant parties, meaning the relationship is not in the hands of one salesperson or account manager – it’s with the company.

How do ERP and CRM systems work together?

Traditionally, salespeople have worked in isolation, developing and later closing a deal with very little input or interaction with other departments. However, a great deal of effort is being spent on trying to dismantle these silos to deliver a better, more streamlined customer experience.

In today’s busy workplace environment, structured ERP integration with your CRM system is as important as ever and is a vital part of the effort to streamline customer experiences. Let’s look back to the movers as an example: the salesperson produces a quote based on the size of the relocation project. If this information is passed to warehouse management, a stock check can be undertaken to be sure the required number of boxes, tape, packaging, etc. is available for the given date, keeping HR in the loop and ensuring staffing is sufficient to complete the job.

CRM and ERP Integration enable these ‘conversations’ to happen automatically so that the necessary stock is ordered or ring-fenced for moving day.

What are the benefits of CRM and ERP integration?

Accuracy and efficiency

Here is another (very simplistic) way of looking at the special relationship between the two systems: the CRM is populated with salespeople’s promises; and the ERP ensures they can deliver.

If you sell a product, you need to know that the product is available, and utilising CRM and ERP integration within your business processes ensures that these two important aspects are working together to meet expectations, both in terms of what is being delivered (accuracy) and when (efficiency). It also avoids the ‘human factor’ of forgetting to pass on a message, waiting to relay information until a specific meeting time, or even mixing up orders.

When the two systems are not integrated, the same data is often input into both systems, which is extremely tedious and time-consuming.

Improved visibility

Integrating the ERP and CRM systems enables greater visibility of demand so that inventory can be more effectively managed to reduce delivery times and prevent shortages. Over time, you can automatically build a better picture of customer trends, seasonal demand, etc., for more visibility of what’s coming to the business, enabling you to plan accordingly.

Improved synergy

When systems don’t work together, there’s less impetus for departments to work together. However, CRM and ERP integration allows you to align the different workflows, making all teams more efficient and enabling the organisation to deliver a better customer experience.

Cost savings

When your ERP and CRM systems are integrated, you can create automation across your quote-to-cash process. You gain cost savings from streamlining operations and improving decision-making. But you also free up your employees to focus more of their time on the jobs that they were employed to do, as opposed to all the laborious tasks that they have to do in order to do their jobs.

Bridges, not silos

Connecting departments by integrating key digital tools ensures business processes are moving in the same direction for the benefit of the customer but with the added benefits of improved cost-efficiency, better working relationships, and improved morale.

Hopefully, this article has highlighted the importance of CRM and ERP integration to your business and how refraining from connecting the two systems can hinder your operations massively. If you’d like to know how we can help you break down walls and start building bridges, get in touch.

November 17, 2023
What’s The Answer To Unlocking Your CRM ERP Usage Challenge? (Webinar Recording)
The rate at which new software implementations fail is alarming. It’s widely researched and documented that up to 70% of all software implementations fail to meet their objectives.

According to McKinsey & Co, 17% fail so badly they effect the very existence of the businesses deploying them.

The reasons for failure range from wrong partner choice, going over budget, missed timelines, lack of clear objectives etc.

Even successfully deployed systems are prone to failure. A key reason for that is poor user adoption.

According to our Partner – ClickLearn, who are a Digital Adoption & User Training platform:
- 83% of senior executives state their biggest challenge is getting staff to use software
- Only 37% of sales reps use their company CRM
November 16, 2023
The Importance of Foundation Workflows
The importance of foundation workflows

Foundation workflows are how your business achieves its purpose – but how do you know your foundation workflow is working effectively? Let’s dig into this important subject.

What is a workflow?

To begin – a reminder: what is a workflow? A workflow is a system for managing repetitive processes and tasks that occur in a particular order. They are the mechanism by which people and enterprises accomplish their work, whether manufacturing a product, providing a service, processing information, or any other value-generating activity.

Identifying your foundation workflow

All organisations have inputs and outputs. The workflow is what happens in between, taking you from one to the other. For example, turning strangers into advocates – a process that encompasses all aspects of marketing, sales, delivery and after-sales – is a common foundation workflow for all businesses. We call it a foundation workflow because it lays the foundation for your business.

Identifying your foundation workflow can be a challenge because there are so many tasks involved in getting from input to output, as shown in the diagram below. But by distinguishing between core and ‘feeder’ activities, you’re able to map a critical path. These are the core activities that make up the foundation workflow.

Your product or service offering could be amazing, but if this critical path is not working effectively, you won’t be able to turn strangers into advocates. That’s why the foundation workflow is so important.

