While the significance of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in the area of marketing and sales is established, its versatile offerings in other areas of corporate functions have yet to be fully explored. CRM offers professionals from different sectors in your organization to work out of a common database, simultaneously using real time data update. This might, at first, sound chaotic, but it actually allows for a transparent, real time updated and seamlessly efficient process that ensures a smooth and harmonious functioning across sectors. Assuming the CRM in marketing and sales for your company is already generating the expected rewards, here is how your other departments can be brought on board to experience the CRM edge and transform key corporate functions.

Effective Human Resources
Human Resource is one of the sectors that have been prompt in embracing CRM technology for effective employee relationship management (ERM). HR managers and heads today do relay on modern CRM techniques to engage, supervise and reward their employees, with ERM becoming an essential business process to ensure a harmonious, productive and satisfying relationship for both parties.

While key roles like profiling, performance management, payrolls, trainings and skill development initiatives are well integrated through the CRM for employees – also known as ERM (Employee relationship Management), the system effectively binds together the entire staff across one platform, creating a binding unity, transparency and sense of involved growth. Apart from these roles, an HR department that uses ERM extensively is very well equipped to recruit and train the other staff of the company to follow the essential Business Processes involving CRM and its implications to the said department, thus steering the company towards a technologically sound, efficient and progressive business unit.

Accurate Finances
With successful marketing strategies, effective services and great sales, the business is making profits. However, it is a laborious task for the Finance head to get a truly accurate view of the company’s financial health without having inputs from all departments. Implementing CRM for

Finance helps reduce stress of using multiple programs and manually combining data from multiple spreadsheets to reach an analysis. Instead, with combined sales information from CRM and a productivity data from ERM, the Finance personnel can easily create an interactive dashboard where all relevant information can be spread out in real time. Along with sales reports and productivity, the system can also manage revenues and budgets, project estimates and proposals create business forecast, in turn helping drive sales targets for marketing and skill development and recruitment for the HR department.

CRM can break down departmental barriers, eliminate the hassle of duplicate data and give you and your team better visibility of your entire business, no matter what the role

Easy and transparent collection management is also a vital role for Finance and can be effectively managed using CRM. By consolidating account information into a single dashboard, the process helps organize collection calls, identify problems for growth, integrate Calendar and Task Manager to send out automatic email reminders and notifications when payment deadlines are approaching and also effectively interface with other departments of the company to push faster collections.

Effective IT
While the IT department truly owns the CRM in any organization, they themselves may not be very well versed with its complete potential. Often considered as software for the marketing team, the IT rarely looks into its versatile uses. While IT is responsible for the integration, it can be of immense help if they are able to benefit from the integration themselves. Imagine having access to the valuable data from various departments, captured by the CRM. It can be of immense help to drive IT to formulate crucial process improvements across the CRM’s of other departments, while helping in the seamless management, up gradation and maintenances of existing functions.

Some key functions that IT can help manage using CRM includes the monitoring of systems used across the organization, help fix and meet specific demands of a department using interactive logs and interface systems, help manage a seamless communication across departments using real time updates and also effective data back-up and crisis preparedness.

Reduce Administrative Burden
With effective HR, Marketing and Sales and a well sorted Finance team, the Administrative load is automatically reduced as most functions become integrated and automated. While separate systems can create chaos for Administration – each department logging in multiple requests at various stages for possibly the same client / function, an integrated and seamless system ensures the roles are well defined and handed out. With each department having several interfaces with the admin team, CRM can help integrate functions to have a centralized information database and dashboard for functions across marketing, sales, finance, revenue, collections and HR.

Cessation
Overall, CRM benefits go far and beyond the original marketing and sales and have the capacity to truly transform an organization, taking it to a whole new level of productivity. The sheer scope of growth and speed that can be achieved when everyone in a company works from the same database, in a harmonious and integrated manner, is truly un- imaginable! CRM can break down departmental barriers, eliminate the hassle of duplicate data and give you and your team, no matter what their role, better visibility of your entire business.