Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a powerful sales and marketing tool that has important implications for manufacturing and inventory management. Many companies use a CRM software program to collect and manage customer communications, order entry, marketing and sales actions. In many Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software systems, CRM is built in on the front end of the total enterprise system. The CRM is a means of scheduling, coordinating and recording customer interactions with your company. It includes contact information, future events, past actions, conversations, and past order history with a customer.
For most manufacturing managers CRM is simply dismissed as a sales and marketing tool and not worth their time to understand. However, nothing could be further from the truth. If you are in the business of providing services and products to your customers (at a profit, hopefully) you should understand what the customer is saying and what he is asking of you. To be effective, a CRM program must be used religiously. Everyone in contact with the customer must record his communications and identify follow up actions based on the communications. Just as you can’t schedule half or part of a production operation, neither can you record only part of your customer interactions. The more you record in your CRM system, the better you will serve your customer.
Although Sales and Order Entry personnel will use the CRM the most frequently, production, shipping, accounting and management will all access the information to make decisions. Accounting will look at terms and conditions for orders. Shipping will look at packaging needs and shipping commitments. Production will look at special requirements such as partial deliveries, scheduling changes and questions about use of the end product. The production scheduler will look at customer needs and issues.
As a manufacturing manager, I had a frequent need to call a customer’s purchasing manager or production manager to coordinate deliveries with the customer’s schedule or to resolve questions about their use of our product. Often, I would adjust delivery quantities and schedules to better accommodate the customer’s own production schedule. Each time I should make an entry in the CRM system to alert everyone to the conversation and its outcome. These entries would justify decisions such as order splitting or shipment delays to the Sales Manager or CEO. Certainly, there should be some control over who has permission to contact a customer. However, to restrict this access simply to give the Sales Department a reason to justify itself is to hamper the ultimate goal of customer service. Every manufacturing company is in the business of providing a service or product to its customers. If you don’t know what the customer needs you can’t provide this service or product at the most effective cost. The CRM system can be the conduit for effective control over customer communications. Everyone in the company should understand how it works. Rules should be established to make it accessible to those with a need to talk with the customer.
What has been your experience in using a CRM system and in customer communications?
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