The above example applies to most businesses. There are obviously other critical paths for other areas, like education or healthcare, but they all fall into the following broad categories (though not always in this order): acquire, deliver, administrate, after service.

Why your foundation workflow matters

Identifying your foundation workflow can take time, but it’s important work. Understanding your workflow, and how one task relates to another, enables you to streamline that workflow and create greater efficiency and a better customer and employee experience.

Identifying your critical path also enables you to dig deep into your workflow and find out what’s working, where you’re missing opportunities, and what can be improved. Benefits of foundation workflow assessment include:
- More insight into performance
- Ability to prioritise change and improvement
- Where to focus effort 
- Reduction in micromanagement
- Responsibilities and accountabilities
- Effective communication
- Knowledge sharing
- Understanding other department’s challenges
In evaluating your foundation workflow, you identify opportunities for effective change – i.e. the changes to your workflow that have the biggest return across your business.

Case study: QGate

We’re sharing our own experiences with foundation workflow assessment to help you understand how this practice can help your business.

As a Microsoft professional services partner that supplies CRM software, we wanted to expand our range of services and provide more value to our clients. Having identified our foundation workflow – the business-typical workflow of lead to order, order to invoice, invoice to cash, and after sales and support – we conducted some due diligence on our ability to grow, measuring our foundation workflow performance against people, process and technology. We looked into our data to see where we were winning, where we needed to do more, and to provide a benchmark for future assessments. The research culminated in a graded assessment of each foundation workflow based on its ability to deliver our current services.

The results showed challenges to overcome in our sales and marketing and service departments, which, when set against our growth ambitions, showed that both performance and customer experience would be compromised if we pursued our growth strategy without change. Fortunately, we did this work in advance, so were able to put a plan in place to bolster our foundation workflow and manage the changes required to achieve our objectives.

Assessing foundation workflows

Identifying and understanding your foundation workflow ensures you have the framework you need to perform assessments that enable you to qualify the efficiency and effectiveness of this workflow. With those insights, you can improve – giving everyone involved a better experience.

As business process streamlining specialists, we would love to help you transform your processes to save time, money and increase efficiency. Contact us – we’d love to hear from you.
September 21, 2023
How CRM Automation can boost productivity in Recruitment
The recruitment industry runs on relationships. Without the ability to act as mediators, negotiators, and advisers recruitment consultants struggle to build trust. This is made harder still as they have to nurture relationships with two distinct audiences: candidates and clients. Both require much of the same level of care and attention, but have very different needs and measures of success. Without a robust CRM and CRM automation, maintaining these relationships becomes difficult.

With so many active candidates and clients, managing the flow of information and communication manually can create bottlenecks and manual errors. This should be where a CRM system comes into its own, automatically capturing key information and adding it to candidate and business records.

By creating a single source of truth for their data, recruiters can leverage all the information available to them. Without the tedium of searching through emails or spreadsheets. Despite this, some recruitment consultancies see CRMs as another tool to maintain, despite it’s capacity for integration and automation.

CRM – A Recap

Originally, the CRM was a way to store all customer details in one place; essentially a database with a decent UI. Today, CRMs still retain the capacity to house a lot of data, but they take care of how the data is gathered and provide the means to communicate.

The ability to gather, house and segment data allows businesses to gain actionable insights faster. Specifically, when it comes to candidates, a CRM like Microsoft Dynamics 365 allow you to identify which candidates have skills that match open roles.

This alone can save considerable time as candidate CVs no longer need to be screened. Rather an alert can be created so recruiters know when a candidate has come in with the desired skillset.

This shortens the hiring cycle as recruiters can draw up shortlists without manually scrutinising hundreds of CVs. Similarly, when a strong candidate lands in an inbox, recruiters can use Dynamics 365 and tools like it to cross-reference those key skills with the kind of skills their clients look for.

This increases the hit rate of speculative CVs when they go out.

In addition to all this, the CRM should also keep the specifics of every interaction with both candidates and employers. Everyone in the business can see the latest developments allowing for a slicker more professional experience. When used well, the CRM enables you to:
- Attract and engage the right candidates.
- Collect and maintain relevant and searchable candidate data.
- Facilitate easy communication with candidates and employers and provide accurate, real-time updates.
- Report on your processes. Reports give you oversight on the whole recruitment process and identify potential issues early.
What is CRM Automation?

Without functionality like CRM automation, working with so much data has the potential to be highly labour-intensive. With recruitment so dependent on building strong relationships and the ability to respond quickly, it’s hard to scale.

The challenge is that the processes exist for a reason and mistakes can be costly. Especially if a recruiter misrepresents a role or a candidate.

Similarly, as recruiters are often targeted on the amount of outreach they do each day, manual processes can cause good recruiters to fail simply because they’re busy.

Fundamentally, there are only so many vacancies that one recruiter can manage, and so many conversations they can have. This can lead to frustration on an individual and business level because it leaves roles unworked and stalls growth.

Reducing the level of admin and manual processes allows everyone in the business to go faster which allows for more profitable business outcomes.

Business Process Automation (BPA) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) come in. By automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks, such as CV screening, interview scheduling, and reference checks, CRM automation allows recruiters to give their time to high-value people-centric activities, such as candidate assessment and client relationship management, and reduce the workload of administrative tasks.

How can CRM automation help recruiters?

Manual processes are always at risk of errors. Mistakes get made and a certain margin for error is acceptable. But the busier we get or the more pressure we feel, the propensity for making mistakes increases. Between the many steps of the hiring process and the number of people involved, it’s all too easy to lose a CV, miss an email, or schedule an interview for the wrong time. Any of which could impact any deals that are in the works. Automated workflow systems ensure that recruitment processes follow standardised procedures, reducing the risk of errors and ensuring consistency across the organization.

CRM automation allows you to:
- CV screening – CRM automation systems can scan CVs and applications, extracting relevant information such as skills, experience, and qualifications. By using predefined criteria, these systems can filter out unqualified candidates, reducing the chance of human oversight or bias in the screening stage.
- Skill matching – Automated tools can compare the skills and qualifications of candidates with the job requirements. By analysing keywords and contextual information, these tools can identify the best matches, ensuring recruiters don’t overlook qualified candidates or mistakenly shortlist unsuitable ones.
- Updates – Automated communication tools can send personalised emails to candidates at different stages of the recruitment process, providing updates on their application status, next steps, and relevant information. This keeps candidates informed and reduces the likelihood of miscommunication or missed notifications, while also freeing up the recruiter to focus on what they do best.
- Document-gathering – Leveraging functionality in tools like Dynamics 365, you can enable checks at various stages in the recruitment flow. This will ensure documentation is received, the candidate has the required right to work, references and visas. You can add and track various types of compliance documentation checks such as proof of ID, visa status, qualifications, or certifications, ensuring nothing is missed.
Scaling with CRM Automation

Above all, CRM automation helps you do more with less. Growing your revenue doesn’t have to involve increasing your headcount when you’re freeing up your team by automating labour-intensive tasks. CRM automation enables you to handle larger volumes of applicants and applications giving you a segmented talent pool that is easy to access and utilise. Automation can help recruiters shortlist candidates efficiently, and manage multiple hiring pipelines simultaneously without sacrificing the quality of the candidates or the service.

To learn more about how CRM automation within Dynamics 365 can transform your recruitment consultancy, speak to a member of the team, today.

Let’s Talk

Get in touch with us today to learn more about how we help businesses like yours navigate Microsoft Dynamics 365 recovery and deployments.

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June 12, 2023
7 Factors to Consider when Choosing a CRM Partner (Webinar Recording)

Are you looking to do a digital transformation? Implement a CRM? Automate your processes and optimise your business operations with technology?

Choosing the right partner to help you do this is essential. Treat it with the same respect and care as you would a friendship, relationship, or business partnership.

When it comes to choosing a CRM business partner, it’s essential to work with someone who understands your organisation’s culture, goals, and objectives. Technology can enable any task, but the right partner should prioritise understanding your business, not just selling you a product.

In this webinar, we’ll discuss some of the key factors that you should consider when selecting a CRM business partner, from their level of expertise and experience to their commitment to customer support.

June 8, 2023
What is Business Process Automation (BPA) and how can it help my business?
What is Business Process Automation (BPA)?

Business Process Automation (BPA) is a powerful tool that you can use to streamline operations, improve efficiency, and drive growth. BPA involves using technology to automate repetitive tasks and introduce workflows, reducing your need for manual human intervention, and increase accuracy.

How can I use BPA and how will it benefit my business?

Invoice processing – Organisations spend significant time and people hours manually processing invoices. BPA can automate this by capturing invoice data, validating it against purchase orders, and routing it for approval. This can help to reduce human input errors, improve speed, and reduce costs.

Customer service – BPA can help automate time-intensive customer service processes, such as ticket creation, enquiry routing, and response. This can help to reduce wait times and provide a more seamless customer experience. For example, a chatbot can be used to handle common customer inquiries, freeing up customer service reps to handle more important and complex issues.

Sales – Automate lead generation, qualification, and follow-up processes, resulting in reduced time and people required to manage leads. This leads to improved conversion rates and increased sales productivity. For instance, an automated lead scoring system can be used to prioritise leads based on their likelihood to convert, making the sales process more efficient and effective.

Supply Chain Management – Automate inventory management, order fulfilment, and shipping processes. An automated inventory management system can be used to track inventory levels and automatically reorder when stock levels fall below a certain threshold, ensuring that products are always available for customers.

HR – Onboarding, payroll, and more can all be simplified. By automating these processes, organisations can reduce administrative tasks, improve compliance, and provide a better employee experience. For example, an automated onboarding process can be implemented to streamline the hiring process and reduce paperwork, making it easier for new employees to join the company.
What should I consider before implementing any type of BPA?

Process Analysis: Before implementing BPA, analyse your processes to identify which are suitable for automation. You need to identify bottlenecks in your business and which areas will benefit most from it. This analysis can help identify areas where you can improve optimise operations.

Scalability: You need to ensure that the solution can grow with your business, and that it can accommodate changing business requirements. This is particularly important for businesses that are expanding, as they need to ensure that their BPA solution can continue to meet their growing needs.

Integration: BPA solutions need to be integrated with other systems and applications within the business. This integration is necessary to ensure that the solution can work seamlessly with existing systems and applications.

Security: BPA solutions involve the automation of business processes, which means that they handle sensitive data. You need to ensure that your solution is secure and that it can protect sensitive data. This involves implementing appropriate security measures, such as encryption and access controls, to ensure that data is protected from unauthorised access.

Employee Buy-In: BPA can have a significant impact on employees, as it can change the way they work. You should ensure that employees are involved in the implementation process, and that they are trained on how to use the new BPA solution. This can help to ensure that employees are engaged and supportive of the new way of working, which can improve the overall success of the implementation.

Cost: Implementing BPA can be expensive, and you should consider the costs involved in implementing and maintaining the solution. Be certain that the benefits of implementing outweigh the costs of living with the pain, and that the solution provides a good ROI.
What are the future trends and innovations in BPA?

Intelligent Automation: With the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), we can expect to see more intelligent automation solutions. This will involve using AI and ML to enable systems to learn and adapt to changing conditions, allowing for more personalised and efficient workflows.

Process Mining: Process mining is a technique used to analyse business processes based on event logs. This technique enables businesses to identify process inefficiencies and bottlenecks, and to optimise their processes accordingly. We can expect to see more process mining solutions in BPA, providing businesses with valuable insights into their processes.

Low-Code/No-Code Solutions: Low-code and no-code platforms enable users to build and deploy applications without requiring extensive coding knowledge. Microsoft PowerApps are a perfect example of these. We can expect to see more BPA solutions adopting low-code and no-code platforms, making it easier for businesses to automate their processes without requiring extensive technical expertise.

Collaborative Automation: Collaborative automation refers to the integration of humans and automation solutions to perform tasks collaboratively. This approach can help to improve efficiency, reduce errors, and provide a better overall experience for employees. We can expect to see more collaborative automation solutions in BPA, enabling businesses to optimise their processes with the help of both humans and automation.

Cloud-based Solutions: Cloud-based BPA solutions provide businesses with the flexibility and scalability they need to manage their processes effectively. We can expect to see more cloud-based solutions in BPA, making it easier for businesses to manage their processes from anywhere, at any time.

So, we know BPA can help businesses to achieve operational efficiency, optimise their operations for growth, and gain a competitive edge in the marketplace. By leveraging technology to automate complex and repetitive tasks, businesses can streamline their processes, improve accuracy, and free up time and resources for more strategic tasks. This can lead to improved overall performance and productivity, allowing businesses to focus on what they do best.
April 18, 2023
Unlock the Power of your Processes: How RPA Can Transform Your Business

All businesses face a common challenge – they often have to deal with high volumes of repetitive tasks, which not only consume time but also lead to human errors.

These tasks arise due to anything from data entry, inefficient undocumented uncontrolled processes, and ineffective systems to customer needs, service inquiries and support requests. As a result, employees must spend a considerable amount of their time on carrying out these tasks, which affects their productivity and more importantly their job satisfaction.

Ultimately, carrying out these tasks results in a suboptimal customer experience due to delayed responses, errors, and inconsistencies in service delivery.

People are not cheap to employ, and neither should they be. Whether you are a services business where your people and their expertise are your product or otherwise, it is essential to keep your people for things only people can do – going that extra mile for your clients and your business.

In today’s digital age, customers (and employees) expect fast and seamless services that are delivered with accuracy and consistency. This means that we need to find ways to automate repetitive tasks and optimize their processes to deliver a better customer and employee experience. Not only that, but the transition to remote working has also meant businesses need to find ways to maintain their service quality and productivity in a distributed environment.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is an emerging technology, that is essentially the culmination of lots of different technology solutions. AI included, it can help your business automate tasks and processes, resulting in improved efficiency, productivity, and customer experience. This could be anything from a CRM, ERP or finance system to smaller activity specific applications that execute business specific needs.

I do feel a little uncomfortable with the use of “robotic” and “robots” to describe RPA, it does conjure images of car production lines with huge robots building cars. This is not it. Essentially, it is software typically residing in cloud platforms that uses low code no code technology that can be configured to your individual business needs. RPA is used to perform any tasks that has logic and a trigger to them removing these rule-based and repetitive tasks that would otherwise require human intervention.

“If a machine can do it, it will be done faster, better and more consistently with the same result every time. Automate everything! and it will increase your business value.”

Alastair Jupp

So, what are the benefits?

RPA can help free up employees’ time, enabling them to focus on more value-added activities. This improves employee satisfaction and productivity, resulting in better service delivery to customers. Second, RPA can help minimise errors and inconsistencies, resulting in a more accurate and consistent customer experience. Finally, RPA can enable businesses to maintain their service quality and productivity in a distributed environment, supporting remote work.

“Focus on improving customer AND employee experience, particularly in the areas where they intersect, RPA will do this for you.”

Alastair Jupp

I have talked about adding business value but not explained how thus far. Imagine you achieved automation in every area possible of your business, any potential buyer of your business will see the benefits of how your core business runs itself and your people are happy, engaged and focused on great customer experience building. This is valuable and it will directly impact the appeal and valuation of your business.

The best part about RPA is that it has developed a long way, and the pricing has reduced. It is now accessible to any ambitious business, big or small, cash rich or not, that wants to add business value, improve customer experience and ultimately, have a more satisfied workforce, happier customers, and a more valuable business.

More about RPA solutions

How we help clients implement RPA

March 24, 2023
How CRM can help you to deliver agile customer service and improve the customer experience
Delivering exceptional customer service is more important than ever. Poor customer service creates a negative impact on your organisation, resulting in the loss of customer loyalty, repeat business, profits, reputation and even good employees.

Ensuring that your customer service is up to scratch is more challenging as the number of communication channels has expanded. Long gone are the days of just letters, telephone calls and face-to-face interactions. Companies must now be able to deliver omnichannel service across their customers preferred routes including email, live chat, and social media.

As the number of contact channels has increased, the challenge of storing and organising of data has also increased. The details and purchase history of a single customer may now be spread among several channels and multiple employees.

Increasingly, businesses are looking at how artificial intelligence (AI) can help to augment customer support. Chatbots and customer self-service can be used alongside service agents to streamline and automate your response to routine customer enquiries and frequently asked questions. The benefits are 24/7 availability to your customers, fast response times and the freeing up of customer service agents to work on more complex issues.

Achieving all of this without an effective customer relationship management (CRM) system is impossible. CRM is a powerful software solution which offers a range of capabilities to help improve your customer experience:
- Keep in touch with your customers with personalised communications across multiple channels
- Deliver a consistent and high-level customer experience
- Use data to help you to understand your customers better and build targeting marketing strategies
- Send relevant information automatically through grouping of customers or triggered by specific events
- Provide attentive customer support by utilising automation and AI to provide swift, focussed responses to customer issues
Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM for Customer Service

Microsoft Dynamics 365 provides an agile customer service solution that will increase productivity, reduce costs, identify sales opportunities and improve the customer experience.
- Provide Self-service Support – Offer your customers immediate access to the right content at the right time on the right channel
- Personalise Customer Service Engagements – deliver consistent, connected experiences across multiple channels from a unified agent desktop
- Empower service teams with tools for Increased Productivity – enable agents to resolve customers’ issues swiftly
- Analyse and learn from comprehensive support insights – track success against KPIs and adapt quickly.
Free Microsoft Ebook

Five Ingredients to Ignite Always-On Service

Maintain quality of service when customer demand spikes

Improve efficiency and automation to reduce costs

Support remote teams to work effectively

Deliver connected, valuable customer experiences

>> Download the Ebook
Next Steps
- Find out more about Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Service
- Learn more about the QGate CRM Implementation Approach
July 21, 2022